Tag: Holly

Hackett and his Commenters

Link To Today’s Strip

Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone!

To celebrate the holiday of love and romance, Batiuk has graced us with a touching strip of an ommetaphobic man who has completely lost his mind after days of being forced to self-apply eye drops.

Remember this is a guy who had to be physically restrained a month ago by multiple people to have drops put in.

That explains his increasingly erratic behavior since the surgery. And the slow decline of his joy since Monday. Every single day, hour after hour, forced to pry his squinting eyes open with trembling fingers. Forced to carefully drip chemicals into the waiting lids, staring up at the nozzle of the dropper, the fear and nausea triggering a flight or fight response that he can’t let his body obey.

Our drip torture is about to end though. As I’ve peeked into the future and it seems the cataract saga is finally drawing to a close. At least, I hope it’s ending. I suppose we could be up for a repeat in a month, when Funky goes in to have his other eye done. I wouldn’t put that past this strip.

So relax, everyone, tomorrow is a brand new day! A day filled with Dinkle.

À la Recherche du Temps Pizza

Link To Today’s Strip

Comic Book Harriet here again! Can’t believe I’m up again already. It seems like yesterday I was struggling to find a band turkey joke that wasn’t as overdone as the ones in the strip. But Tom rolls on like an ever flowing stream of consciousness, bringing me back again, panning through his muck for fool’s gold.

I want to give special commendation to SpaceManSpiff 85. He was given a relentlessly dim and myopic arc, and managed to fill the week with a overwhelming flow of cataract puns. Sir, you have my admiration. And my sympathy. Because it seems I’m going to be just as burdened this week with shortsighted visual humor.

I asked earlier this arc if Funky has always been a hapless character that only exists to be neurotic and spout lame puns. My interactions with Act I Funky come through flashback photo-cornered panels, car accident coma dreams, and the offerings of our resident Batiukian researchers. Longtime Stuckfunkians Rusty Shackleford and Banana Jr 6000 were kind enough to reply, and both used the term ‘burnout’ to describe Act I Funky, which kind of surprised me. I can’t see the preachy Batiuk, with more cheap soapboxes than a Palmolive warehouse, insinuating his main character was dating Mary Jane Wackytabaccy on the weekends, and playing it for harmless laughs. Crazy Harry? Sure. But the eponymous protagonist?

I can see it now. Panel two has Act I Funky, in all his mellow glory, blissed out on his tiny bed, with every comfort a baked adolescent needs within arm’s reach: lamp, pizza, soda, music, The Amazing Mister Sponge. Curled up in a tiny cluttered nest of his own hedonism. He even has his SHOES on the bed, that’s how much he DNGAF.

Stark contrast to Act III Funky in panels 1 and 3, sitting on a huge, empty bed, in a mostly empty room. Only a featureless smartphone and a rapidly expanding mattress his plebian pleasures. His specific interests have been pulled out, leaving us with a boring box containing a boring man with a face slowly drooping like a blobfish.

I wish Funky could have gotten glaucoma instead. We could have had burnout Funky back.

Wild Cataracts

Here’s another in the long line of Batiuk’s insults to the expanded space comics get on Sundays. Literally copying one panel and repeating it four times is pretty sad. (You can tell since that little line above the coffee mug is exactly the same). I don’t think the strip would have suffered at all if there had been a little variation-snow falling outside the window, a bird landing on the windowsill, a TV on in the background, or even that little line above the coffee cup changing. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a Sunday strip in either this or Crankfshaft that couldn’t have been told just as easy in one or two panels.
Oh, and having cataract surgery clears up your vision. Expect Funky to start cheating on Holly just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Thanks for having me!  Taking over tomorrow is Comic Book Harriet.  I hope Cayla gets COVID or something, just so CBH has something to write about.

Cataractive

I like this doctor. “Yeah, he’ll just have to wear this thing for a couple of nights, I don’t know how many exactly, whenever he feels like taking it off, whatever. Oh, and he only needs to wear it at night, he can take it off during the way, who cares.”.
Funky sure has had some wild mood swings this week. The first two panels he looks like he’s lost the will to live, then in the third he’s popping up and yelling out a pirate impersonation.

Cataractastrophe

This is an odd strip. I guess the joke is “Funky isn’t feeling anything because he’s been ‘sedated’, even though sedation and anesthetization aren’t the same thing, if he’s freaking out and yelling he sure doesn’t seem sedated”, but I don’t get why he’d be dead set on having to feel something before he goes in for surgery anyway. Shouldn’t be relieved that he can’t feel anything before he has a knife inevitably poke out his eye?

I like to think of this as Funky just admitting that he’s dead inside and has no emotions anymore, because I’m very tired at the lame attempts at humor and very much want this strip to jump back into overblown melodrama. At least that was slightly entertaining.