Vera Nash – Page 2 – Son of Stuck Funky

The Gangrene’s All Here

Another dull entry…which would be a great name for this strip.

Imagine this particular episode presented with no dialogue–it’s just people standing around with a couple of handshakes thrown in. Without the dialogue, it’s dull, but you have the possibility that adding dialogue might make it into something that could be interesting, possibly, depending on what these people say. But in Funky Winkerbean, if you add the dialogue back, yes, it changes…but not for the better. You end up with something no one could care about at all, except someone trying to reach a 50th anniversary on a project in which he has lost all interest. And it shows. Boring people saying boring things in a boring way.

I’m sure the idea is that Funky Winkerbean fans (those mythical creatures) would look upon this and shout, “Yes! Vera and Cliff are back! This is great!” The problem–probably the main problem with the whole strip–is that in the real world, enthusiasm for characters comes from caring about them, because those characters are interesting, or do interesting things. Here, these characters are uninteresting, do nothing but stand around, and we are given no reason to care about them at all. This is because Tom Batiuk cannot create interesting characters, because he cannot care about anyone other than his various avatars (mainly Les, but also Dullard, John Howard and Dinkle).

Remember that time you were in a restaurant and you asked the table next to you if you could borrow their salt shaker, and you got an assful of stories that bored you to tears, but you needed that salt? Say hello to Vera and Cliff.

While I can’t say much for his taste in clothing, it’s nice that Cliff and Vera dress up a bit when they’re going visiting.

Can the Living Marry the Dead?

Link to today’s strip.

Apologies first off–I don’t know how Fearless Leader embeds these sideways things into normalcy, so you’ll have to suffer with strained necks for the nonce. Unless I reach beyond myself, and give it a try–

–hey, that worked! I think!

And check out that cast. Isaac The Robot (defaming Dr. Asimov’s memory), Moon Mile Meek (or whatever that bowel movement was named), the Space Cadets, the Black Ghost, the Amazing Mister Sp0nge and the (*Cough* undead) Absorbing Junior, and the latest ass-pull, the Blue Astra. I’d love to see a follow-up strip showing what gifts they brought (“a gift certificate for $10 at Best Buy? Who the hell–“) but follow-ups are definitely not this strip’s strong suit.

–Case in point. So, the Starbuck Jones movie world premier has come and gone, and we are no wiser as to how it fell on the world. Was it a hit? Did people enjoy it? Were the fanboys irate over how it changed canon? Did it rescue the Valentine Theater from foreclosure, and did it spring the careers of Mason, Marianne, Cindy, Cliff, Vera, Pete and Dullard into the stratosphere? Did it circle the drain on the way through the toilet? Is Cable Movie Entertainment now on the level of Marvel Studios, or are they instead competing with The Asylum for most horrible crap ever?

As the Residents once sang on their album Not Available, these are “Never Known Questions.” Because the only answer here is another question, “Who cares?” And the answer to that is, “Not Tom Batiuk.”

My theory on this is actually quite simple, and obvious once you hear it. The success or failure of the Starbuck Jones movie was something that–had nothing to do with Les Moore.

Think on that for a moment. Has this strip ever featured a creative, successful idea that didn’t involve Les Moore? I certainly can’t think of any. For the most part, it’s been “I need help, oh thank you for helping, [blink] oh it’s the next day and everything worked.” (I’m thinking of Pete Movement and his battles with the…sigh…Lord of the Late.)

The message of the strip has been pretty constant in Act III–Les Moore is the only person who can be allowed a creative success in the world. Everyone else succeeds only because they betrayed their ideals and settled for hackery. No one else has lost a wife…no one else wrote a best-selling book detailing how he suffered when losing his wife…no one else wrote about how he just damn kept on, after losing his wife…and found a woman willing to be doormat. That last bit is a little troubling, but, you know…Les Moore was once married to a woman, who…died.

It makes me fear what comes next week.

Scenes from a Mirage

Link to today’s strip.

Now, I want an honest counting of hands, here. How many of you thought we’d see something/anything of the Starbuck Jones movie during this, the arc in which the long gestating film finally had its premier? Think of all the things riding on this film’s success–not just careers for Mason Jarre, Pete Robots, Darrin Undesireable and Cliff Anger, but the culmination of desire for a million fan-boys, the affirmation of belief for thousands of cellar-dwellars, and the salvation of the Valentine Theater (and a poorly-performing comic strip associated with same). Surely such an expanse would provide proof of its benevolent effect. Right?

