Hello! This is the commenter known as Banana Jr. 6000. I take my handle from the wise-cracking but philosophical desktop computer from Bloom County. Having recently completed the monumental task of finding Spaceman Spiff among the cosmos, I will now take on an even greater challenge: helping to make Funky Winkerbean fun and interesting to read every day.
I’m delighted to join such a strong team, where everyone brings their own areas of expertise to the discussion. My background is in writing, so that’s probably what I’ll talk about the most. And today’s strip gives me a lot to talk about!
The “Dibbs Gallery” marquee tells us this is Kitch Swoon, who was last seen at Atomik Komix handing out nice-sized checks. Apparently she’s hired the new-look Summer as an assistant. It also looks like Tom Batiuk went through a Roy Lichtenstein phase about a year ago, because this is his second mention in a month. The wedding sign Darin made was a blatant copy of Lichtenstein’s famous work “Crying Girl.”

How on earth is a visit to Atomik Komix going to “revisit the source material” for Roy Lichtenstein prints? Roy Lichtenstein was a real person, who died in 1997. Is she flat-out admitting that Atomik Komix and Dibbs Gallery’s real business is art forgery?
That would… make a lot of sense, actually. There’s no way those lame, derivative, preachy comic books are producing the kind of money we’ve seen these people throw around. And Westview is the perfect place for such an operation. It’s a town full of comics-obsessed suckers, and a police force that’s willing to cover up certain things.
Today’s strip should have been deleted. We don’t need a strip to tell us what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s strip. Just start the scene already. Batiuk did this correctly the first time Kitch Swoon appeared in 2019:

That strip also had a cameo from Holtron, the star of last week’s pointless Act I flashback. As several commenters remembered, Holtron was repurposed as a prop for the Starbuck Jones movie, and later given to the Atomik Komix team for free. Now this valuable prop from a multi-gazillion dollar movie is just sitting around an office, as a conversation piece. That’s a bit of conspicuous consumption, don’t you think?
Nice “Pineapple” computer, buddy. Get out of here with that crap.