Morton Winkerbean – Page 4 – Son of Stuck Funky

Supersedure

I guess Mort really does have Alzheimer’s. Or at least some kind of tragic memory disorder. Because no matter his prowess at identifying erogenous zones, I can’t imagine he would be getting much action in school in 1945, when most girls were hoping to make it to the altar untouched, and birth control was not nearly as accessible.

He also knows exactly nothing about bees. Bees don’t have kings. They have drones. Drones have no stingers. Have no fathers. And can only have sex once because the act of impregnating a queen rips out their guts. If they don’t find a virgin queen to go out with a bang, they are driven from the hive in autumn to die of starvation and cold.

But maybe he means he is more like a male Queen Bee. When a Queen Bee is born, it immediately fights in a highlander style battle to the death with all of her virgin queen sisters. A Surviving Queen Bee gets to have sex a few times, but all within a couple days, during swarming. Once her spermatheca is full, she will never have sex again. Instead she becomes the baby factory of a new hive, creating more than a thousand babies a day, every day, until she gets too old.

When she gets old she stops producing as much queen pheromone. She is then replaced by the workers in a procedure known as “supersedure”. Her sterile worker daughters will raise new queen larvae.

When a new queen becomes available, the workers kill the reigning queen by “balling” her, clustering tightly around her. Death through balling is accomplished by surrounding the queen bee and raising her body temperature, causing her to overheat and die.

So death from exposure, disembowelment during sex, sororicide, or being smothered to death by his own progeny; which would you like to see happen to Mort?

Mort-uary Madness

Link to Today’s Comic.

Holly’s thousand yard stare into the middle distance is absolutely haunting today. If she actually managed to look at her son, she would realize that he seems to have de-aged about ten years.

It’s also seemed strange at first that Funky has pulled up a wooden chair rather than sit on the couch with his father. But then again, I wouldn’t want to be sitting on anything contiguous with my father’s loins when discussing carnal matters. Also Funky is probably afraid of getting crabs.

Looks like the rest of the week will be this conversation between two doughy-faced doppelgangers barely differentiated by hair color. Yay. My booze budget will be through the roof.

The Unfair Penitent.

Link to Today’s Comic.

Yes Funky, you are living proof that your father had intercourse with your mother at least once. That is, in fact, how humans reproduce. Not the asexual budding process that you seemed to have assumed for the first sixty years of your life. I would say we need a paternity test to be sure it was Mort who knocked on heaven’s door to bring to earth your doughy face, but given the the family resemblance, we can safely go with Nasus semper certa est.

This is nearly unbearable. However, let us at least attempt to learn and grow from our pain.

According to Webster’s online: “Lothario comes from The Fair Penitent (1703), a tragedy by Nicholas Rowe. In the play, Lothario is a notorious seducer, extremely attractive but beneath his charming exterior a haughty and unfeeling scoundrel. He seduces Calista, an unfaithful wife and later the fair penitent of the title. After the play was published, the character of Lothario became a stock figure in English literature. For example, Samuel Richardson modeled the character of Lovelace on Lothario in his 1748 novel Clarissa. As the character became well known, his name became progressively more generic, and since the 18th century the word lothario has been used for a foppish, unscrupulous rake.”

[insert barf emoji here]

Link to Today’s Comic.

Comic Book Harriet back again. I stayed up late waiting for this strip to drop.

I am now drinking heavily in an attempt to simultaneously write about and forget it.

So Mort’s regeneration has extended from mind, to body, to virility. And now the nursing staff assume he is completely capable of remembering safe sex instructions from his son… and taking Mort’s ability to consent for granted.

You remember when Mort’s Alzheimers was so bad he was reduced to a blankly staring, practically non-verbal, vegetable in a wheelchair that couldn’t even recognize his own son? I really really REALLY wish he’d stayed that way. Because this week is going to be agony.

Maybe He Peed Himself, Like Les

Link To Today’s Strip

In case you were wondering if there was literally any point to the Adeela storyline beyond “hey, my characters are eating Thanksgiving dinner with MUSLIMS, look how progressive and bold my writing is”, today’s strip should prove to you that no, there really wasn’t. This story was somehow dragged out for the past month (at least? I forget) and yet Batiuk somehow still couldn’t finish off this week with anything relevant to it, and instead just has another “old people are idiots/hilarious” “gag”. Batiuk couldn’t have a strip where Adeela thanks her hosts, and then maybe one where Wally cracks wise about how he’s glad he didn’t get a new partner?

I mean, why is Holly talking like this to her guest she just met? “Yeah, my father-in-law’s mind might be going. Or maybe he’s just trying to be funny, staring into space and looking extremely confused and disoriented. Either way, we’re just going to talk about him like he’s not a real person as we leave the room. The men are upstairs reading comics, and we’d better hurry if we’re going to provide them with enough cookies and chocolate milk”.

What is the “trick” even supposed to be here? I really can’t stand this typical Batiuk “wordplay” humor where he just switches two words around, but I really hate it when it’s in the service of mocking senility, which he’s been doing a lot of lately.