Montoni’s logo – Page 3 – Son of Stuck Funky

The Four Loko of Comics.

Poor Donna, look how excited she is in panel one. She reaches out with both hands to the bottle sitting on the weird, tiny, chest-high, table that floats in the featureless beige void. Some cheap sparkling wine. Something to take the edge off the fear gnawing at her subconscious that she’s trapped forever in this gradient colored nega-space. Locked into a bland box, where she slowly decays as the background fades, both the room and her person losing all color and detail. She’ll drink that bottle of cheap, carbonated booze and forget her horrifying existence for a while.

And then the reveal, and her face falls.

This must be payback for all the times she washed her hair with Crazy’s head cleaning solution.

But it’s okay. She can wash away her sorrows with rancidly effervescent salad dressing.

Now is the Crouton of Our Discontent.

Link To Today’s Strip

Come to Funky Winkerbean for the mesmerizingly inane plot, stay for the intense first-person envelope stuffing action! And in such detail! We almost get to see what the ingredients of Montoni’s famous salad dressing are. Alas, all we will know is that it contains ‘< of 10 em WWWW’.

Cute pun too. Nice to see that the salad dressing gift was really a prop in service of a sentiment. Provided Donna likes salad dressing, this is a perfectly adequate anniversary present for an older couple living off of the income of a single part time job at a comics shack. Certainly better than an IOU for a trip to China that is quickly forgotten.

‘Salad Days’ is such a weird idiom though. We’ve become so removed from the concrete meaning of the metaphor, that usage of the phrase keeps sliding further and further away from it’s genesis in Shakespeare. Nowadays it generally means a worry-free and pleasant time of life. Either youth, or retirement. But that’s only after evolving more times than a Pokémon.

Of course, I fell down the internet hole again on this one. It’s my specialty.

‘Salad days’ comes from a line in Shakespeare’s 1606 play, Antony and Cleopatra. But like a lot of popular Shakespearian idioms, the turn of phrase didn’t get pulled out as a stock phrase until the mid 19th century. Initially salad days was a somewhat negative expression, meaning a time of ignorant indiscretion in youth. You’re green, and cold, and will soon wilt, and so do stupid things. Like get a Star Wars tattoo or seduce Julius Caesar.

Which brings us to the origin of the phrase in the play. In Act 1 Scene V of Antony and Cleopatra, Cleo is gushing about Marc Antony, her hunky Roman boyfriend, and preparing to send dozens of messengers after him like the first century equivalent of blowing up his cell phone with texts. She asks one of her servants if she ever loved her old, now dead, Italian dressing, Julius Caesar so much.

CLEOPATRA Did I, Charmian, Ever love Caesar so?

CHARMIAN O that brave Caesar!

CLEOPATRA Be choked with such another emphasis!
Say, the brave Antony.

CHARMIAN The valiant Caesar!

CLEOPATRA By Isis, I will give thee bloody teeth,
If thou with Caesar paragon again
My man of men.

CHARMIAN By your most gracious pardon,
I sing but after you.

CLEOPATRA My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then! But, come, away;
Get me ink and paper:
He shall have every day a several greeting,
Or I’ll unpeople Egypt.

So, you know, if Batiuk wants to go with this original allusion that’s fine. It’s nice to think that Crazy Harry and Donna will grow to disavow this time in their lives, and see themselves as stupid for ever feeling this way. And if they want to finish it all off by dying of snakebite, so much the better.

All Dressed Up, (With No Place to Hide.)

Link To Today’s Strip

Nice to know that the Sunday teal and salmon colors have been washed off the walls, and we’re back to horrific fleshcave known as weekday Montoni’s. I don’t know where you would buy a skin colored coffee maker, and I don’t want to know.

Did you find Sunday’s joke amusing? I sure hope so! Because today we get the same joke again, told to a different person. I can’t wait for tomorrow where Wally will enter and they can tell HIM all about Crazy Harry’s crazy salad dressing idea.

We don’t even know if the salad dressing is a bad gift, because we know almost nothing about Donna. For all we know she loves salad dressing, and will be thrilled by this present. She’s as much of a faceless cypher as any Funky Winkerbean background character at this point. The last time she was given any significant speaking role was a single week back in 2014, where she talked to Holly about how comic books ‘aren’t just for boys.’

I jumped into the archives to revisit that particular arc. Maybe it would give some insight into Donna’s personality. And WOW, there is an entire Pandora’s box of unfortunate implications to unpack here. Whatever Donna may seem on the outside, inside she is one messed up chick.

1.) Donna sees the world as men against women, with men as destructive mutants, and women as humanity.

3.) So Donna, as a girl liking video games, saw herself as ‘half-boy’ because of her interests, and identified with Hunter. Hunter was a character who straddled both worlds, half-human, half-mutant. In her analogy, half-woman, half-man.

4.) She saw video games as, ‘the boy’s turf’ and thus felt she needed to hide the female side of herself in order to participate. And saw participating in disguise as a form of battle against the fully mutant male.

5.) Now that she is a wife and mother, she expresses no nerdy interests and has become identical to every doudy Westview hausfrau.

None of this furthers the assertion that comic books are for girls too. They are still ‘boy’s turf’ and a girl must be part male if she wants to enter.

This just feels like a sad little girl’s internalized misogyny manifesting itself in unwarranted gender dysphoria.

A Dressing Down.

Link To Today’s Strip

Oh good. I was getting worried. We hadn’t seen Montoni’s in what feels like FOREVER and I was starting to wonder if Batiuk had forgotten about it, just like he forgot about Wally Jr or Crazy Harry’s children.

I said once that I thought Lisa’s Legacy was the Axis Mundi around which this entire universe turned, and while Dead St Lisa is certainly the spiritual heart, the physical center of the Funkyverse is this stupid little pizza joint. Monk’s Cafe in Seinfeld, or the Central Perk in Friends pale in comparison to this monolith.

As many of you know, Montoni’s is based off of the real restaurant Luigi’s located in Akron, Ohio. So, today’s strip instantly raises the question, does Luigi’s sell salad dressing. After a little digging using that internet Dinkle loathes so much, I found out that yes Luigi’s does offer bottled Italian salad dressing for sale in store. Seven-fifty will buy you this little number.

Really, looking at Luigi’s, they should be insulted by the Montoni’s comparison. Sure, they share a band box, and a counter with stools, but Luigi’s looks like a decent place, with a much more inviting and charming interior. By all the accounts I read, this place is almost always packed, and with a line waiting outside.

They do have weird idiosyncrasies, like not accepting credit cards, instead having an ATM in the back that doesn’t print out cash, but prints out a receipt to use up front. And the monstrosity below is their interpretation of a salad.

Weirdest of all, while scrolling through pictures of Luigi’s looking for salad dressing, I found what must be the inspiration for another old Montoni’s friend. See if you can spot it.

Do you see it yet?

ICE, where’s my car?!

Today’s strip marks one week since we’ve heard so much as a peep from Amicus Breef, and yet he is still there like he did anything at all to help Adeela or anyone else. He doesn’t even get to bluster to the ICE agent, Funky fills that role today. Things ICE should have to show if they are going to arrest Adeela should be Amicus’ wheelhouse, not Funky’s. And yet, ICE backs off at Funky’s incomplete demand (seriously, what was he demanding to see?) while they never wavered when confronted by Amicus, making Funky a far far better immigration lawyer than Amicus, who is literally an immigration lawyer.

Son of a gun, TB remembered the insulated bag! Before we praise him too much for this, it should be pointed out that the insulated bag officially spent more time in ICE custody than Adeela.

Also, Funky still hasn’t gotten his delivery car back.