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.
Truly, Wally is the greatest hero of our time, next to Les, since he stared silently at a curb and had a wheelchair ramp built there.
Sadly, he had to pay for it out of his own paycheck, and Rachel won’t be able to get the treatment she so desperately and obviously needs for her hair cancer.
You know what’s legitimately hilarious about this strip? Billy, who I totally forget existed before this strip, has had more dialogue and a bigger role than Summer has had in the past five years or so of this strip.
Thanks for having me, everyone! The amazing ComicBookHarriet will be taking over tomorrow.
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?
Son of Stuck Funky 
