Tag: OMEA

Link to today’s strip.

Oh, poor, poor Dinkle.  He can’t find the free pizza, so his breakfast was cheese and candy.  I may just burst into tears over this development.

Three days of this crap and Becky hasn’t had a single line.  Looks like she was in the middle of a conversation when Dinkle just roared in and shut her down.  Of course; Dinkle has to be the center of attention at all times.

And Batiuk’s really going out of his way to deny her any dialogue.  You’d think she’d be the one talking about Dinkle’s Deficiencies, but no, it has to be some random passerby.  Which makes sense in this world–after all, Dinkle is known and beloved by the entire high school band community, past, present and future, so of course they’re all up on his current state.  I hear there’s even a newsletter, with a circulation of several hundred thousand.

What’s really surprising is that no one has taken him in hand and led him to the pizza table.  But…I guess that might imply that there’s someone wiser than he, who knows where the pizza is, and Batiuk cannot have that.  So, I further guess this means that no one has been able to find the pizza table.   Because there can’t be anyone better than Dinkle in anything.  Why, he even schools them in how to whine like a baby!

PS:  The “Rand Curdy?” in the masthead made me think of Monty Python’s “Lemon Curry?”  So there’s an extra laugh.

Link to today’s strip.

Today’s strip was not available for preview, but we all know it’ll be Dinkle droning on about something unimportant, or something else equally unimportant.  And it will involve terrible, underthought wordplay somehow.  And people will smile at Dinkle, like “Oh my gosh, that is so true!”  You have to wonder if Batiuk is equally as bored creating this stuff as we are reading it.  And he’s still got, what, five years to go?  That sure seems like an awful lot of wry rejoinders to carve out.

Why is Dinkle even here?  He’s frickin’ retired.  But Batiuk just loves this character, possibly even more than Les.  Les is the bestselling author he always wanted to be, Darrin is the comic book artist he always wanted to be, John has all the comic books he could possibly want.  All understandable (if a bit off-putting) aspects of Batiuk’s desire that things in the past went differently.

Dinkle, on the other hand, just seems to be this father-figure mentor, a dispenser of wit and wisdom.  (Yes, there should be quote marks around a lot of that.)

Apropos of nothing, I think one of the reasons we see less and less Burchett is that he wasn’t getting considered for other projects.  Publishers would say, “Hey, the latest thing you’ve done is Funky Winkerbean, and the artwork in that is terrible.  No thanks.”  But if he can draw the fictional comic covers here (which admittedly are quite good–artwork-wise), he has something of quality to show to prospective editors.

Link to today’s strip.

It is not, in fact, interesting in the slightest.  Which I guess is par for the course with this strip.

“You know, in the old days, we used to talk about what we’d accomplished with our students.  The routines we designed, the cough awards we won, the general feeling of accomplishment.  Nowadays, though, I thought I’d skip all that and just talk about myself, non-stop.  Did you know that I used to be deaf, but now I just need a hearing aid?  Let me tell you all about that.”

No wonder Mr. Movie Director Man’s Dad looks so downcast in that last panel.  Oh, God, what’s a polite way to get out of having to listen to this boring old fart?  Maybe I should forget the ‘polite’ bit and just belt him in the mouth.  Yeah, just smash his teeth in and hope his jaw breaks.  Imagine Dinkle being unable to use his mouth!  That would be so awesome!  Oh crap, he saw me smile at that image and thinks he’s on a roll…maybe I can vomit up those hot dogs I had for breakfast, make my excuses…