Westview High School – Page 15

Dream Academy

Being late/running late is a very common theme in dreams…Being late in a dream as an image of finding it difficult living up to your own demands or the demands of others…When we dream that we are late or that we are about to be late, it is often because we are fighting a battle to achieve more than we can actually handle.

https://michaelrolsen.com/dreams-late-mean-dream-interpretation-late

It’s a pretty common dream, all right, so give Batiuk points for being relatable for once. I know I’ve had dreams of this type. The naked-in-public kind of dreams, too. Batiuk and Ayers do a pretty good job at giving this scenario a dreamlike feeling. The hallway appears infinite, and eerily empty. And while this is almost a universal dream premise, I bet Tom Batiuk hasn’t had this dream in ages. At this stage of his career, the only demands he probably has to meet are to submit one comic strip per day. It doesn’t have to be especially well drawn, or funny, or make sense, or follow a narrative. Just a piece of content, to fill space on a newspaper comics page or on a website.

Well, my two week long nightmare of having to deconstruct FW every day is ended, and on deck is guest emcee Epicus Doomus! Take it away!

Banned Room Revolution.

Today’s strip, when it drops.

Well, it’s been a real teeter-totter of a shift. One week of super-depressing Lesplotation misery porn, and another week of weightless recycled turkey gags. But you how the old song goes: When you’re up, you’re up. And when you’re down, you’re down. And when you’re only halfway up, it’s Sunday and the strip isn’t available for preview.

Our glorious leader TFHackett, is assuming his place on the podium tomorrow. Please treat him with the respect due a founding father of our blogiverse. He’s chopped down Lisa trees, and crossed the mighty Cuyahoga, and seen our troops through the frigid winters of Ohio. He stood up to the rotten king who tried to silence our freedoms through C&D, and brought us to this promised land.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Comeback Kidder.

Link to today’s strip

Dinkle! Stop touching your face! It’s gross! I don’t care if you forgot to shave, or have some kind of numb-cheeked neurological disorder, you will break out in ugly old man acne.

Speaking of ugly, Becky in panel three is a real barker. Bags under her eyes, lines around her misshapen mouth, weird flesh-colored half moon circles on her eyelids, mismatched ears. Ugh. Edvard Munch could be more flattering when portraying anxiety.

And I’m confused. Becky has a husband that isn’t Dinkle? I did another archive deep dive and, after going all the way back to December 2018, I found this weird strip.

That’s DSH John. But are they married? They mention each other a few other times, I guess? But that was the last time they were in a strip together. December 22 2018. They’re married, right? And have kids? When was the last time we saw kids?

Since 2018 Becky has attended OMEA in January, the school end picnic in May, Bull’s funeral, all with Dinkle at her side, and DSH John nowhere to be seen. Over 20 individual strips. And she only had 3 strips WITHOUT Dinkle.

And isn’t John married to Crazy Harry?

Found this funny strip from a year ago though. I guess Dinkle must be catching the Alzheimer’s that Mort Winkerbean lost. Because he forgot he’d already praised Becky for going digital.

Facing the Music.

Link to today’s strip

Went on a weird journey for today’s post. At first I was just going to point out bad art. Like Dinkle touching his face with a tiny little prop hand. Then it occurred to me that Dinkle has touched his face in shocked contemplation no less than three times this week, which is gross and not something you want to be doing during cold and flu season.

But I stopped when I noticed that Becky mentioned practicing music for the Christmas Concert…because Westview doesn’t have a Christmas Concert. They have a Holiday Concert, so as to not offend those who do not celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, and/or a night where the undead soul of a fourth century Turkish bishop breaks into people’s homes. I had vague recollections of an entire Holiday Concert arc dealing with Principal Nate becoming a somehow more exaggerated prototype of South Park’s PC Principal. So I dug into the archives, and sure enough there was an arc from December 7th through the 13th in 2015.

My trip took me farther back, because I decided to review some of the tired old Band Turkey gags, and I discovered that Dinkle himself assisted Becky in selling something other than turkeys back in 2014.

Then I looked up, and right there, November 2014, I found the arc where Bull had been offered a college coaching position, only to have it snatched away from him when the college’s first choice called back. And I was stunned to see that, five years ago, Batiuk thought to include a strip where Bull and Linda include their children in life decisions. Probably the last time Jinx has spoken in strip.

Reading that arc again, after everything, had me genuinely sad. And also kind of grossed out. Because Batiuk wrote Linda as incredibly horny back then.

Premium Tool.

Link to today’s strip

I’m a little ashamed to say it, but I chuckled unironically at the strip today. Well, it wasn’t really a chuckle, more of soft snort complete with an eye-roll. But props to Batiuk, this came within sighting distance of comedy.

Ayers deserves more of the credit though, the dead-eyed, wide-mouthed Dinkle in panel three hits my funny bone when partnered with the blunt punchline.

I wonder about the premiums paid out. It seems like even more fundraiser money sucked away from the band. I remember getting promised dumb prizes for selling enough during school fundraisers, but no one could sell enough to earn them.

Cabbage Jack yesterday in the comments pointed reader to Tom Batiuk’s blog. I’d never given it much of a look, but I browsed back a few months and it was quite a trip; an inane mishmash of narcissism and comics related shitposting. Most egregious are the little excerpts from his Funky Winkerbean volumes, where he deconstructs the history of his own creation like an art restorer painstakingly scraping the macaroni off a kindergardener’s project.

“The scenes with Fred and Ann and their son Darin were reflective of a different part of my life with Cathy and Brian that I was beginning to draw upon. Change was becoming a palpable part of Funky, and the biggest changes of all were just about to unfold. I didn’t have a master plan exactly, but I could see daylight ahead, and I was beginning to run toward it.”

“As was my habit, new characters continued to appear. Cindy Summers, the most popular girl in school, and Bodean, Westview High’s resident hood, joined the cast as the polar opposites of the high school continuum. Big hair was starting to come in for girls, and Cindy’s hair soon became the biggest of the biggest. Her tenure in the strip was destined to be remarkably long.”

And taking the cake, yesterday’s offering, where Batiuk goes borderline biblical talking about trying to renegotiate a contract.

“And lo, there came a day when the prophecy of the attorney in the beginning times came to pass.
It’s been said that the past is a knife (as an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, I’m all in on that one), and at the beginning of 1990 I was definitely feeling its point in my back.”