Tag Archives: uninteresting stupid anecdotes

What’s in your head, in your head? Ruby, Ruby, Ruby-y-y-y

I’d argue that today’s strip is the product of an AI tasked with generating images for the word “wistful”… but that’s an insult to artificial intelligence and I don’t want to be responsible for unleashing Skynet. This is just completely sad, but in the stupidest way.

Mindy is the one that really punches up the stupidity here. First, “when” Ruby retires is essentially right now, it doesn’t need to be discussed as if it is well in the future. Second, Mindy also draws a paycheck from Atomik Komix… so does she dramatically underestimate the financial resources it takes to travel extensively or does Chester really pay that well?

And if Chester pays that well, why can’t he spend some money on an office that doesn’t look like a dungeon crawl game being played on a vintage grayscale Macintosh? Maybe everything in the office is made of stone. So that’s why they called him “Chester the Chiseler”!

94 Comments

Filed under Son of Stuck Funky

Burning Man

One bad turn deserves another, I suppose. Today’s strip sees Les take his revenge on Funky for two strips’ worth of Crankshaft schtick with some ‘Shaft-level quote muddle-ment of his own. Where did you pull this piece of unwisdom from, Les, I Chong?

The master says: Piles of excrement comes out of both ends of Les, but only one pile can can be flushed.

53 Comments

Filed under Son of Stuck Funky

Philholtian Legend

How gullible is this woman?

Today’s strip uses a real location to tell a cock-and-bull story. This “cartoonist hangout” is the Palm Restaurant in New York City, a real-life location. As commenter Gerard Ploude pointed out in the comments, Tom Batiuk announced this place would be part of an upcoming story. The entrance we see Phil go into is identical to the photo Batiuk showed on his blog:

The original Palm in Manhattan has since moved a few blocks, and now has locations in about a dozen major cities. They also have a tradition of artists (not just cartoonists) drawing their works on the wall instead of paying the tab. Sadly, the original location has since been remodeled, and the drawings are gone. I hope they archived them somehow.

Kitch believes this ridiculous yarn, and Phil leans back in his chair to smirk about it. This is one of Funky Winkerbean‘s most infuriating tropes: a character congratulating himself for his wit, when he hasn’t done anything remotely witty. I say “him” and “he” because it’s always a man. Women aren’t allowed to be witty in the Funkyverse.

27 Comments

Filed under Son of Stuck Funky

Modest Louse

I neither understand nor care what Les is droning on about in today’s strip, though I do find it hard to believe any student would invite him to a graduation party… including this one. Les was invited to Montoni’s alcohol-free graduation party in ’98 (not by a student), it was about as well-attended as you would expect.

If the party is alcohol-free, then why are they switching from present to past tense mid-sentence?

Cayla, for her part, is a strange combination of scandalized by a swimsuit style that has been fairly common and quite popular for half a century and nonchalant about seeing her younger self galavanting merrily beside the (time?) pool.

42 Comments

Filed under Son of Stuck Funky

Licorice Pizza

OK, I’ll start positive today. Here’s something I like about today’s strip, Ayers uses bubble panel borders correctly, to denote a memory of dream sequence. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like much, but coming from TB’s pencil for decades it meant “present day in-strip setting change”, a maddening misinterpretation of longstanding comic art language.

And now, for everything else…

A pizza spinning on your turntable used to be a sort of shorthand for “cool”, in that it signified you were someone cool enough to have just a had a party wild and “crazy” enough that some nut tried to play a pizza and everyone was having too much “fun” to notice (see this well-known scene from Sixteen Candles, for example). However, a pizza spinning on your turntable when you are alone in your own room with your headphones on is not “cool”. Silly, whimsical, weird, crazy? Sure… but not cool. One could even describe Crazy’s memory as rather sad, given the contrast between him listening to his pizza alone in his room compared to the sight of a pizza on a turntable signifying a really good time shared by friends.

Furthermore, was the music produced by the pits of a pizza ever “cool”? Since every Youtube video of someone “playing” a pizza on a turntable is just a gag to dub in “That’s Amore”, I am forced to assume that it actually sounds like an EP for a British New Wave band. In that case, yes, it actually was cool.

36 Comments

Filed under Son of Stuck Funky