Sourbelly April 23, 2022 at 10:53 pm
Passing out from wearing a cheap stupid helmet 18 sizes too small may have had more of an impact on Kwazy Harry’s boring, stupid, pointless psychotic embolism. Whatever. It’s over, right? On to the next thing!
If only. If only! Ya know, snarkers, I was secretly kinda hoping that Tom Batiuk would drag Funky across the fifty year goal line, accept his Gold T-Square (to put with his Inkpot Award), call it a career, and live off the (surely massive) proceeds of the Complete FW volumes he so incessantly flogs. If only! Instead, the comic strip creator who crowed about allowing his characters to age and even to die, has given himeself carte blanche to run around tying up his strip’s countless loose plot threads. And in the cheapest way possible: “it was all just a dream/coma/toxic fume induced fainting spell.”
“There, there, lie quiet now. You just had a bad dream.” Yep, it had to be the “off-gassing of the plastics” in a helmet that’s sat in the attic since 1980. In addition to her prowess at video games, Donna’s also some kind of an expert in plastics chemistry.
Um, Harry, shoehorning “Lisa’s Story” wherever you possibly can is the absolute least weird thing in this strip. It happens constantly. It should’ve seemed inevitable that Donna reminiscing about her glory days would lead to the Lisa Bench.
So I guess Harry has travelled back in time (again). Which makes this all even less weird, since this is now the second time that Harry has “travelled back in time”. Or, since he’s seeing the Dead St. Lisa Cancer Death Memorial Bench, it’s possible he just died. Which would make Donna’s insistence that he wear the helmet instead of her very interesting. Really, the only weird thing today is that a helmet his wife wore as a young teen fits old man Harry perfectly.
As always, it’s extremely intimidating following up the amazing ComicBookHarriet, but I’ll do my best. And so, the latest retelling of “a girl used to play arcade games” is continuing on. It still stretches any credibility that Maddie (who has to be over thirty at this point) never once heard about this before. Or that she never wondered what the weird helmet that was apparently just sitting around in the attic for decades was. It’s also kind of funny that Donna doesn’t have it on display or in a shrine, given that “used to be the Eliminator” is literally her only character trait.
It’s extremely sad how the younger generation of Summer and Maddie only exist now so the older generation has someone to recount the Act I strips to. Maddie wanted to see Donna wear it because it was her helmet, that she used to wear and has a history with. There’s no point in Harry wearing it. Apart from it just being kind of hilarious that after weeks of “girls can do everything guys can”, we have “actually, we can’t wear this helmet, so a guy needs to wear it for some reason”.
If you really break down what Crazy is saying here, it seems to imply that when he was sixteen he was attracted to an eleven year-old-child he assumed was a boy.
No Boku No Pac-Man, please…
Unfortunate implications aside, all we have here is a restatement of the week’s plot. The only thing of note is that the Sunday colorist managed to depict a redhead character correctly for once.
March of last year Tom let us know this arc was incoming, when he posted the book cover that inspired his Eliminator helmet, and said this:
I saw this book on a spinner rack at the Captain EZ Confectionery a few blocks from our first apartment. Couldn’t resist the cover. Picked it up and later “borrowed” the Hunter helmet for a character I’d just created in Funky called the Eliminator. Said helmet, coinkadinkily enough, will show-up in a Funky story arc next year.
Cover Me 143 posted on MARCH 20, 2021
“Hunter” – Art by Paul Neary and written by Rich Margopoulos, Budd Lewis and Bill DuBay. Six parts in total, appearing in issues #52-57. Set in a near-future world devastated by nuclear war, it features Damien Hunter, a half man/half demon who seeks to destroy all the demons on Earth, including his father Oephal. As a half-breed consumed by self-loathing, Hunter frequently moralized on racial issues in contemporary America.
I want to thank Banana Jr. 6000, none, Charles, Mela, as well as others for providing some background on the arcade game Defender. I didn’t grow up with video games, only picking up the habit during college, so the context was great. I hunted up a few short YouTube vids that cover the development and just how unique and challenging the game is.
Today is the last day of my shift. It has been a real treat celebrating 50 years of Funky Winkerbean by going back in time to see what a 25-year-old Tom Batiuk was capable of. Thanks everyone who enjoyed it with me!
But what did I really think of the first four years of Funky Winkerbean?
It was alright.
Not usually laugh out loud funny, certainly capable of being bad, but amusing enough. Certainly not out of place squeezed between Hagar the Horrible and Wizard of Id.
But I easily found strips where the seeds of what would grow into Batiuk’s thorniest issues were germinating.
Preachy Nihilism.
Recycled Jokes
Observational Non-Humor
Vaguely offensive portrayals of women
I mean women WANT to be sexy and hate not being sexy and hate other women for being sexy amirite?
Dinkle writing AWFUL puns.
Worshiping Les. (Okay, this one is actually funny.)
And, as I’ve said before, I think we’re sometimes too hard on modern Batiuk during those occasions when he dips his toes back into gag-a-day humor. It might not be as good as his best was back then. But his best now is as good as his average was.
So sue me, I liked this one.
There were a couple strips I stumbled across that made me cringe or shudder, knowing where the strip would eventually go.
Baby Wally was born fearing death.
Alcoholism runs in Funky’s family.
Les hopes his future wife will make him money…
Uhh…
Uhhh…..
But despite all that, there were strips that had me genuinely laughing out loud. So here they are, my favorite strips from the first few years of Funky Winkerbean.
Act I Crazy Harry is my spirit animal.
I have literally done this.
So that’s it for me this round! The esteemed SpacemanSpiff85 will be taking over the ship tomorrow, asking the hard hitting questions.
Like, when is the strip ending? Will Wally Jr. ever return? Will Mindy and Mopey ever marry? Will Summer ever graduate Kent State? We’ve reached 50 years and we’re still chugging along. Maybe someday, we’ll know, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be this year.
Son of Stuck Funky 
