Tag: Vera

O-H! I-ugh…

Today’s strip simply confirms what we’ve all known since Monday, that this movie premiere is going to take place at “that damn Crankshaft theater”.

And we can all blame Jeff Murdoch, a passive-aggressive sad-sack who has never managed to elicit sympathy from readers despite constantly suffering under his mother and father-in-law, two of the nastiest and most despicable characters to have ever graced the comics page. We can also blame Batiukverse Twitter, which waived its character limit to allow Jeff to convey the following information in a single tweet (maybe he typed this all up in Notes and tweeted a photo, which is still contemptible):

– His first and last name
– His location
– The fact that he was a member of the Starbuck Jones Junior Spaceman Fan Club when he was a kid
– That he saw the original Starbuck Jones serial at the then-new Valentine Theater
– That his son now owns the Valentine Theater
– And that he thinks it would be a good place to hold the premiere of the new Starbuck Jones movies.

Given all of that, I’m surprised he didn’t mention how movie tickets only cost $0.10 when he first saw the Starbuck Jones serial, or how much he misses voting for Robert Taft Sr., or how great his old LaSalle ran.

Valium-tine

While Jeff Murdoch apparently violates Twitter’s character limit in today’s strip, Director Martin Johns violates general decorum by thinking Jeff’s tweet is worth reading out loud to these Hollywood types lounging about in wicker chairs.

Prescient SOSFer erdmann hypothesized yesterday that this would lead to the premiere of Starbuck Jones at “that damn Crankshaft theater”. Today’s strip all but confirms that, and I can tell you that the next several strips will not dispel the idea. If you consider this to be a spoiler then you haven’t read Funky Winkerbean for very long.

In other news, Cindy has lost her right foot. Oh, and Jeff Murdoch is apparently both old enough to have seen and remember original-run Starbuck Jones movie serials (before Cliff was blacklisted sometime in the early 1950s) and young enough to have also been attending Kent State in 1970 (on a John Sebastian impersonator scholarship, apparently). To be fair, there is a window of time in which that works, but it is narrower than Crankshaft’s mind.

Martin Mulls It Over

Greetings, SOSFers! It’s billytheskink here – your favorite lizard-named, Martin Mull-referencing, pointless trivia-posting, guest author.

I was wishing (and hoping, and thinking, and praying) that yesterday’s strip was the coda to this Comic-Con arc. It certainly looked like it could be. Unfortunately, it was a tease, and today’s strip takes us right back to yesterday’s ocean-side confab to discuss… the Starbuck Jones movie premiere. Goody, another week of this. That’s four straight weeks now.

A relative of mine had a baby back in June. That baby will be 8 weeks old at the end of this week. FW strips involving Starbuck Jones will have appeared during 65% of her life. This makes me incredibly sad.

And Spending Her Time So Foolishly Too, No Doubt

Link To Today’s Demoralizing Developments

Working that goddamned f*cking decoder ring in there was like dropping a cherry-shaped wad of maggots onto a garbage sundae, it’s the kind of sickening overkill BanTom does better than any other sub-mediocre comic strip author in the business. It’s finally official, after five days of absolutely painful dilly-dallying these two horrible old snores are engaged (as are Cindy and Mason…(shudder)) and a more pathetic spectacle I cannot recall.

“Waiting a lifetime”, yeah, sixty years is indeed nearly a “lifetime” but not necessarily in the Funkyverse, where middle-aged men creak, groan and collapse regularly and couples in their nineties eat solid foods and get frisky in restaurants. Still though, it seems kind of incredible that they just completely lost touch for sixty years. No phone calls, no letters, no emails, no Classmates or HotBot or Google searches, just nothing at all until two comic book-obsessed weirdos took it upon themselves to do everything for them.

In fact when you look at them that way you realize that there’s nothing “happy” about these two imbeciles getting back together, as they’re both awful, stupid, lazy people who literally wasted their entire lives for no reason whatsoever aside from sheer sloth. They’re only together now because of outside meddling, completely happenstance impulsive meddling, by the way. What kind of human being wouldn’t be utterly destroyed by the realization that the great lost love of your life who you feebly pined over for sixty freaking years was likewise just sitting there like an idiot wondering and waiting to hear from you while you sat there doing literally nothing? It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard, yet in the Funkyverse it passes for lite, cute and breezy.

Hopefully this is the last of these two until Frankie crashes the big Starbuck Jones-themed double wedding ceremony and forces Marianne to attempt suicide again. You know that when he finally gets around to re-visiting this in August or whatever he’ll spend five full days on the characters talking about that f*cking decoder ring, just to refresh everyone’s decoder ring memory.

Oyb Hsit Omcic Pstri Wsblo

Link To Today’s Dismal Experience

I’ll take a stab at decoding Cliff’s “secret message” using nothing but my extensive knowledge of the Funkyverse and nothing more. OK, here goes nothing…

THIS STORY IS GARBAGE AUTHORED BY AN UNIMAGINATIVE AND POSSIBLY DELUSIONAL HACK WITH NO DESIRE TO ENTERTAIN ANYONE BUT HIMSELF AND NO ABILITY TO DO SO EVEN IF HE WANTED TO

That’s what I came up with. I’m estimating it’s at least 125% accurate, more or less. How many times will he go back to THIS well? It was a movie prop, Tom. The guy is ninety f*cking years old, that goddamned f*cking decoder ring isn’t his whole…oh, wait. My bad, I forgot who and what I’m dealing with here. Of course that f*cking stupid decoder ring is Cliff’s whole life, as he’s a woefully one-dimensional and contrived character with all the depth of a pizza box who was conceived by a lazy shameless hack who must have been absent when they covered “plausibility” in vocabulary class. It’s only natural that Cliff’s entire life centers around some moronic old toy. Like they say, write what you know.