Tag: hoodie

Prayer For The Sneering

Link to today’s strip

I’m admittedly as beady-eyed and nit-picky as anyone here at SoSF, so maybe my opinion is somewhat skewed. That said, Lisa’s silly little “prayer” comes across as being rather selfish and short-sighted to me. After all, how did she know back then what would become of Frankie? Perhaps he would have changed his ways and become, oh I don’t know, an ordained minister or a first responder hero or a devoted family man or whatever. Typical Lisa…me me me, always self-absorbed in that annoyingly cloying way she had (and still has despite being dead). In any event, as Nelson Muntz might say, “Haw haw! Your prayer went unanswered!”.

So what did Frankie do, exactly, to merit this non-stop sneering and eyebrow-cocking? His attempt to “cash in” on one of Lisa’s many tragedies? Les did it a few times. Cayla was practically boinging off the walls when the movie check arrived. Summer even went as far as to suggest a 3-D version of “Lisa’s Story”. What makes that any different? I get the feeling that any “outsiders” who dare to enter Westview get chased to the city limits by a group of pitchfork-toting sneering fat guys wearing pizza shop smocks in an old-fashioned car as “Dueling Banjos” plays in the background. What a bunch of hostile pricks.

But forget all that nonsense, as none of it matters anyway. The big news today is that Montoni’s appears to be selling T-shirts! I simply MUST have one, although because I’m not a XXXXL I doubt they’d be carrying my size. If Batom doesn’t start hawking these on his site he’s both lazy and stupid, because he’s sitting on a gold mine with those.

Soaked In Stupidity

Link to today’s strip

“Drenched in irony”…not exactly, unless “irony” is now synonymous with horse doot. So Lisa was either “trying to fit in” or she was trapped in a violent, abusive relationship…which one is it? I also have to assume that Summer is skipping over entire months of this journal, as Lisa now knows she’s pregnant, but whatever. It’s not all going to suddenly start making sense at this point, you know? I just wish Cayla had “drenched” this idiotic journal with gasoline before tossing it into the nearest bonfire.

So, it appears that the big “plan” to foil Frankie’s demented scheme somehow involves putting Jessica’s oft-mentioned camera-pointing and tripod assembly skills to work…finally. Too bad for Boy Lisa that she’s not this ambitious where actual paying gigs are concerned. I haven’t a clue as to how filming Summer reading random diary passages will stop Frankie’s nefarious plot (so to speak), but hey, I guess Batom has to start wrapping this disaster up sooner or later, regardless of whether it makes any sense at all or not. Nor do I know what’s going on with the trippy purple background or the wild scribbling and the less said about Summer’s painfully bony and angular legs, the better. What a fiasco.

(S)Hit Parade

Link to today’s strip

So when Pm & Jff interrupted Frankie during his wind-up, it turns out he was about to pummel Lisa because she was breaking up with him, not because of her pregnancy or whatever. Perhaps I’m just way too cynical but to me this one reads as if BatTom felt he really needed to give the reader a reason to hate Frankie even more. So he used the diary contrivance to inform us that his assaults were an ongoing thing, without elaborating, the same way he always dances around and skates the “issue” at hand while pretending to “address” it. Now he can add “teen domestic violence/underage drinking” to the ever-growing list of “relevant topics” FW has “tackled” and he can get back to his real “plot” which involves a reality TV show or something.

Panel three features some of the corniest dialog he’s ever put to paper. Good thing Lisa grew out of her “eye-reading” phase because quite frankly she really, really sucked at it. Also of note today is the bizarre shading in panel two (shadows??) and that horrific squiggle-haired chair which honestly makes me nauseous, as does Summer’s “concerned/sad” face.

Blink Once For “Yes”….

Hey gang, it’s your old pal Epicus, taking the SoSF reins for what promises to be a spectacular week of earth-shattering FW events and mind-boggling TB plot twists. Or banal TB idiocy and pathetic FW contrivances, with is probably far more likely. Special thanks to TFH for the opportunity to host the interweb’s premier Funky Winkerbean snark blog, it’s both an honor and a privilege! Likewise, props are due for our previous guest host, DavidO, for a job very well done! Now let’s leap right on in to this week’s edition of the big Frankie mega-arc and see what went on (shudder) in that hideous leopard-skinned van, shall we?

So finally, after approximately thirty-seven weeks of boring chatter and nonsensical developments, we learn the truth about that awful, awful night when the despised Boy Lisa was conceived. There wasn’t any rape or even any actual coercion involved at all! Nope, while a beer-addled Lisa tried to communicate her growing (and awfully sudden) revulsion for Frankie via deep, meaningful telepathic eye contact, she blinked, which he naturally interpreted as “green light, all systems go, let’s get bizz-ay!”. An honest mistake, as who among us hasn’t had a drunken blink misinterpreted as an invitation to wanton, reckless sex and unplanned parenthood? Good thing Lisa didn’t sneeze, as God only knows what sort of perversions Frankie might have unleashed upon her. In any case, several moments later Lisa was inseminated, beginning a series of events which would eventually lead to the ruination of an entire comic strip. Nice going there, Blinky.

Hopefully Summer takes her mom’s story to heart and remembers the sex-blinking code if she ever finds herself in some creepy guy’s van exchanging deep soulful stares, although we all know that’s highly, highly unlikely for any number of reasons I won’t go into here. It’s such a shame that Lisa couldn’t think of any other way to communicate her feelings other than through eye contact and telepathy. Maybe sign language or semaphore or something, I don’t know.

That Evening with Frankie

It wouldn’t be A Very Special Funky Winkerbean Story Arc if Batiuk didn’t manage to work in a Sunday comic book tribute. Interestingly, Batiuk’s Medina homeboy Tony Isabella featured this very comic book cover on his blog a little over a year ago. Also worth noting that while the guy pictured here has the same skin tone as the woman, that the FW colorist has made him positively swarthy. He’s like Lenny in reverse.

The Lisa-Frankie “romance” so far: insecure “new girl” can’t believe that the handsome jock has asked her out. He picks her up in his leopard-print upholstered bread truck. Later, they attend a party where they both consume alcohol. On the way home, Frankie stops in an alley where we must assume they had unprotected sex. Lisa’s journal only informs us that this was not a good idea, but was she in fact raped? What were her “high expectations” when Frankie parked in that alley? Did her low self esteem lead her to just go along despite her better judgment? Nothing to this point suggests that this was non-consensual (“Uncle Jfff’s” recollection of the near-punching seems to have taken place either after the sex or on a different night–Lisa’s dressed differently). In the 2001 flashback to Lisa’s teen pregnancy, she even offhandedly describes Frankie as a “lousy” lay.

What makes today’s panel so infuriating, of course, is that interview Batiuk gave back in March, where he teased this story arc:

In the return of that story we deepen the teen pregnancy story and say that it was a little more than just youthful indiscretion on Lisa’s part. There was some coercion involved (emphasis added).

With that, Batiuk goes above and beyond “tell don’t show”: he’s telling about “telling, not showing”. Any coercion on Frankie’s part, particularly of an alcohol-impaired Lisa, makes TB’s evocation of “Romance” today stupid, tone-deaf, and wrong.