Tag: Holly

O Little Town Of Memphis

Link To Today’s Strip

Merry Christmas to our SoSF guest hosts and commenters! Without YOU it’s all just masturbation! Have a great holiday!!

Man, Funky sure is aging (even more) poorly…the New Guy added a solid ten to fifteen years to his already-decrepit character. Soon he’ll just be a skeleton…a big fat skeleton. Obviously it’s seems HIGHLY unlikely that his father went all the way to Memphis to record a CD without him knowing about it but by the standards of the Funkyverse it’s sort of believable. I mean just last week some guy bought “Lisa’s Trilogy” as a Xmas gift for his dead wife, so this seems rather innocuous in comparison.

“Greetings From Memphis”…wow what a shitty title, they only recorded in Memphis, they don’t live there. “Hits From The Oxygen Bottle”…”Over The Hills And Warfarin Away”…”Nights in White Pravastatin”…”(Let’s Get) Physical (Therapy)…”Stairlift To Heaven”…”Code Blue Christmas”…”Fractured Hippy Shake”…”Like A Rolling Kidney Stone”… “Stray Cataract Blues”…”The Grandkids Are Alright”…”(Do You Remember) AM Talk Radio”…”Every Assisted Breath You Take”…”Walker This Way”…”We (Medi)Care A Lot”…now THOSE are titles befitting the Bedside Manorisms. “Greetings From Memphis” will just confuse people, or it would if anyone actually cared.

A Special Denouncement

It’s about time! I was wondering if we’d ever get there, but today’s strip finally gives us the call back to John Darling we’ve been expecting. Yes, Phil is terrible at his (former) job, just like he was back in 1979. Back then, making fun of the local weather forecaster was a comedy trend surpassed only by making fun of Billy Carter…

JD7-30-79
This strip appeared opposite an ad imploring you to come test drive the all-new Chevrolet Citation…

Oh, for Pete’s sake!

I remain baffled by the pie case at Montoni’s. Who eats pie there?
That’s a rhetorical question of course, nobody eats anything at Montoni’s. Not even Crazy, who is only ever seen there sipping a bottomless coffee or soda and avoiding his job. But still, what’s with the pie case?

Shooting Gallery

Today’s strip

Greetings, folks, BChasm temporarily in the captain’s chair for the next little while.  What’s this?!  The viewscreen shows a sea of hostiles–ready photon torpedoes!   We must annihilate this threat before it spreads across the galaxy!

I’m going to skip over Mason’s “movie we filmed here,” comment, because while I don’t think any of the film was shot in Centerville, I honestly don’t remember the “school bus drives into shot” bit well enough, and–Tales to Astonish–I have no desire to look and see.  So I’ll give him that.

What else?  Well, we’ve got a crowd shot of almost everyone, including Les–which sets our Les Watch back to zero, damn it.  At least he’s not saying anything, and is both poorly drawn and partly covered by a word balloon.  Funny, though, I’d have expected both Comic Book John and Imbecilic Harry to be there, but I guess they got their exposure in at Comic Con, so no need to feature them any longer.  But who is that between Jim KibblesNBits and Marianne?  It looks like they flew Marianne’s mother out there after all!  I guess?

The fact that so many of the cast and crew are in the audience–and sitting right up front, too–makes me wonder if Tom Batiuk believes that the first time anyone involved with a movie actually gets to see the finished film is at the premier.  In the real world, the director would have seen the film dozens of times by now, and there’s almost always a screening for the cast and crew.  So all these people would be backstage, or at the back of the hall, gauging audience reaction–pacing, room for laughs, people getting bored at certain parts, and so on–and looking for “oohs” and “aahs” for the cast members.

But not in the fantasy land that is the Funkyverse.  Here, everything happens the way a five year old imagines that it happens–it’s all just magic, and friendship, and comic books and pizza, and it works every time!  In a way, that sounds like an attractive world…for a few minutes.  But after those few minutes, I’d want something of substance, something that would stir the imagination rather than just “be” everything forever.

Poorly thought-out as the Lisa stuff is, it’s at least an attempt to address adult concerns–something that a comic strip aimed at “contemporary problems of young people” should attempt more often.  Because I’m pretty sure the contemporary problems of young people aren’t that they wish there were more comic-book movies.

Probing The Depths Of “Huh?”

Link to today’s strip

Like your comic strips overflowing with oddly-worded nonsensical babble? Well then, today is your lucky day, because we have that. The same film that drops everything and re-writes the entire script every time someone involved with it happens across some old coot or random piece of junk actually has a fully-fleshed out and complex back story behind it, a back story Mason committed to memory after holing up at Holly’s house three or four years ago and reading the entire SJ collection, which has since been sold to finance Cory’s wedding plans, which are apparently in the same place as Frankie’s food truck and Becky’s mom. Got that? Consider yourself briefed. If Batiuk really wanted to shock his readers he’d wrap up every dangling plot thread in one six day arc just jam-packed full of huge word balloons, but that would mean the next few years of FW would consist of the characters just aimlessly standing around doing nothing. In other words, it’d be indistinguishable from how it is right now.