Tag: Montoni's

What’s in Your Wallet?

The year’s still young, but apart from Crazy Harry’s Casablanca outing, Cliff Anger’s marriage proposal to Vera, and Dinkle and Becky’s convention trip, Funky Winkerbean‘s been all about…Funky Winkerbean. The Funkman  and/or wife Holly (whose hair color recently changed from blonde to the same gray/beige “greige” as Bull Bushka’s temples)  have figured in 60% of the strips since January 1st. By comparison, Les has only been seen four times and been given exactly one line of dialogue! Be thankful for small favors. In any event, the titular character, love him or hate him, is getting lots of screentime.

We regularly take Batty to task for depicting milieux (mainly the comics and motion picture industries) that reflect his interests but in which he has only vague understanding. Query which is better or worse: TB’s hamfisted Hollywood fantasies, or relateable, mundane, QIRFRL* arcs like “Funky Renews His Driver’s License“?

*Quarter-inch removed from real life

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SosfDavidO here, and Holly isn’t looking so jolly this Christmas season as something related to female human anatomy happens to her in today’s strip that, as a man, I can’t really comment on but it looks terrible.

It seems like an odd choice of topics to deal with when the rest of the Sunday funny pages are probably crowded with New Year’s Eve strips. Batiuk could have probably done a one-panel spread of the Funky crew setting up a balloon drop or something as a way to show most of the crew together again but no, Tombat went with a distressing visual of an older female experiencing hot flashes. Great choice!

In lieu of any well wishing from Funky and Co, here’s wishing everyone a Happy 2017 from the crew of SonofStuckFunky!

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The Further Adventures of Rachel and Funky Talking may be found here.

 

Hahaha, it’s funny because CrossFit and yoga are, like, totally different things! Can’t wait for tomorrow’s strip when maybe Tom will finish stretching this arc like a chunk of saltwater taffy and actually move the plot along.

BTW, go back through this arc and take a look at each day’s strip. Notice how Tom’s rendering of Rachel gets more fluid and less awkward as the week progresses? I find this interesting because it shows me that Tom lets himself get “out of practice” with his characters when they’ve been absent awhile and probably doesn’t take the time to do a little “freshening up” with the ol’ Funky Felt Tip before bringing them back.

Headbangin’ For A Cure

Link to today’s strip.

Aaaaand once again, T-Bats pads out two panels worth of inaction to fill three days, finally getting around to telling us that Rachel and Wally are attending the concert to help him with his PTSD. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a storyteller with a worse sense of pacing.

While I’d say that I’m looking forward to seeing the concert (who would turn down a chance to see Mort ripping up Inna Godda Davida on the slidefart trombone?) there’s little chance of that. The intern who drew Mort’s dementia-induced Independence Day Sunday comic has weekdays off, and we all know how Tom hates drawing his characters doing anything but standing around talking.

School of Rock

Today’s Funky Winkerbean is an example of my least favorite  FW strip. I mean, I’m used to jokeless installments, or days at a time with no plot advancement, or bungled punchlines. But this crap just baffles me – I have no idea where T-Bats is going with this and by the time he meanders around to making a point I probably won’t even care.

So instead, I’m just going to wonder aloud why Tom can’t seem to draw his characters with any kind of consistency. Remember when Rachel was a ginger cutie? Well, I do, you philistines, and you can be reminded of it by looking at the center panel of this three-panel strip. For some reason, Rachel in panels one and three has sag lines around her eyes and an “I-forgot-to-put-my-teef-in-thiff-morning” mouth, but in panel two looks more or less like she used to a few years ago before Tom got sick of drawing her and shoved her to the back of the character rotation.

Funky’s got a new look today, too. Kind of reminds me of what it would look like if Silly Putty copulated with Mr. Potato Head and had the kid raised by Alfred Hitchcock.