Tag: Westview High School

Wack Friday

As far as Summer knows, the helmet that Maddie sketched for her has no special powers, aside from concealing Donna’s feminine gender from the boys. So how in the hell is she able to surmise that it’s really a “temporal phase shifter“? Maddie doesn’t know this, and Donna, who as a kid actually wore the thing, thinks that its phase-shifting abilities were just a figment of her fumes-addled imagination.

Great Moments In SoSF Arc Recap History

Mar. 23-Mar. 31, 2010
In the big game, the Lady ‘Goats go up against Our Lady of the Cedars, and get their asses kicked for a change.

From back when Summer was actually a main character in the strip; the “sporto” that her father never was in his high school days. The Lady Scapegoats are seeded vs. Our Lady of the Cedars, who are to Westview’s girls’ basketball squad what Big Walnut Tech is to the football team. The girls are intimidated even before the game starts, and even the duo of former rivals Keisha and Summer are not enough to propel the Westview team to victory. This arc is notable for a couple of reasons: it’s one of the rare occasions when our protagonists do not succeed. It also contains one of my all time favorite Act III FW panels: the dejected Westview team seeing their reflection in the winners’ trophy.

Not sure why the OLC girls are still in uniform while Summer’s team has already changed into their street clothes. Nor why the winners are showing off a huge trophy when this is supposed to be a first round game.

In Westview, It’s More Of A Disadvantage Point

Happy Thanksgiving from your pals at SoSF!

today’s strip

I don’t know how many of you watched “Twin Peaks: The Return”, but during the final episode (spoiler alert for five year old show) there is a rather long scene near the end where literally nothing happens. And while tension did indeed build, a quick glance at the clock revealed that there was no freaking way the show would explain everything (or anything) in the amount of running time it had left. And then it really got confusing and weird.

I mention this because after today there are like only forty FW strips to go, and knowing BatYam as I do, it seems incredibly hard to believe he’ll be able to bring whatever this is supposed to be home in that amount of time. The strip is winding down for good, and it’s squarely focused on a character who’s been absent for most of the last ten years, and a guy who isn’t really a character at all. He’s obviously setting up some sort of insane time travel thing here, which only makes me wonder where all this imagination was hiding for the last fifteen freaking years.

Obviously the fear here is that he’s going to somehow reunite Les and Summer with Lisa in some way, shape or form, and the strip will end with the three of them hugging. Cayla will presumably be conveniently retconned away or shipped off to “Crankshaft” or something. We all know he (BatHam) never really cared for Cayla anyway, given how little she factored into the strip after she married Les. In my opinion, the whole strip noticeably slowed down (no, seriously) after that.

Great Moments In SoSF Arc Recap History

June 14-June 20, 2010
Funky checks his dad into a nursing home. Afterwards, he orders a “vodka and orange” at a bar, but changes his mind and leaves.

Which led to his collision with Cell Phone Girl (RIP?) and “the black panel”, the greatest individual panel in Act III history. This is FW we’re talking about, so there was some speculation that Funky had died, but he just went into a coma instead. He then traveled back in time, met his teenage self, and advised himself to buy a copy of “Starbuck Jones #1″…the very same comic book that had saved Montoni’s in a prior arc. Then he recovered and PTSD and blah blah blah who cares, but that was where the Starbuck Jones legend truly began, which spawned a sequence of events that directly led to Ruby Lith retiring just last week. Who’d have thunk it?

We Harley Knew Ye


For all his inconsistency and carelessness with continuity and canon: when Batiuk introduces a character from FW‘s distant past, it turns out that they were in fact part of the Act I cast. Though I read Funky Winkerbean back in the day (I was in marching band, how could I have not?), I was sure that Harley “the janitor” Davidson was a recent addition. So a big tip o’ the SoSF cap to ComicBookHarriet for pointing out that he’s been around since at least ’79. Four decades later, Lego-headed Summer has arrived at the custodian’s office. Sounds like she’s discovered yet another sordid detail from Teen Lisa’s journal…

Interesting times when it comes to comics on the web! Yes, Crankshaft will continue into the new year, but Batiuk is jumping ship from Comics Kingdom/King Features Syndicate to GoComics/Andrews McMeel Syndication. Maybe that’s why Batiuk’s “editor” @teaberryblue hasn’t bothered to comment on Batty’s semiretirement (plus she/they are expecting a baby in December). Speaking of GoComics, looks like they’ve sorted the problems that knocked the site offline for the last couple of days. In other news, Comics Kingdom is “moving its commenting platform to OpenWeb” from Disqus; in the process discarding years’ worth of reader comments and hailing this as an upgrade.

Snarkocalypse, Soon!

today’s strip

Before I mock Summer and her new, sleek, angular, pointy appearance, a few words on the looming heat death of the Funkyverse. Obviously, without a daily strip, we will not be doing daily posts anymore after December 31. The site will remain alive for the foreseeable future, and we do hope we get new FW material to complain about. It’s not going to shutter right then and right there. But this is Batiuk we’re talking about here, so there’s just no way of knowing how it’ll actually go. He might drop 365 new FW strips on his blog on January 2, or he might do a feeble, one-off comic book cover eight months from now, or anything in-between. There will not be a re-read from the beginning, nor will we switch to “Crankshaft”. The daily strips are the engine that runs the whole thing and without those, it’ll never be the same. I’m not sure how or if sporadic posts will work, but that’s a bridge to cross at some later date.

From here on out, TFH and I will be sharing SoSF hosting duties. We are bandying around some ideas, and we very much want to give our beloved guest authors, both present and past, AT LEAST one more shot before the end, and see what happens after that. We likewise hope our faithful readers will remain entertained and engaged to the end, and we’ll do what we can to make that happen. For TFH and I, it marks the end of a long, long road. While Lord knows it wasn’t “hard work” by any means, it did require a daily commitment, and by “daily” I mean DAILY. FW runs literally every day, without fail, and we have always ensured that our loyal readers had a working link to the stupid strip, as well as a place to clown on it. We never missed a post, ever. We feel we owe it to ourselves and SoSF itself to ride it out to the very end, and savor it while we can. For me, SoSF is part writing exercise, part deranged personal vendetta, but mainly it’s been a labor of love. And I’ll be touching on that a lot more in the coming weeks.

So anyway, yeah, how about this new, aerodynamic, de-shaggified Summer, huh? I’m assuming that he brought her back upon learning that FW would be ending, as he didn’t seem to care too much for the last ten years. And, interestingly enough, I don’t care now! It’s just like Batiuk to be wasting time on Harley the janitor when he has barely six more weeks to go. The strip is jammed full of long-running characters, it’s winding down to the end, and he’s focused on Ruby and Harley.

And now, from the SoSF arc recap archives, a Great Moment In SoSF History:

Dec 27, 2010 – Jan. 2, 2011
Les hosts a New Year’s Eve party. Susan announces that her divorce is final. At the stroke of midnight, Les is smooching Lisa’s Ghost.

Man, that was a real humdinger. Easily one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. Les was furiously making out with himself, while a horrified Cayla and Susan looked on in revulsion. That was Cayla’s second hairdo, her “dreads” look she was sporting for a while. See, back then, Les was still only “seeing” Cayla, and Susan was still lurking around, shamelessly throwing herself at Les at every opportunity. Meanwhile, Les was still madly in love with Ghost Lisa, who was a constant presence back then, despite being dead, which happened in a story arc you may have heard about once or twice. When you look back on that period now, it’s amazing how action-packed it was compared to, say, 2020 or something.