I’m a little ashamed to say it, but I chuckled unironically at the strip today. Well, it wasn’t really a chuckle, more of soft snort complete with an eye-roll. But props to Batiuk, this came within sighting distance of comedy.
Ayers deserves more of the credit though, the dead-eyed, wide-mouthed Dinkle in panel three hits my funny bone when partnered with the blunt punchline.
I wonder about the premiums paid out. It seems like even more fundraiser money sucked away from the band. I remember getting promised dumb prizes for selling enough during school fundraisers, but no one could sell enough to earn them.
Cabbage Jack yesterday in the comments pointed reader to Tom Batiuk’s blog. I’d never given it much of a look, but I browsed back a few months and it was quite a trip; an inane mishmash of narcissism and comics related shitposting. Most egregious are the little excerpts from his Funky Winkerbean volumes, where he deconstructs the history of his own creation like an art restorer painstakingly scraping the macaroni off a kindergardener’s project.
“The scenes with Fred and Ann and their son Darin were reflective of a different part of my life with Cathy and Brian that I was beginning to draw upon. Change was becoming a palpable part of Funky, and the biggest changes of all were just about to unfold. I didn’t have a master plan exactly, but I could see daylight ahead, and I was beginning to run toward it.”
“As was my habit, new characters continued to appear. Cindy Summers, the most popular girl in school, and Bodean, Westview High’s resident hood, joined the cast as the polar opposites of the high school continuum. Big hair was starting to come in for girls, and Cindy’s hair soon became the biggest of the biggest. Her tenure in the strip was destined to be remarkably long.”
And taking the cake, yesterday’s offering, where Batiuk goes borderline biblical talking about trying to renegotiate a contract.
“And lo, there came a day when the prophecy of the attorney in the beginning times came to pass.
It’s been said that the past is a knife (as an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, I’m all in on that one), and at the beginning of 1990 I was definitely feeling its point in my back.”
