Tag: Montoni's

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.

Too Old To Rock & Roll, To Young To Die

In an unusual turn of events, today’s comic finds us for the second consecutive week in Westview, without a hint of comic books or Batiuk’s fanfic cesspool Star*uck Jones. And look who’s back! It’s Rachel, and she needs to leave work a half an hour early so she can go to the Monsters of Metal concert tonight.

Well.

We know that Funky’s going to say “yes.” I mean, the restaurant is so dead today that Rachel’s folding pizza boxes and Funky is noodling around PornHub on his laptop. I just can’t wait for the hilarity of a full week of T-Bats’ Get Of My Lawn ranting about loud music.

 

Flying the friendly skies of Montoni’s

8jtsuooToday’s strip teaches us that there are two things T-Bats knows nothing about. The first is drawing handshakes. Here’s a guy who’s had his doodles in the newspaper for over forty years, and yet whenever two of his characters shake hands, they always look like one of them is blocking a punch from the other. Pro tip, Tom, the fingers wrap around under the wrists.

The other thing of which he’s apparently ignorant is the time it takes to make a decent pizza. If the restaurant is keeping a bunch of pre-made pies in the walk-in, it might be possible to get it through the oven, into a box, and into the sky in under twenty minutes, but that’s not good quality…and they’re trying out an unproven technology to boot. Pretty clever the way Funky has gotten Tony so riled up that this drone thing is practically guaranteed to fail.

I’ve got no idea what the hell Wally is supposed to be doing with that cell phone. He’s been pretty much in his own little world this whole week, so I bet he’s just playing Pokemon Go while those two old fools argue.

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 LATE EDIT: As of this morning, nj.com seems to be having problems displaying today’s strip (at least, none of the machines I’ve used to access it in the past two days show the comic.) So here is an alternate link directly from Comics Kingdom.

“Anyone who has never made a mistake…

…has never tried anything new.” – Einstein

It’s taken four days to come to the point, but in today’s strip, we’ve finally Batiuked around to it: Funky knows the Pizza Drone is going to fail because all of Tony’s other ideas have failed.

It seems to me that T-Bats really didn’t put a lot of time or effort into Funky’s list.

  • Pizza Fax – There are still pizzerias in my area which accept take-out orders via fax. It started back in the bad old days of pay phones and copper landlines, but because some business still inexplicably insist on using the clunky, slow, and low-resolution fax even in an era with reliable and cheap internet, the service lives on.
  • Pizza on a Stick – Popular at heartland State Fairs, apparently. Just not in Westview.
  • Bucket of Pizza…well, okay, I’ll give him that one.

But I’d venture to say that most of Tony’s ideas have worked out pretty well for him. He immigrated to the US, opened a  successful restaurant which provided him with a good living and a decent retirement (after all, he spends his winters in Florida) and – with the exception of taking on a business partner who holds little respect for him – shows evidence of having made some pretty good decisions over the years.

And notice that none of Tony’s failures were on the scale of nearly bankrupting the company by trying to sell shitty Ohio pizza in New York City, Funky.