SosfdavidO, coming up short on fire related puns for today’s today’s mope-a-thon. Once again, Tombat leaves the viewer with a confused sense of wondering what the heck they’re supposed to be feeling. It sure ain’t comedy. It’s more akin to Garrison Keillor’s brand of humor but we the reader don’t get the enjoyment (or misery) of hearing Garrison ramble on out-loud.
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As usual, Sunday’s offering was not available for preview. As I said last week, Sunday strips tend to be outside the continuity of the previous (or upcoming) week, so who knows what we’ll get? I’m going to guess “band camp.” It’s been a long while since we enjoyed one of those. …many, many years in fact. I’m sure we were presented one within the last year, though.
I doubt we’ll get a continuation of the “Flash Museum” arc, as Saturday showed both Pete and Dullard leaving the place. I suppose they could babble and babble about the stuff they’ve seen for six panels–it would not come as a surprise.
Note that I said “the stuff they’ve seen.” We sure as Hell didn’t get to see much of it. Jay Garrick’s hat, about half of Captain Cold, a distant picture of Gorilla Grodd, and some boomerangs. Someone who had never heard of the Flash, reading that story…would still never have heard of the Flash. On Wednesday, this person would learn that a comic book is involved, and on Thursday he’d hear about “Flash villain(s).” Though whether or not “Flash villain” is a villain opposing the Flash, or a type of villain, he would not know. Also, is the Flash a person, or an organization like SHIELD? For being such a big Flash fan, Tom Batiuk doesn’t seem to be able to say much about the man himself.
As Charles mentioned yesterday, Mr. Batiuk seems to have some peculiar ideas about Hollywood, and I’ve long suspected that the entire strip is just Mr. Batiuk saying, “This is my universe, and I can make it work however I want. Comic books are the most revered art-form. Anyone who works on a movie is paid enormous amounts of money, but they constantly daydream about what they really want to do–work on comic books. Females are there to see that the man is supported in all things, unless it’s Funky, because screw him.”
Speaking of money, I’ve occasionally ordered DVDs from Warner Bros online store, so they send me periodic emails about other things. One of them is a life-size statue of Wonder Woman, made out of some kind of foam and looking pretty realistic. In order to get one of those, prepare to have $1300 dollars on hand. Pete’s “dolly” looks less and less like an indulgence and more like an illness.
UPDATE: Well, today’s offering did involve the flash, though not the one people were nattering on about last week. The art in this one has a nice sense of space, flows well and looks pretty nice, though the two images of Dinkle do what in film school is called “crossing the axis.” It’s something you’re not supposed to do, as it tends to subliminally confuse audiences.
The one thing I really want to mention is that image of Funky. He has now become indistinguishable from his father, which makes that last panel pretty…disturbing.
Well, I see the light at the end of the tunnel is growing dim, so time for me to climb out of the pit before it fades entirely. Please welcome your new dungeon master, DavidO! Let’s all look forward to tomorrow, when, uh, a thing, er, might happen…or might not, but as always…um…[slinks away awkwardly]
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Sosfdavido here, barely to update after a long power outage in the Santa Cruz mountains! Here’s a post for today from my cell phone but HTML doesn’t show up from my phone. 
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Are we being led to believe that the events of this week’s FW– John’s posting the plot synopsis to the web, Pete’s discovery of same, alerting the studio and identifying and tracking down the skunk-headed culprit – have all transpired in one day of strip time? “Hard to tell” indeed! John (like fellow comics nerd Pete Rudomanski) always, always is seen wearing the same shirt. But Crazy Harry’s still rockin’ that blue shortsleeve we saw him in on Monday…and we know it ain’t a postal uniform.
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Well, now that we’ve enjoyed a week of nothing at all, it looks like we’re seeing some actual hazing! But no, just turns out to be a glimpse of something that happened to that Ol’ Punching Bag Himself, Wally Winkerbean, many years ago.
Odd, isn’t it, that Becky’s example has to be something that happened twenty or thirty-odd years ago, and she’s only just this year put a stop to it. I mean, we couldn’t have used someone slightly more contemporary, like Owen, to make Becky look a little less uncaring and incompetent. But one suspects that when Owen graduated, his model sheets were thrown into the fire so that Tom Batiuk wouldn’t be tempted to take the focus away from Dinkle and Les.
The last panel does, on the face of it, constitute a “punchline” and it would ordinarily be a pretty good one. But given the slant of this strip, my first thought was “This store is going to go out of business.” Odd again that the store seems to sell nothing but plastic wrap (and lottery tickets) again indicating that this prank has been going on so long local merchants are dependent on it for economic survival–but only now is Becky addressing it. The town will probably dry up and become abandoned, and the band camp will be relocated to Camp Crystal Lake (at least Jason would be easy to draw). An interesting view of Chesterton’s Fence. I guess I’m defending hazing! Funky Winkerbean has made me a terrible person now.
I guess also that this tosses a glitch into the Batiukian Theory that men are the only ones who can act; that the sole function of a woman is to supply cookies and milk to a comic-book reading session. Turns out women can utterly destroy things. Here’s to equality!
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(Wikipedia: A humidor is any kind of box or room with constant humidity that is used to store cigars, cigarettes, or pipe tobacco. Just so you folks don’t have to look it up.)
This is definitely a “What?” strip. As in, “What kind of thought process arrives at this end?”
Is this in reference to yesterday’s strip, about freshmen in the lake? Now they use bottles for water, instead of a lake? If that’s the case, I can’t even. I mean, the lake thing was just last night, and now everything’s awesome?
Has The Odious Dinkle’s blathering on about himself actually solved the problem of band camp hazing?
Or is this another example of hazing–these girls are forced to drink bottles of water, because hazing? If that’s the case, why isn’t Becky stopping it, if she’s so goldurn concerned?
Sigh. I know the answer. Tom Batiuk saw the word “hydrating” and noticed that both it and “hazing” begin with an “h” and have a couple of vowels in common. But this isn’t a pun, or even amusing in any way. It’s not even a malapropism.
If Crankshaft thought of this, even he would not say it.
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Credit where it’s due: a nice touch in today’s strip is the kid with the trombone. He was in yesterday’s strip as well, walking roughly in the same place, so it’s a very good way to show that time has not passed between yesterday’s strip and today’s. In other words, despite taking a week in real-time, only a few minutes have gone by in strip-time. It would be better if he had the same color shirt as yesterday, but I’ll be generous and put that down to an error by the syndicate.
However, I find The Odious Dinkle’s dialogue in panel one to be pretty damned off-putting. What exactly does he mean? Becky mentioned problems with hazing, and that was only a few minutes ago–so, no, she hasn’t had the time to do anything, so, yeah, the problems with hazing probably are still ongoing.
What I find off-putting about this is the idea that The Odious Dinkle has been treating everything Becky says as an opportunity to blather on about himself, and now that he’s blathered on for a while, he’s surprised that his blather hasn’t solved every problem Becky has. Why, I’ve just told you I have problems, how dare you claim to have them as well. It’s this kind of total self-absorption, this hermetically sealed worldview, that makes The Odious Dinkle so odious. It makes one long for a replay of the Becky on the scissors-lift scene, only substituting The Odious Dinkle for Roberta, and including the payoff.
What I really don’t get is The Odious Dinkle’s reaction. “Old uniforms?” What does that mean? I have this horrible feeling that these are uniforms from his tenure as band leader, and as such should be treated as sacred relics. Which quite frankly makes good my point about his raging egoism, and thus makes me loathe him all the more.
Let’s hope someone hides his oxygen bottle.
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