Today’s strip gets a “time travel” tag and a “retcon” tag, because both of those things appear to be happening!
This is lifted wholesale from the Fatty Arbuckle case, by the way. Dashiell Hammett actually was a Pinkerton man in the late 1910s and early 1920s and he did claim to be a part of the Pinkerton team hired by Arbuckle’s defense attorneys, though some historians doubt his involvement was significant if it even happened at all.
How this squares with the timeline of silent film star 1940s icon Butter Brickle Brinkel’s trial is unclear… but all timelines in the Batiukverse are about as clear as an oil spill.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Today’s strip was not available for preview, so we’ll all just have to wait for midnight Eastern time to see how Cliff’s hallucinations of Sam Spade prove Brinkel’s innocence or something.
In lieu of this Brinkel nonsense, let’s hop back 23 years to this very day, the last time a Funky Winkerbean character attempted to solve a celebrity murder.
The summer of 1996 was a busy one in the Batiukverse. Lisa was badly injured when talk radio caused the Westview Post Office bombing and Les was busy working on his first book, the eventual Fallen Star, where a fictional detective (surely not Sam Spade?) solved John Darling’s murder.
The interviewee here is Wade Wallace (he eventually became Funky’s AA sponsor) and Les didn’t even seek him out for this interview. Nope, this exchange happened because Funky, Les, and Lisa caught him running an ongoing scam where he would call and order a pizza, not pick it up, and then fish it out of the Montoni’s dumpster when Funky threw it out… y’know, because he was homeless. In fact, he likely had been homeless for a nearly 2 decades at this point, as his homelessness was used to set up a vanity gag in a December 1979 John Darling strip. Act II was a maudlin mess.
Wallace returned later in the summer to return a publisher’s check to Les, which he found because Les accidentally threw it out like an idiot. Les spends three strips in a dumpster looking for the check, which is a real highlight in Batiukverse history.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Hello, I’m billytheskink and you’re not. Be thankful for that, too, as I’m doing two weeks time writing blog posts about Funky Winkerbean and the endless Butter Brinkel Battle (and you’re not).
Back to the… are we watching the documentary in today’s strip? Is that what these filmstrip borders mean?
The very late Valerie Pond was about to leave the studio that employed Brinkel when she met her untimely death. Is this factoid a red herring or a critical bit of evidence in this pointlessly re-opening case?
All good questions… with answers that I do not actually care about one bit. What I do want answered, though, is how you check guests against an invite list at a masquerade ball.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
I’m a little more shocked that Crazy apparently has all of Butter Brinkel’s films on CD/DVD stacked up in what look to be jewel cases. And he’s just handing these rare treasures to Cindy stacked haphazardly, and not in a box or anything.
It’s pretty hilarious to me that Cindy is swearing Crazy to silence. I mean, why? You would think she’d want to build hype and buzz around her documentary. Is she afraid someone else is going to steal her idea? (Ha.) Or is she afraid this is going to damage her reputation? (Again, ha.)
By far the best/dumbest part of this strip, and the storyline as a whole- these “films” were apparently burned onto a CD or DVD. Meaning somehow Crazy either made digital files of them from the original film, or maybe a VHS release himself, which seems unlikely, or downloaded them off the internet somewhere. Meaning there’s literally no reason he couldn’t just have sent the files to Cindy directly, or barring that, made copies of the discs and mailed the discs to Cindy. I thought for sure it would turn out he somehow had the original theatrical reels of the movies, that would understandably be fragile, which would explain why Cindy had to spend thousands of dollars to fly cross-country. But yet again, I was giving Batiuk too much credit.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
