nursing home – Son of Stuck Funky

O Come Let Us Adore Cory

Sigh. Gonna tread lightly today. After all, it’s Christmas. I sense that many if not most of you reading this are boomers like myself, which makes us close in age to Funky and the gang. Hence, we’ve watched Mom and Dad grow old, and maybe one or both have passed away. And many of our first and fondest memories, especially today, are of our parents. So while I have a beef with how Batiuk uses Pa Winkerbean as a prop rather than a person (another character whose name we’re never told), this one does tug a bit.

While it’s impossible to read Pa’s expression here, one thing’s for sure: Army life seems to agree with Cory. He appears relaxed and smiling, his unruly hair now shorn “high and tight” and his Wilma Flintstone necklace presumably replaced by dogtags. I’m wondering if in the coming year he’ll have an arc devoted to his life as a soldier, or if he’ll simply live on as a face on Skype.

Wishing you the happiest of holidays

and the brightest of new years! Stay Funky!

—TFHackett

Father Christmas

In an unusual, abrupt, but very welcome midweek “jump cut”, we see Funky picking up his old man at jokeishly-named “Bedside Manor”. The rarely-seen Pa Winkerbean is one of the most forlorn figures in this strip (and boy, is that saying something). We don’t even know his first name; we only know that he never speaks and that he is fond of a certain Britcom. And if you were to swap that Santa cap hat for a baseball cap, give him some glasses and enlarge the pores on his nose, he’d look just like Ed Crankshaft!

As the stomach turns…

Billythestink called it; where’d the picture atop the telly go? Vanished! And yet Pa Winkerbean’s chin triples in just one panel!

I for one, can’t wait for this week to be over. There’s no stilted dialog to make fun of, no “solo car dates” or any such thing, just a week of slow, boring time-killing!

Casa-Blahca

Oh, wow, way to go, Funky, you made your dad almost smile by putting on some old movie. Either that or he’s passing gas.

Snarkers, it doesn’t take much in the math dept to figure that dear ol “one foot in the grave, one foot on a banana peel.” Winkerbean is, at youngest 66, at oldest, what, in his mid-80s? To say the man is a vegetable is an insult to garden produce; is it possible TB is trying to write about something he doesn’t really understand again?

Maybe I just know a lot of 80+ year old people that can still carry on a conversation, but I don’t think it’s just me.

This is your life, Pa Winkerbean..

Any regrets? Well here comes one now! There’s your fat-ass ungrateful son coming in to spend hours and hours with you staring at a television set, ignoring you like always but at least now he can feel *good* about ignoring you because he’s in the same room as you. Even though it appears death is coming (Why a week-long set up for a character we never see otherwise?) it won’t be soon enough; Batiuk is going to keep your poignant tale on the backburner until at least 2016.