SosfdavidO here, and ooh, look who’s being soooo coy in today’s strip not showing the face of the random weirdo wandering around the high school football game by himself.
Are we readers waiting for a payoff? Because unless he turns around to reveal Hannibal Lecter it’s going to be a letdown. But let’s keep padding this story out because we’ve got a whole damn week to fill
SosfDavidO here! And we’re kicking off this week’s arc with a mysterious stranger! Who could it be in today’s teaser? More importantly, does anyone care? It could be any one of the 21,836 characters that have popped into Westview in the past 40+ years or it could be a retconned character pulled out of thin air. Les’s brother Stanley! Sure, why not?
Making their first appearance since January 2016 are Summer and Keisha. I’m sure the sounds of one-on-one basketball right outside his door do wonders for the terminally distractable Les’ writing process.
If “see you later, alligator” is good enough for Cliff and Vera, I don’t know why Les and Cayla feel the need to “update” it. Let’s not get started on Les calling his black wife a monkey. Instead let’s examine Batiuk’s tendency to take a feeble but acceptable joke and proceed to stretch it ’til it breaks. He could have left it at “they’re working on an update blah blah blah.” But, because it’s Sunday and he still has two panels to fill, he’s gotta drop in the stuff about going “viral” and “beta testing”.
It’s all well and good that Batiuk recruited a couple comic book pros to draw Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean. But the draughtsmanship, maddeningly inconsistent as it is, isn’t the problem with these strips, it’s the writing.
SoSfDavidO here! Puns are supposed to make you groan. Is there even a pun in today’s strip?
This is just awful writing. This, what you’re reading, and today’s Winkerbean. How many story arcs are still being juggled and we get a throw-away strip like this? Funky looks bored as hell but he’s probably long-since fused with the couch and couldn’t leave if he wanted to.
Bull can’t even manage to look pleased by the Big Reveal in today’s strip. If the artist was looking for stunned, it came across as only slightly interested instead.
Son of Stuck Funky 
