Tag: Holly

Doom Smells Pretty Fishy.

Link to today’s strip

Oooh, we have a real treat this week. Not only was Monday a nonentity where one character essentially tells another, “I will soon tell you the point.” But we get a double dose of the ‘suspense’ today. Do you think by the end of the week we will know the crux of the ‘conflict’? I give it 50-50 odds.

Funky is shoveling the snow off the sidewalk, and talking to his wife on the phone. So much wrong with this.

While I guess a March snowstorm isn’t insane for the Midwest,(here in Iowa we had snow on Thursday,) the strip on Sunday had the students standing on growing green grass in light jackets and sweaters.

Funky is just outside his house. Unless his wife is away from town, isn’t she just inside? Why is she asking him if he’s sitting down? Why is she having this serious conversation with him on the phone, instead of waiting the 15 minutes for him to finish shoveling? Has she locked him out of the house? Do they only converse with cell phones now? Does she refuse to set eyes on him since he turned into a horrible eldritch amalgamation of the Stay-puff Marshmallow Man and Statler the Muppet?

‘Not necessarily bad news’ always means, ‘it’s not bad for me, but you won’t like it.’ Funky is right to sniff doom. On the other hand, a good whiff of Funky right now probably smells like moldy dog and onions. He sniffs doom with every inhale.

Sporto Hall of Fame

Okay, so a few things about today’s strip.

  1. It’s not terrible, especially by Batiuk standards.  It’s two people happy about something, and has a little charm to it, which honestly puts it in the top 1% or so of Funky Winkerbean strips.  The problem is it’s mired in with all the rest of them, so I can’t help but think of how Batiuk portrays CTE or PTSD or how lazy and self-indulgent his writing can be, which makes it hard to enjoy on its own terms.
  2. Speaking of lazy, this exemplifies one of the biggest things that annoys me about Batiuk Sunday strips: it’s a total waste of space.  Did we really need four wordless panels to establish these two are walking?  So many of these Sunday strips just seem to obviously like they were intended to be three panels and then Batiuk added a couple of silent panels to fill it out.  In this instance I think one single, large panel with a pretty snow scene would’ve been very nice, and it would’ve been entirely possible to fit the two lines of dialogue in there.
  3. Batiuk really should not draw attention to Charlie Brown.  It’s like Stephanie Meyer referencing Shakespeare, or a Sci-Fi Original movie referencing Star Wars.  Don’t remind your audience there is far, far better material out there.  And also Batiuk is in nowhere near the same league as Charles Schulz.
  4. Wherever Holly and Funky are going, it sure isn’t to visit Bull.

There’s Always Someone Around You

Link to today’s strip.

And another strip unavailable for preview.  Of course, that’s typical for Sundays so no surprises there.  I dare say, if I may be so bold, that it has been quite some time since we last saw Funky and Les running.  Or we might just get more Dinkle.

Anyway, for my first time back in the chair in a while, let’s recall the wonders we witnessed recently during my stint:  Wally got a pizza party and Dinkle looked for food.  When your strip is just jammed full of action and adventure like that, you should certainly expect the awards to roll on in!   You’d also expect people to buy your books, not only for themselves but as gifts for others!  I mean, who wouldn’t want a boxed set of Dinkle’s entire Claude Barlow witlessisms?  Sure, maybe the Norms would balk, but they’re not on award committees so they can be ignored.  And ignored with gusto!

Well!  That’s it for me, at least for the present.  It’s time to hand off this cold, damp slice of pizza off to the Stunningly Suave SpacemanSpiff85!    He’ll focus his fearsome frap-ray blaster on the festering fools who fill Funky‘s foul fiefdom–for a fortnight!

Thank you all for your indulgence!  And now, exit–stage right!

 

Night of the Living Manager

Link to today’s strip.

I remember when Dullard left, Funky was worrying about filling his position and Wally volunteered for the job.   Funky dismissed the offer out of hand, and now we know why:  you can’t be a manager if you don’t have a degree.  Why, the absurdity!  Being a degree-less schmo is fine if you’re just washing the disease off the plates, but manager?  Never!

Apparently, though, someone was hired to manage the place during the night…someone who we’ve never seen, and whose existence has never even been hinted about.  (But probably had a degree.)  I suspect this being quit so that it could join its fellow cryptids like the Fresno Nightcrawler, the Flatwoods Monster or the Hopkinsville aliens.

By the way, is Funky talking about a closing manager?  Because I would think the night would have much bigger crowds than the lunch shift, with that much more responsibility as well.  Wally still seems right on the edge of frail, so I don’t know what a large, boisterous crowd would do to him.  Ha!  I kid…like Montoni’s ever had a large crowd.

A closing manager for Montoni’s would just add up the mediocre receipts, see that the equipment looks clean enough, cage the apes, weep quietly and so on.

Not much else to say about this one…it’s dull, unfunny and the events therein (Wally being a manager) will be ignored in the future anyway, so that boring, poorly-constructed word-play can be made.

Nice to see that continuity is still as much ignored as always.  The other day, Tony had a red sweater.  Today, it’s black.  Either someone in quality control slipped up, or Tony was covered in blood and it has now coagulated.