Montoni's – Page 43 – Son of Stuck Funky

Hell Is Where The Home Is

Know what would have been an even bigger surprise? If she walked in through the window or the wall or the ceiling! That is one ultra-shitty slice of dialog right there, just laughably terrible. As is Cindy’s bizarre (and awfully condescending) wordplay about ladders and her stupid NYC apartment joke. Clunkier than a big bag of hammers and twice as stupid. You’d think that the guy “authoring” this thing would at least have the common decency to wait until he’s fully awake before he starts randomly filling in the word balloons with whatever gibberish comes to mind.

Speaking of things that aren’t good, what the hell is going on with Funky’s head in panel two? What a debacle, it’s all misshapen and stuck on his body in an anatomically impossible way. If you keep staring at it it’s like an optical illusion. And why is Holly holding her hand over her heart like Cindy’s reciting the pledge? What a mess.

“Yeah, things suck for me now that I have to come back to this shitty state where you losers live but I’m still pretty well-off”. LOL wow, subtle as a punch in the face there, TomBat. Poorly drawn, terrible dialog, moronic premise…it’s the Batiukian trifecta of fail.

Change Stinks

Link To Today’s Strip

Well, Cindy, it might not smell so bad if you had the cab drop you off anywhere other than directly in front of that horrible pizza place, like the local dump or the fat rendering plant or the sewage treatment facility. But then again, without that hilarious Montoni’s backdrop her soul-crushing career and personal setbacks wouldn’t be quite as comical. RIGHT???

Speaking of comical, isn’t it funny how the good-looking popular girl from high school is now an old washed-up schlub who feels terrible about herself? And speaking of funny, isn’t it just SO WACKY how Cindy inexplicably visited her ex-husband’s awful pizzeria before she bothered with things like accommodations in the Cleveland area and visiting her new employer? The genius of it is that by the time whatever the premise is here finally unfolds, everyone will have forgotten that it began with a character doing something no sane, rational human being would ever do in “real life”. Welcome to the Funkyverse.

This has “bad sitcom premise” written all over it. I will tell you this: if it turns out that there’s another vacant apartment above Montoni’s that “no one’s using right now”, I am going to let the expletives fly, you can bank on that.

(Question for those of whom were paying attention at the time: what were the circumstances surrounding Funky and Cindy’s break-up? Was it Funky’s boozing or did she realize his dumb ass was holding her back or what? I believe it was semi-mutual, was it not? I sort of remember the original Funky & Cindy premise was “ordinary nobody (Funky) marries high school superstar (Cindy)” but I was ignoring huge chunks of Act II at the time so the rest of it is a blank to me. Fill us in if you remember, please.)

Moore’s the Pity

Link to today’s strip.

ACTUAL STRIP CONTENT COMMENTARY: There isn’t any. “Content,” that is. What we’ve got is a recap post for those poor souls unlucky enough to have missed a month of Tom Batiuk’s brilliance, and are desperate to find out what’s “happened.” To those folks, well, I can only quote the Daleks: “‘Pity’? The word is not in my vocabulary.”

I have to say that the last panel is a perfect summation of all of Funky Winkerbean. It should be the logo on the official site.

BCHASM’S “TL;DR” POST:

In 1941, Preston Sturges made Sullivan’s Travels. If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it, and I won’t spoil it for you. The premise is that Joel McCrea plays a Hollywood director who specializes in frothy, lightweight comedies. However, he longs to make serious dramas that call attention to the ills of the day. The film never outright says it, but Mr. McCrea wants to be known as an artist, and not an entertainer. The lessons he learns, and the conclusion he comes to won’t be surprising to anyone, but I still find it amazing that others in Mr. Sullivan’s shoes seem oblivious to those same lessons.

I wonder, if Tom Batiuk was just starting out on his career as a syndicated cartoonist, and if he took the best strips of the past three years, do you suppose any syndicate would hire him? Or would they show him and his relentlessly gloomy strips to the exit?

