Tag Archives: park bench

by | March 23, 2020 · 10:30 pm

Point, Les

Link To Today’s Thing

Man, that post title just wrote itself. I’ve been waiting years to use that one. Anyhow, Lisa’s sainted ashes (sigh) are still the main focus, as Mason (who just promised to respect Les’ Lisa boundaries a few months ago) is poking and prodding him to give up the EXACT SPOT where Les dumped Her ashes, as if anyone would actually care. It’s so weird when Les isn’t the sickest and most morally repugnant character in a story, you know? I mean how long is this movie going to be? How many downer endings will it have? Ten? Twenty? Does it start when they meet? When they get married? I KNOW I definitely don’t want to relive THAT wedding (look it up). Is there an intermission after she dies? Sigh.

Coming soon: “Lisa’s Story Part II…The Re-Lisaning”, the follow-up to Mason Jarre’s 2020 smash hit film. Watch as Les blithely ignores his new still-living wife…again. With forty-three hours of never-before-seen “behind the scenes” footage.

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by | October 25, 2019 · 10:30 pm

Bench+Leaves=Double Symbolism

There are so many times I’d love to have an honest talk with Batiuk about this strip. Like this week’s story. Are we honestly supposed to feel bad for Les here? “Aw, poor Les, he got peer pressured into doing something he doesn’t want to do.”, or something? I mean, he’s an adult, if he’s already regretting it, he can say “Actually Mason, I don’t want to do this.”. Or he could, once again, act like an adult and accept it and make the best of it. Batiuk so often goes for “deep and conflicted” but hits “in need of intensive therapy” instead. I wonder how soon Les is going to hallucinate a talking blue cat?

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by | March 8, 2017 · 10:30 pm

Gless Joe Vs. Bald Bull

Our old friend the park bench returns from a long absence in today’s strip. A pity that these two are disturbing its peace. Or were disturbing its peace, rather, as Les and Durwood are STILL flipping through old photographs.

You could probably argue that they are flipping through new photographs staged to look like old photographs, as TB redraws all of these flashback panels, but then you’d be debating the semantics of Funky Winkerbean, which (speaking from experience) won’t get you invited to many parties.

Anyways, today’s flashback panels pretty accurately replicate the original strip from August 1993 (The Westview High School class of 1992 1988 had a 5 year reunion? Weird.)

TB has, of course, recapped Les punching out Bull at the five year reunion before, though not with these same panels. It was part of Les’ reminiscence of his time with then-fiancé Lisa after she was injured in the 1996 Westview post office bombing. This was less than three years after the famous punch, by the way. Again, it was a fairly faithful reproduction of the original strip except that Lisa gets a snarkier 3rd panel line in the flashback.

Oh, and if you are wondering what awful thing Bull said about Lisa to deserve being punched… Uh, I’m not sure, honestly. At the most, he was being patronizing to Les while making a mildly unwelcome but factual statement about Lisa. Anyways, Bull was remarkably cool about the whole thing, in an early example of the common Act II trope where Les’ haplessness was played to make others look bad instead of for humor.

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by | June 25, 2016 · 10:00 pm

Achilles’ Last Stand

You know who really does deserve a Pulitzer? Whoever came up with that blurb “Funky Winkerbean is a reality-based comic strip that depicts contemporary issues affecting young adults in a thought-provoking and sensitive manner.” That is, if there’s a Pulitzer Price for bullshit.

Epicus Doomus
June 24, 2016 at 10:29 pm
And of course we all know [Mason wanting to add an “e” to his last name] will never, ever be mentioned again…

Each time TB squanders ink and newsprint on a strip where Les and Funky go running, it’s the same question: why does Funky do it if he derives no benefit? Les appears to be reasonably fit (at least compared to Funky). He’s not spraying plewds everywhere (“plewds“, by the way, are the droplets of sweat we see in cartoons). Although that might be attributed to Les’ sweatband, which he wears so tightly that it appears to be deforming his skull.

On the heels of bringing you the last couple weeks of snark, yours truly feels like Funky does after one of his runs! Fortunately, billytheskink will be tagging in to go mano a mano with the mind of Batiuk for the next fortnight. Thanks as always for reading, commenting, and sharing the pain.

 

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by | September 1, 2015 · 9:29 am

Stropp it to me

It looks like Tombat is getting a little lazy with this week’s strips, judging by the looks of Today’s strip. Is he just going to stare at things all day? Funky’s dad shows more life lately than Les does. I’m not even sure Tombat is creating new content, it’s like he’s just placing existing panels next to each other.


Uh oh! Spoilers for later this week!

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by | March 21, 2015 · 11:40 pm

No Fidelity

Link To Today’s Strip

Har har har, I get it. Add “music hipsters” to the list of modern-day whackadoodles. Or maybe it’s a fond homage to those annoying plastic converter things you used to need to play 45 RPM records. Who knows and frankly, who cares? All things considered, this isn’t the worst FW gag I’ve ever seen but DAMN is that gigantic single panel jarring, it’s just huge.

Note the park bench, as it isn’t just any old park bench…it’s a very special park bench. I like how the seasons change in Westview, just instantaneously all at once. That would be so cool in real life, you know?

One final beady-eyed nitpicky point: the floating music notes should be coming from the headphones, shouldn’t they?

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by | February 11, 2015 · 10:30 pm

Where the sidewalk should have ended

Today’s strip sees Mason and Cindy continuing the evening stroll they began yesterday, traversing Westview’s snow-covered central square park with its trademark gazebo. Despite the implications from the past couple of strips that he has a thing for Cindy, Mason reveals his real interest is not her but the town of Westview itself. Yes, Westview is definitely a change from Hollywood’s economic opportunity and operating post office.

With Westview reminding him so much of his hometown, one can only guess where Mason grew up. Centralia, Pennsylvania is a good bet.

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