Tag: Les

How the Mighty Have Fall In.

Link to Today’s Strip.

Comic Book Harriet here! Ready to aim aim high and kick it off, hopefully without slipping and breaking a leg. I wanna thank our resident Spaceman Spiff for caring for us all over the last couple painful weeks. He brought us comforting sarcasm, and a barrel full of witty insights to dull the ache of Batiuk’s broken humor.

Today we get a real treat. The Passion of the Dead St Lisa movie bombed. So all of our comments about Funky Winkerbean gradually morphing into a Judge Parker, where characters are gifted success without merit, must have struck a nerve. Or Batiuk just finally remembered who he was, and is back to his old yanking-the-football ways.

But today is just PACKED with non sequiturs.

The only thing that confused me at first, but that I could make sense of after thinking about it, is that the release date of Lisa’s Story got pushed back. The movie just wrapped a few months ago, so it didn’t have any time to sit on the shelf mostly finished ala No Time to Die or Wonder Woman 1984. But then I remembered that movies get release dates well before they are finished, or have even started filming. And the great LA Firedemic of the vaguely defined ‘last year’ apparently shut down movie production long enough for Marianne Winters to be treated for early stage breast cancer. So yeah, the release date would have been pushed back significantly.

And it is an accurate and believable rendering of what did happen to a bunch of movies in the last couple years. There’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the movies, cancelled, delayed, suspended, and/or dumped to streaming because of the pandemic. I’m actually surprised Batty didn’t decide to go topical-to-the-max and have it released directly to PicFlicks or Hula or whatever the Funkyverse equivalent of a streaming service would be. But apparently it was released in theatres.

And that is what is confusing me. There is no way Les and CauCayla would be learning about the movie bombing from an EMAIL from MASONEE. They went to a wrap party, but didn’t go to the premiere? They didn’t bother to check Box Office Mojo, or Rotten Tomatoes to see how the movie was being received critically or financially?

Les knows what it’s like to drop an anvil in a lake?

It that a popular idiom? I didn’t really know. So I went to grandpa Google and did a phrase search.

It really isn’t that common. Only four pages of results. I found it used a couple times in news articles because Judge Napolitano said it about Russiagate. A really sad blog about a sick kid. A few links to some fanfictions on wattpad…

And then things got weird.

What does this mean? What does any of this mean? Is it poorly translated from a language with ideogrammic elements? Is it some kind of secret code? Some kind of communication between hidden agents among us? It Funky Winkerbean PART of whatever this is? When Tom Batiuk ended today’s strip with “an anvil in a lake,” was he sending a message, recognized only by the few, that now, at last, was the time?

If you’re interested to see what dropping an anvil in a lake looks like, may I suggest this video. Where two Finnish people speaking nearly unintelligible English drop a red hot anvil into a lake and film it, just because, why not? Why not do that? Why not watch that? It makes a lot more sense than Funky Winkerbean most days.

It’s The Way They All Became The Batom Bunch

Link To Sunday’s Strip

Here’s the story

Of a hack named Batty

Who was busy with two comics of his own.

Both of them had stupid puns

And lots of wordplay

And bad dialog for girls.

Why the f*ck is there a soda can in the header panel? What does that have to do with anything? So BatYarn wanted to parody Zoom, but didn’t really know much about it or have any serious ideas for doing so. Naturally, he decided to plow ahead anyway and this floppery is the result. This is just bad on a visceral level, the kind of FW strip that firmly convinces me that mocking FW every day is indeed the right thing to do. What a hack.

And on that note I am done. What an ordeal that was. There’s been entirely too much Les lately, too much cancer too, at least for my tastes. Stay tuned for a Special Guest Appearance by Our Fearless Leader himself, the SoSF King Of Kings, TFH!!!

A Brief History Of Wry

Link To This One

Christ, what a bunch of assholes. BatYam’s pandemic garbage dump arc limps toward the finish line today, as we get a rare glimpse inside the WHS teacher’s lounge, aka The Den Of Perpetual Ennui. The always-insufferable Linda is (surprise) once again bitching about her job in that low-key annoyingly wry way of hers, as Klabichnik delivers the “punch line” (as it were) while the useless Dick Facey sits there stupidly. What a piece of garbage. Strips like this actually make a mockery out of making a mockery of FW, which is the only “anomaly” here.

Low Water Mark

Link To Today’s

SIGH. Yet another pandemic gag that (I assume) seemed clever at the time, only to fail badly thanks to BatYam’s unique blend of ineptitude and stupidity. I don’t know why Les drinks water from bottles by throwing the water from the bottle into his mouth, but based on their expression in panel three, Linda and Jim have clearly seen this and been amused by it before. The real question here is what did Les say there in panel two? Was it “shit”, “f*ck”, “dammit” or something else entirely?

Pound sign, squiggle, explosion, lightning bolt and skull and crossbones…whatever it was it must have been pretty obscene to merit that skull and crossbones. I also like how the bottle is helpfully labeled “water”, just in case there was any doubt. Seriously though, has anyone out there actually done this or found it to be a problem? I mean sure, I do some pretty stupid things at times but I haven’t sunk to this level yet, thank God.

Help Me Tom, I’m Only Bleating

Link To Today’s Drip

Batty usually has no problem with dreaming up new premises, as the problem is typically everything that happens after that. But jeepers, this one is mighty thin, even by his lowly standards. It’s like he decided to do a “back to school” arc, then completely ran out of ideas immediately, then decided to forge ahead anyway. And in his defense, who would even know?

But anyhow, yeah, he’s already resorting to testicle gags, the lowest of all gag forms. At this rate we should be getting into the fart jokes by tomorrow at the latest. I mean what can you even say here? This isn’t merely a lifeless outing, it’s an exhumed corpse outing.