Tag: Owen

Goodness Gracious

Lower your expectations! I’m left to swim in BeckoningChasm’s wake after his most excellent guest hosting duties. A tip of the Funky Fedora to you, BC!

Now, onto the snark.

Quick, Les, take a seat with the rest of the class so we can pick *someone* we know out of this sea of unknown students. Cody, Owen, pressed into service as one of the only two students we’ve been introduced to in this gaggle of malformed, floating heads, does his best with the predictable but bad news he’s been given in today’s strip.

Hoo-boy. I hope this strip doesn’t indicate we’re in for a cycle (recycle) of “The Scapegoats are terrible” knee-slappers. That could make for a long snark fortnight for yours truly!

“BC”=”Before Cthulhu”

Today’s strip

NB:  BC does not stand for BeckoningChasm!  Let’s just swat those rumors down right now!

Now, as for today’s thing…whoa, Les is straying from the Moby Dick/“Snows of Kilimanjaro” syllabus!  Let’s be generous and say he’s only brought this particular work into his class in order to point out its shortcomings compared to those two works…”bullying it,” in a sense.    Now, I confess my knowledge of ancient texts is pretty weak, so can anyone tell me what this work might be?  The Satyricon, maybe?

Given the sorry state of the Westview educational system, Owen’s answer seems to be a genuine one, not borne of his own personal ignorance.  There’s no evidence of a typical religious presence in Westview, although I seem to recall a priest performing Les and Cayla’s wedding.  So Jesus Christ (no matter your personal view of him) would not be an item that anyone in this benighted town would discuss openly, and hence the meaning of “BC” wouldn’t be common knowledge among the community’s teens.  (It’s not BeckoningChasm so stop asking!)

In fact, seeing the evidence of how the characters in this comic regard the endless and instant hostility of the cosmic fate that continuously observes and judges them, I suspect that the only gods known in Westview are those theorized by H.P. Lovecraft…

–okay, that was a jokey aside, but in all seriousness, it suddenly makes the undercurrents behind this strip much more interesting.   Did Lisa really die of cancer?  Did Susan Smith really leave town?  Last year’s high school class…have they really gone on to college somewhere?  Where are Jinx, Chien, Crazy Harry’s kids, Rachel’s son, Wally’s son?   Why aren’t they mentioned at all?  Did you notice we didn’t have a “senior prom/graduation day” arc this year–what happened to last year’s entire junior class?  And maybe Khan isn’t “Khan,” but the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred?  Maybe “Citizen Khan’s” isn’t a deli at all!

Now I really want to see a Sunday strip showing the Westview folks attending mass.  I want to see a priest facing the crowd and saying, “Okay folks, repeat after me–Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

*cough*  Well, rather than end on that dark thought, let’s take a closer look at panel two, where Les is at his most punchable.

If he swallows him, he'll make a BLEAH face and spit him out.

There you go.  As our friends at Mad magazine once said, “Suitable for framing or wrapping fish!”

(Credit Where It’s Due Department: image of Cthulhu created by someone who calls himself Somniturne1)

I thank you for your indulgence, fellow snarkers!  As Fearless Leader says, stay Funky!

The Business End

Today’s strip

Naturally, anything called “Merchant’s Day” would have to feature the only two functioning businesses in Westview.  What I don’t get is how cavalierly John runs his comic book shop.  Here are a couple of potential customers who, yeah, might not read comics themselves, but might know people who do and thus might buy gifts, and John can’t even be bothered to look up.  Isn’t he perpetually behind in his rent payments?  Isn’t the entire town continually strapped for cash?  Does he not want to even try to make money?  Look at the expression on his face:  it just screams “Get out of my shop.  Get out of my shop.  If I don’t look up maybe they’ll just go away.”

Besides, given the fact that John frequently proselytises everyone about the art and value of comic books, you would think in his world there wouldn’t be anyone who wasn’t a potential fan, just waiting to have him open up a whole new world for them.  Yet here he doesn’t even try.

Yes, I do know that the words “try” and “attempt” and “strive” and so forth are considered curse words in Westview, but the continual avoidance of those activities is just so.  Damned.  Wearying.

…come to think of it, this particular episode seems to sum up Funky Winkerbean in a nutshell.  “Look…here’s something.”  Lady, if you only knew how wrong you are.  “Never mind…this isn’t a store.”  You know what else it isn’t?  A joke.  The joke is right here, and it’s on us.

Revenge of the Rats

Today’s strip

Above the post update:

Well, I’ve been wrong before.  And I’ll be wrong again.   Farewell, Jim, and godspeed.

Original post:

Friday’s strip was not available for preview, so while we wait I’m going to point out a couple of things.

1-unless something happens today, this week featured a pretty unique storyline:  no one smirked.  Let me repeat that: not one single character, in four days of a storyline wherein the cruelty of fate, taxpayers and school boards was loudly and repeated lamented, smirked.  That has to be some kind of record.  Of course, as noted, no one has seen today’s strip, it could be a regular smirkageddon.

2-this strip continues the trend that’s been going on for months now in which nothing ever gets resolved, except through exhausted defeat.  I’m trying to think of the last time any of these characters took positive action in attempt to combat the entropy that closes around them like a strangling cloak.  All I can remember is Owen and Cody building a robot…which was almost immediately destroyed.  Most of the rest of these arcs have people determinedly doing nothing in order to stymie their opponents (the Frankie story).  The last time I wrote in these pages, Les, Cayla and Funky sat down to have lunch.  They never even got to eat.  (Someone might mention the Dinkle Anniversary party as a counter-example.  I’d point out that we never saw Harry do any of the things he was supposedly doing to prepare, other than talk to Funky.  Instead, it was talk, talk, pun, talk, complain, talk, pun, talk, done.)

It’s one thing to have bad jokes, or bad insights.  At least those are attempts.  Having nothing, just having characters state their troubles, then give up and wander away…even badness is more “something” than that.  The lack of anything in this strip is what makes it so hard to read, and so exhausting to try and come up with anything to say about it.

Maybe that’s Tom Batiuk’s plan all along; he hopes to starve criticism not by feeding it poison, or by not feeding it at all, but by feeding it those chemicals that bond to the digestive system and make it impossible for nourishment to be absorbed.  Like…like that’s how they killed the Tribbles in that Star Trek show!  If that’s his grand plan, I’d love to see the end result he hopes for:  a comic strip free of critics so he can do…what, exactly?

Let’s hope today’s entry proves me wrong and is the first shot across the bow of a renewed Funky Winkerbean.  I am not, of course, holding my breath. If you are, please let me know your record.

Not Cool

Link to today’s strip

I know of something that could possibly act as a “cooler”. It’s called a “refrigerator”. It’s like a cooler, only bigger. Seriously though, nice try at one of those “these damned kids today” strips but no, I’m fairly certain that young people today are quite familiar with glass, what with their beer and bongs and meth pipes and all. This one reads like it probably should have been left in the outtake pile or maybe the blooper reel. Although I always love how he draws that creepy Komix Korner staircase, though, one of my favorite things in the strip in fact. It’s like a portal leading to some insane geek hell dimension.

And isn’t there probably a cooler full of drinks right downstairs in Montoni’s anyway? I take back that “nice try”.