What publisher looks at the comics page and says, “We need more depressing comic strips. Buy Funky Winkerbean!”? I can’t imagine such a person. (Well, okay, I can imagine J. Jonah Jameson doing this, because he hates his readers.) Does this mean that Funky Winkerbean still appears in newspapers due to inertia and nostalgia, for a time when we were younger and the strip made us smile wryly?

In the very infrequent times that I step in the Comics Kingdom comments section, Mr. Batiuk has a few defenders, none of whom can point to the positive aspects of his work that they enjoy (it’s well drawn, the characters are realistic, it reminds me of my youth, etc etc). None. The only defenses I’ve seen employed by his fans is that his detractors have never won an award and must be unemployed. Well, I mean, take that! Oh–and there’s also “If you don’t like it, don’t read it!” I’ll wait for you to recover from that mot juste.

I wonder what Tom Batiuk really hopes he’s accomplishing. Does he, J. Jonah Jameson-like, take pleasure in consistently thwarting people’s desire for entertainment, because that damned Spider-Man? Or, conversely, has he simply ceased to care? I know that if I drew a nice paycheck doing something in which I no longer believed, I’d probably keep doing it as long as the bills kept arriving. Everyone has the right to survive, after all. But I’d still take no joy in it.

Of course, a creative person (an artist or an entertainer) might find a way to bring joy back to his creation. As I noted yesterday, when Conan Doyle brought back Sherlock Holmes, he did so in The Hound of The Baskervilles–hardly an FU to the Holmes fans. Would such a thing be possible for Batiuk? I don’t know, but I think it’s far too late for Funky Winkerbean–Batiuk has started down his chosen path, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to admit he made a terrible mistake. No, you will take Les Moore, and you will like Les Moore, and you will find yourself amused and enlightened by Les Moore*. I suppose it’s a strange stance to take, to decide that this is the line that shall not be crossed.

Everyone can see the line, it’s just that no one wants to stand on that side.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

*For amusement, try substituting “horse poop” for “Les Moore” in that sentence. It reads exactly the same!

Speaking of O Brothers, the greatest O brother of all, David O, will be driving the SoSF Funky Cart in the Depression Box Derby starting tomorrow. Thank you for your indulgence, and exit right to Funway!

And The Cradle Will Smirk

Link to today’s strip

BAAHHHH! Oh, don’t mind me, I was just startled by that weird pacifier-sucking baby head floating around in the first panel. Absolutely haunting. As are those snow-covered stairs leading up to that apartment, a real death trap if I’ve ever seen one.

I don’t know about you guys but I never get enough of Boy Lisa MBA cracking wise about the technology these kids today something something what who cares. Oh sorry, I meant to say “Never get. Enough.”, sorry about the mix-up. And that side-smirk Jessica throws him, are women supposed to be smirking like that so soon after giving birth? Or at any other time? And what is that eerie glow in the room? That baby’s head looks strangely translucent today, doesn’t it?

Oh well, it’s been a blast as always but now it’s time to turn things over to the next young firebrand on the SoSF team…the always snark-tastic Beckoning Chasm! Until next time…stay Funky!

Ret-Kahn Time

Link to today’s strip

I couldn’t resist one last awful Khan pun to close out the week. I guess the retcon panel is supposed to imply that Montoni’s managed to somehow survive in the worst commercial space in the entire world even in spite of the fact that the business was owned and operated by a complete imbecile with extremely low expectations. So as I pointed out yesterday, nothing has really changed in that town regardless of the current state of “the economy”…it’s a huge fail-hole populated by depressing, stupid people is all. Knowing how these people think, they probably rub the burn scars they got from eating “pizza on a stick” fondly while reminiscing about “the old days”.

I’d like to believe that Old Man Montoni would likewise be amazed by how unbelievably narcissistic and self-absorbed these idiots are and that he’d be appalled by how they always make everything about themselves. But he did live there too, so I doubt he’d even notice that anything was amiss with these clowns.