Tag: Rachel

Headbangin’ For A Cure

Link to today’s strip.

Aaaaand once again, T-Bats pads out two panels worth of inaction to fill three days, finally getting around to telling us that Rachel and Wally are attending the concert to help him with his PTSD. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a storyteller with a worse sense of pacing.

While I’d say that I’m looking forward to seeing the concert (who would turn down a chance to see Mort ripping up Inna Godda Davida on the slidefart trombone?) there’s little chance of that. The intern who drew Mort’s dementia-induced Independence Day Sunday comic has weekdays off, and we all know how Tom hates drawing his characters doing anything but standing around talking.

School of Rock

Today’s Funky Winkerbean is an example of my least favorite  FW strip. I mean, I’m used to jokeless installments, or days at a time with no plot advancement, or bungled punchlines. But this crap just baffles me – I have no idea where T-Bats is going with this and by the time he meanders around to making a point I probably won’t even care.

So instead, I’m just going to wonder aloud why Tom can’t seem to draw his characters with any kind of consistency. Remember when Rachel was a ginger cutie? Well, I do, you philistines, and you can be reminded of it by looking at the center panel of this three-panel strip. For some reason, Rachel in panels one and three has sag lines around her eyes and an “I-forgot-to-put-my-teef-in-thiff-morning” mouth, but in panel two looks more or less like she used to a few years ago before Tom got sick of drawing her and shoved her to the back of the character rotation.

Funky’s got a new look today, too. Kind of reminds me of what it would look like if Silly Putty copulated with Mr. Potato Head and had the kid raised by Alfred Hitchcock.

Too Old To Rock & Roll, To Young To Die

In an unusual turn of events, today’s comic finds us for the second consecutive week in Westview, without a hint of comic books or Batiuk’s fanfic cesspool Star*uck Jones. And look who’s back! It’s Rachel, and she needs to leave work a half an hour early so she can go to the Monsters of Metal concert tonight.

Well.

We know that Funky’s going to say “yes.” I mean, the restaurant is so dead today that Rachel’s folding pizza boxes and Funky is noodling around PornHub on his laptop. I just can’t wait for the hilarity of a full week of T-Bats’ Get Of My Lawn ranting about loud music.

 

And With That Last Panel, The Arc Ended

Link To Today’s Strip

Yikes, talk about lackadaisical. Maybe he could end every arc this way…”and that was how Lisa died”…”and that was how Funky traveled back in time”…”that’s why Les is such a smug dick all the time”…”and that’s why Owen always wears that hat now”…you get the idea. If Funky had just said, “oh, we won a holiday bowling tournament that year” on Monday, all of whatever this was supposed to be could have been neatly avoided and replaced with, oh I don’t know, something about pizza or comic books or an immense sense of personal loss or something fun like that. You know, the typical meaty FW fare.

It’s funny to me how he’ll use FW to promote CS but the CS strips merely used FW characters as backdrops. If you don’t read CS regularly you have no idea who that lady is or why her bad bowling is supposed to be funny. None of the FW characters seemed to recognize their psychotic old school bus driver either, which is pretty weird, as he was supposedly so “iconic” he got his own spin-off strip. The main thing I got out of it was realizing how old Rachel actually is, how old and fat Funky got and how Bull looks pretty much the same as he did back then which is a huge accomplishment in the Funkyverse. So kudos to him.