Grab Bag Week: High School Hijinks Edition continues, and yes, dear reader, today’s strip is the source of that oh-so-punchable Les face in this week’s banner. That’s the expression Les wears when he’s doing what he does best: being a smug, superior dick to his students. Owen’s right, Les, for once: that was a trick question. Doesn’t the fact that nobody, nobody in his class is able to answer this question say more about the teacher than the students?
Tag: Les
WHSTV
You’d think that producing Westview High’s closed-circuit morning newscast would be a job that a couple of geeks like Cody and Owen could not only do but might actually do pretty well. Naturally, everything goes terribly awry, as typified by the fact that the picture on the TV is upside down. Just more fuel for Les and Linda’s disdain of their idiot students.
Never mind that, though. Get a load of who’s sitting in the front row: it’s Alex, most recently seen dispensing totally worthless relationship advice to lovestruck Owen. Surely there is some retconning going on here: we met Alex at mopey Pete’s book signing in December 2007 (see below), and she appeared to be at least high school age five years ago (I was going point to the fact that she sported tattoos even back then, but apparently Ohio law allows minors to get tattoos with parental consent). She’s certainly old enough for Pete to attempt hitting on, though we know that that’s not the best indicator. Note that her model sheet on the Meet the Cast page is one of the few that does not give an age. How convenient.
Dec. 10, 2007 strip:
Just My Type
Meanwhile, back on Earth…
I imagine Cayla looks at her husband at least once a day and mutters “Amazing…” Today she finds herself in awe of Les’ typing skill. Les explains that he enrolled in typing class in high school as a way to get close to Mary Sue Sweetwater. His scheme to impress Mary Sue by becoming an awesome typist backfired when he got himself promoted to “the advanced class”. Even Les’ failures are a result of him being just so good at everything! All’s well that ends well, though, as his keyboarding chops impress Cayla (chicks dig men who can type fast). Mary Sue, meanwhile, would later find herself on the receiving end of some classic Westview karma.
Supreme Indifference
Questions continue to come in about the comic book covers that I use from time to time in the Funky Sunday strips. It seems that there are a lot of folks in Funkydom who enjoy seeing the comics of their youth and the artists who created them paid homage in this way…
TB’s blog, Jan. 31, 2013
Batiuk actually takes a great deal of pride in his “Comic Book Sunday” tributes, but we folks here in SonofStuckFunkydom just see them as lazy, facile filler. Today’s “homage” to Justice League of America Vol. 1, No. 5 is particularly galling. This time Batiuk has not even gone to the trouble of trying to relate the comic book cover to any of the strip’s current plotlines.
Typically he finds a cover he likes and comes up with some contrived way of shoehorning it into the current plot. He’s reversed the process today, whipping up a weak standalone gag for the inset panel that relates only tangentially with the comic cover. Batiuk can’t even be bothered to Photoshop one of his character’s heads onto a superhero body. The “gag” consists of Crazy Harry (he’s a Tea Partier, you know!), kvetching to Les about that goddam out-of-control Supreme Court. I’m not even going to Google the news from a year ago to find out what the Court was up to at the time TB came up with this gem. Clearly he figured that, no matter what was happening in the news, the “folks in Funkydom” would all nod in amused agreement at Crazy’s rant.
A Lowell in the Action
Today’s strip takes us through space, from London to Lowell, Massachusetts, and through time, to the mid-nineteenth century, to finally arrive at a weak “pun-chline” which a year or two ago would have been served up by Cory “Call Me Fishmeal” instead of Cody.
As an aside: a long-running comic to which FW is often (unfavorably) compared explains how “small lapses in continuity and art…only add to the charm” of “artisanal comics” such as Funky Winkerbean…check out today’s Doonesbury!
[Edit: Link to today’s FW and to Doonesbury were incorrect; I’ve fixed ’em now]
Son of Stuck Funky 
