Banana Jr. 6000 July 29, 2022 at 5:02 am
Who the hell would go to this exhibition? Both these men now live in this town, and have spent a lifetime putting out the comic book equivalent of shovelware.
Maybe people are coming out just to gawk at Flash “Fairfield’s” towering head. It’s the most interesting detail in today’s strip. Not a hell of a lot else to comment about here.
What is “show-offy” of even writerly about Pete’s comment? That paragraph that Darin has to lean in closely and squint to read is a little flowery (“its special magic”) but otherwise inoffensive and succinct. How is “From the hearts of Phil and Flash” an improvement?
Now: can anyone explain how, after Batiuk has spent 8 years establishing his canon, Flash Freeman’s is now Flash Fairfield?
Comic Book Harriet commented the other day about Batiuk “[giving] Flash and Phil the same backstory as Darin and Pete.” Maybe by bestowing on him an alternate last name, Batiuk’s just giving Flash one more thing in common with Pete Roberts Reynolds.
Hello! This is the commenter known as Banana Jr. 6000. I take my handle from the wise-cracking but philosophical desktop computer from Bloom County. Having recently completed the monumental task of finding Spaceman Spiff among the cosmos, I will now take on an even greater challenge: helping to make Funky Winkerbean fun and interesting to read every day.
I’m delighted to join such a strong team, where everyone brings their own areas of expertise to the discussion. My background is in writing, so that’s probably what I’ll talk about the most. And today’s strip gives me a lot to talk about!
The “Dibbs Gallery” marquee tells us this is Kitch Swoon, who was last seen at Atomik Komix handing out nice-sized checks. Apparently she’s hired the new-look Summer as an assistant. It also looks like Tom Batiuk went through a Roy Lichtenstein phase about a year ago, because this is his second mention in a month. The wedding sign Darin made was a blatant copy of Lichtenstein’s famous work “Crying Girl.”
Add another name to the list of better artists that Funky Winkerbean has ripped off.
How on earth is a visit to Atomik Komix going to “revisit the source material” for Roy Lichtenstein prints? Roy Lichtenstein was a real person, who died in 1997. Is she flat-out admitting that Atomik Komix and Dibbs Gallery’s real business is art forgery?
That would… make a lot of sense, actually. There’s no way those lame, derivative, preachy comic books are producing the kind of money we’ve seen these people throw around. And Westview is the perfect place for such an operation. It’s a town full of comics-obsessed suckers, and a police force that’s willing to cover up certain things.
Today’s strip should have been deleted. We don’t need a strip to tell us what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s strip. Just start the scene already. Batiuk did this correctly the first time Kitch Swoon appeared in 2019:
That strip also had a cameo from Holtron, the star of last week’s pointless Act I flashback. As several commenters remembered, Holtron was repurposed as a prop for the Starbuck Jones movie, and later given to the Atomik Komix team for free. Now this valuable prop from a multi-gazillion dollar movie is just sitting around an office, as a conversation piece. That’s a bit of conspicuous consumption, don’t you think?
Nice “Pineapple” computer, buddy. Get out of here with that crap.
hitorque February 21, 2020 at 2:13 pm
…I FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT!! Chester the Molester is supposed to be Bruce Wayne, but instead of fighting crime through an alter ego, his mission is to right all of the wrongs of the comics industry while saving the entire genre for posterity singlehanded…
Well that would make at least as much sense as whatever has gone on around here this week! Bought off his conscience? Chester’s really not guilty of anything, aside from being a rich nerd. Unless the guilt he feels is over having built his entire fortune on all those comics he stole from the drugstore as a kid. In which case it’s going to take more than selling off one rare comic–which he owns in triplicate–to truly fix his karma.
I right away had to look up “pantload;” not as a prerequisite for moving it to the Batiuktionary, but because I understood it to be a pejorative. It’s what you might call someone who’s clueless and unpleasant: “Chester’s a real pantload.” Indeed, over at urbandictionary you can find some pretty colorful definitions. More um, sophisticated reference sources, however, support Ruby’s usage: a nicer way to say a “metric shit ton” of a given thing.
Son of Stuck Funky 
