Montoni's – Page 43 – Son of Stuck Funky

Monday, March 10th

Greetings, folks, BChasm back for another round. I found myself a bit startled when Epicus mentioned that I was next in line, and as the panic set in, I wondered if I could schedule some emergency surgery, or join the army, or something…but no, duty calls, and the Moon is a harsh mistress.

Today’s episode was not available for preview, so we can all speculate until the wondrous onset of midnight, when all will be revealed. Will it be more of Cindy’s woeful career, or another quest for an issue of Starbuck Jones, or will both these recent plotlines be abandoned to bring us something else? One thing you can say about Funky Winkerbean is that it’s really pretty unpredictable.

It’s just unpredictable in a really, really lame way. What way beckons from the pallid rim of midnight?

Let’s find out together.

UPDATE: And it looks like those who had Cory in the Dead Pool are about to get their payoff! Maybe. Whatever resolution this new arc will have, it will be better in the imagining than in the actual.

My Contrivance Sense Is Tingling

Link To Today’s Strip

The more we see of Cindy, the older and uglier she gets. I wonder why that is? Oh, right….the hackery. Anyhoo, you can practically hear the phony canned laughter behind this trope-laden piece of crap. Old 1980’s sitcoms would have rejected this premise as being too stupid. ABC’s former longtime weekend anchor can’t score herself a hotel room in Cleveland in March? Surely there must be at least one, right? And get a load of Batom, nearly brushing up against something that could possibly be construed as an “adult situation” just like in one of them there Woodsy Allen movies they sometimes have on the cable! Why you can almost feel the cackling…I mean crackling sexual tension as these two rapidly aging former lovers engage in some playful wry banter and…..

Oh, sorry, I had to take a brief break to throw up. What was I saying? Oh yeah, the way he’s already f*cking up her hair from panel to panel…LOL. I can’t believe I’m even saying this but maybe having Cindy rent a mysterious new apartment above Montoni’s would have been a BETTER premise than this one. I mean seriously, Cindy moves in with the Winkerbeans and hilarity ensues…duh. AND another comic book reference too! Maybe Funky should try “common sense” first to see how he likes it, THEN graduate to “spidey sense”. This arc has rapidly turned into one of the biggest debacles of the year, if not the entire decade.

Hell Is Where The Home Is

Link To Today’s Strip

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!