Don’t be ashamed; after all, this was something that was fed to us for several years now as the event of the decade, as the measure by which this strip would ensure its place in the pantheon.

So, hands? Well, there’s one. Two. Oh…oh…oh, dear. That’s far too many hands than I thought I would see.

In my host duties here, I have tried to focus on the content of the strip and NOT on Tom Batiuk, the person. I’ve never met, and don’t know Tom Batiuk; from all reports, he’s a genuinely nice guy, open and friendly, and I try to keep that foremost when I write here. And to be honest, I wish him well.

But I’m going to violate that rule here. Because Tom Batiuk cannot tell a story.

He must know this–aside from Les Moore, the characters he truly cares about (Starbuck Jones and The Amazing Mister Sponge) have never had a single panel dedicated to showcasing their, cough, awesomeness. Sure, we’ve had lots and lots of covers, but nothing in the way of story. Story being the key to why a character makes an impression. Comic book cover? Anyone who ever read a comic book ever knows that comic book covers are designed to lie you into buying them. So they don’t count.

It’s much, much easier to ease back down off that plane, and shift the focus to a bunch of has-beens getting married. Everyone likes marriages, right? And that’s way more, like, focused than some movie thing that’ll be, like, forgotten in two years. But marriage, man, that’s like eternal! Until the next reboot. But I’ve heard Les Moore has a new book! Gotta be worth it all, man, gotta be worth it all.

And, just to be that guy, I’ll be damned if I look it up, but I’m pretty sure Mason made this exact same joke some months back.

To paraphrase Charlie Brown, I weep for the newspaper comic-strip fans.

Shooting Gallery

Today’s strip

Greetings, folks, BChasm temporarily in the captain’s chair for the next little while. What’s this?! The viewscreen shows a sea of hostiles–ready photon torpedoes! We must annihilate this threat before it spreads across the galaxy!

I’m going to skip over Mason’s “movie we filmed here,” comment, because while I don’t think any of the film was shot in Centerville, I honestly don’t remember the “school bus drives into shot” bit well enough, and–Tales to Astonish–I have no desire to look and see. So I’ll give him that.

What else? Well, we’ve got a crowd shot of almost everyone, including Les–which sets our Les Watch back to zero, damn it. At least he’s not saying anything, and is both poorly drawn and partly covered by a word balloon. Funny, though, I’d have expected both Comic Book John and Imbecilic Harry to be there, but I guess they got their exposure in at Comic Con, so no need to feature them any longer. But who is that between Jim KibblesNBits and Marianne? It looks like they flew Marianne’s mother out there after all! I guess?

The fact that so many of the cast and crew are in the audience–and sitting right up front, too–makes me wonder if Tom Batiuk believes that the first time anyone involved with a movie actually gets to see the finished film is at the premier. In the real world, the director would have seen the film dozens of times by now, and there’s almost always a screening for the cast and crew. So all these people would be backstage, or at the back of the hall, gauging audience reaction–pacing, room for laughs, people getting bored at certain parts, and so on–and looking for “oohs” and “aahs” for the cast members.

But not in the fantasy land that is the Funkyverse. Here, everything happens the way a five year old imagines that it happens–it’s all just magic, and friendship, and comic books and pizza, and it works every time! In a way, that sounds like an attractive world…for a few minutes. But after those few minutes, I’d want something of substance, something that would stir the imagination rather than just “be” everything forever.

Poorly thought-out as the Lisa stuff is, it’s at least an attempt to address adult concerns–something that a comic strip aimed at “contemporary problems of young people” should attempt more often. Because I’m pretty sure the contemporary problems of young people aren’t that they wish there were more comic-book movies.

Court and Snark

Snifit
August 21, 2017 at 12:26 am
I like how Batiuk doesn’t bother actually showing where they are. The theater? Marriage License office? Swinger hotel? They’re here, guys. Just here.

“Here” turns out to be the courthouse, and there are so many questions. Are they picking up marriage licences, or are they going to be married by a judge, or maybe by Centerville’s mayor, Bill Clinton? Why then did the prospective grooms (separately!) reach out to Pete to find a minister? Why all the secrecy about the wedding? And while it’s true that Starbuck Jones is what brought them together, does that somehow mandate that they must marry as soon as the movie comes out? Has the movie come out, and have we not been shown the gala Ohio premiere? What happened to the pink boutonniere that Cliff wore yesterday?