Once again, Tom Batiuk goes with “tell, don’t show” and graces us with a wall of text about a (fictional, in-universe) character we’ve never even seen and care nothing about. In a strip well-known for having stupid character names, The Amazing Mister Sponge is really up there in the top ten. Were I a super-villain (and I’m not saying I’m not), if one of my henchmen called out, “Hey boss, the Amazing Mister Sponge is after us!” why, I’d probably collapse from laughter and be unable to launch my scheme. So maybe he does have a super-power. I imagine it loses its effectiveness the second or third time, though, and starts being annoying. “Why can’t one of the good heroes try and stop me? This is embarrassing…”
It really makes me curious about how Mr. Batiuk decides on a storyline, what factors come to play that cause him to deliver…this. Don’t you love how the episode ends on a cliff-hanger, the idea being that we’re all on pins and needles to know what Pete’s scheme is? In reality, we know it’s going to be a crashing bore, except “crashing” implies something happening. If this is Tom Batiuk’s depiction of the pressures of being a cartoonist, there’s a much better solution than wasting space: retire. Sure, you can spin your wheels until the glorious 50th, but here’s a cold hard truth. No one is going to buy The Complete Funky Winkerbean: 2010-2015. No one.
I guess one thing is that Mr. Batiuk seems to have lost any enthusiasm for drawing. That Starbuck Jones face on the wall, for example, is a terrible drawing. If that’s an example of Pete’s artwork, no wonder we’ve never seen this Sponge-Head.
As for the “real” characters depicted here, Darin is a bland smiling blank–the kind of image you’d see if TV stations still used “test patterns.” And Pete has clearly been rejected from The Muppet Show for “looking too lifeless.”
Son of Stuck Funky 