Sunday’s strip was not immediately available, so have at it, early snarkers!
Update: Oh look, a health-care joke. I can think of several Westviewites and a Medinoid I’d like to launch into the Sun.
Today’s Starbuck Jones faux cover tips its funky felt tip to Norm Breyfogle, so feast your eyes on this pastiche from Batominc. Or, you know, look at the real thing.
Update 2: Erich reminds us that it’s no pastiche.
Now Batominc demonstrates what a skilled artist with a year’s lead time can do with a topical storyline. It does that by counterexample, mind you. Is it impressive the way Batominc avoided every salient feature of real Iraqi Freedom jackets?
And what an unexpected plot twist! Nick the Geek Who Looks Like a Tough Biker is an Army vet! Whoa!
Based on the Punisher skull motif, I guessed that Nick the Geek’s comic book store is based on Canton’s Bill’s Books and More, and @bobanero has noted the existence of a Black Hole Comics in Columbus. That store, though, does not seem to feature a Punisher emblem.
The best aspect of this strip, though, is Holly’s unwarranted esteem for her own negotiating skills. It would be even better if she were to imagine herself rounding the bases of a weirdly tiny baseball diamond.
“What do you want, Geek? Credits?” our current strip seems to ask, as if Holly were some alternate, Klingon-like version of our rotund Winkerspouse.
Later, at home, Nick the Geek will hold up Holly’s Drug City discount card, and muse to his wife: “Can you imagine that? She offered this to me as if it was really worth something. Poor old gal.”
His wife will recall vaguely that such cards were worth something once, long ago, in the before time. “Sure,” Nick will reply, “about a hundred years or so ago, before they passed the Affordable Life Amendment,” and will toss the plastic card into the fuel cell.
On the plus side, Starbuck Jones dies in the first panel.
Caveat lector, let the reader beware, is what Nick the Geek’s sign should say. I’m never shocked when Batominc fails to deliver on a narrative promise, so please imagine the next sentence in Truman Capote’s voice: Nick the Geek doesn’t look like a geek; he looks like a member of the Hell’s Angels.†
I know, I know, that makes me a beady-eyed nitpicker. After all, what’s more important—narrative continuity, or a weak pun?
†See? My superannuated references are to guys who died only 3 decades ago.
Hi snarkers! Oddnoc here. I wish I could could say we’re in for a thrilling treat this week, but we’re reading Funky Winkerbean. That makes us the worst reading club in America.
Today’s strip features a—wait for it!—pun! Oh my gosh! A pun in Funky Winkerbean—I can hardly restrain my glee.
You don’t see the pun, you say? Er, it’s in panel 3. No, not in Harry’s speech balloon. It’s in DSH’s. “Nick the Geek.” Still no?
Maybe that’s because the pun is based on the name of guy who died on Christmas Day 1966, 47 years ago, Nick “the Greek” Dandolos. The guy was born in the 19th Century, so this fits right in with Funky Winkerbean’s focus on “contemporary issues affecting young adults.”
Son of Stuck Funky 