Or it might be when you give your oldest childhood friend your treasured copy of “Contrivance Man Vs. The Zanthian Blorks” # 1 so he he can complete his collection even though you could have easily gotten $125 for it on FleaBay. It depends on where you are in Westview at the time. Unless these are characters I am unaware of, this is an extremely rare example of BatYam devoting an entire Sunday strip to random anon-o characters, which doesn’t happen a lot in the Funkyverse. Ditto actual customers in Montoni’s. That certainly doesn’t happen every day either.
I assume that maybe this is an homage to something, maybe those old “Peanuts” strips or something. And it’s harmless enough, I suppose. I guess sometimes FW is just plain deeply weird as opposed to deeply weird and highly annoying like it usually is.
Here we have the quintessential “tell, don’t show” strip as everyone stands around marveling at a display of which we, of course, get barely a glimpse. Instead, we get to look at a quintet of imbeciles.
The real treat is panel three, where Tony speeds out of Montoni’s with a huge ladder, that was apparently just sitting around somewhere. Funky looks puzzled, Wally looks at the floor, and Adeela’s face is almost covered by a crucifix! There, that’ll show her! Based on what we can see, she’s either amused or about to throw up.
Holly’s face is that of sheer terror. Tony’s face seems to say “Ha ha, fooled you!” and I think Holly is about to yell to Funky, “Stop him! That grotesque old gnome is stealing our only ladder!“
But no, he’s just using one of the non-black Santa hats to plop onto the Montoni’s mascot. Giving us, in the process, another unneeded look at his fat ass. Something tells me that hat won’t survive the first gust that comes along, but at least someone actually tried to do something without bemoaning the oncoming failure.
I will say this: the street in that last panel is very well presented. It looks like it’s wet from freshly melted snow, so good on whoever was responsible for that detail.
And that’s it from me for this go-round. Tune in tomorrow when Epicus Doomus sits in the center seat. See you on the Funway!
First off, those are the blackest “Santa hats” I’ve ever seen. I guess the band is going to play at Santa’s wake.
But really, in what way is this a “long story”? Funky appears to be able to tell the entire thing in a single sentence. But they had to make coffee and settle in a booth so he could do this?
This makes me think Funky’s “That’s a long story” is his way of saying “Stop bothering me.” So Adeela went off and made coffee and came back and said “I made coffee” and Funky responded “Oh okay.”
And then he got bored and told the story in the dullest way possible, rather than trying to make it interesting. Hey, if his creator can’t do it, what chance does Funky have?
I have no idea what a “sanctuary pizzeria” is supposed to be. Once again though, we see someone stick their tongue out while doing menial tasks, it looks just as stupid as it did before.
And once again, it’s Montoni’s and Adeela is front and center. Why? Easy.
Adeela is one of two characters in this strip who is to be treated with kid gloves, whose beliefs and thoughts are always to be held in high regard, while everyone else gets kicked in the guts and has to say they like it. She’s here so Batiuk can get awards for “inclusion” and “diversity” and that’s the only reason she’s here at all. Nothing is ever done regarding her character except bringing up her religion, and that’s just so everyone can tiptoe around it.
(Note: I have nothing against “diversity” among characters. But they have to be characters first.)
Well, this strip is never going to win awards, because the person behind the “writing” can never come up with good characters or a convincing scenario that would appeal to anyone. So, yeah, Adeela will be in every Montoni’s strip from now on, because someone has to have an award they’re really desperate to give away, and one of these days that person might read this strip.
There’s one other character who is treated the same way, and that’s Les Moore. If that doesn’t give you incentive to hate Adeela, nothing will.
For a nice change of pace, everyone in today’s strip looks cheerful. As usual, though, there are no customers to be seen. Not even freeloaders like Harry.
What happened to Adeela in panel two? She was right next to Holly, and now she’s been shunted to the rear of the restaurant. And why is she there? I thought Wally and Adeela were managers who worked different shifts, though I don’t care to remember who had the day and who had the night.
I guess Batiuk feels if she’s not a part of every Montoni’s strip going forward, he’s not going to get any of those diversity awards.
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.
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.
In today’s strip, Wally finally gets around to memorializing his daughter Rana’s (R for Rana) gravesite, her having been buried underneath the Montoni’s sidewalk after she died of Ultra Breast Cancer she caught as a child from a landmine in Afghanistan. This all happened off-panel a few years back when Funky was shown working out in the gym. You can tell how moved Wally is by the thought of his late daughter since his face is literally melting off from sadness.
That is probably not what’s happening here, but gosh, what if Batiuk had used the time he wasted this week on exploring Wally’s relationship with his daughter, rather than his relationship with the sidewalk?
In today’s strip, Wally and his tube of toothpaste (he apparently waits until he’s at work to brush his teeth) walk by a construction worker. I wonder if it was Batiuk or Ayers who got really excited at the thought of being able to draw a jackhammer, because clearly someone put a lot of effort into that, and overlooked other things, like how the paint from Wally’s sign is somehow bleeding off the sign onto the curtains of the restaurant. I have a feeling that sign is now going to be shoehorned into every strip possible. It’s the new Becky’s Pinned-Up Sleeve.
In today’s strip, Wally stops to make sure he’s tied his shoes. Or he is stopping to think about what he’s supposed to do when he reaches the street. Or he’s freaking out because he thinks there’s a landmine buried in the street in front of him. Or he’s pausing dramatically just in time for Montoni’s to explode after Becky’s mom planted a bomb because of Wally’s sign. Or who the heck knows, because this is such a bad strip.
Funky Winkerbean made its debut on March 27, 1972. Click here for a countdown of days until the fiftieth anniversary and hopefully Tom Batiuk's retirement.
