WHS Scapegoats – Page 4 – Son of Stuck Funky

Take My Arm, Please

This one is unbelievable. First, we have pinned-up sleeves all over the place today. Then it turns out that Dinkle, aka General Nostalgia himself, doesn’t even KNOW about the Band Big Reunion Alumni at all yet! How could this have not been his idea? I mean, what the hell is he even DOING there if he’s not re-living the good old days, you know? And why are Funky and Holly leaving to pick up Holly’s mom now for an event that’s a full month away? Is he seriously going to do an arc about the elderly AND marching bands at the same time? Good God.

And finally there’s the bizarre spectacle of a retired march band conductor cracking wise about old people with missing body parts to a current marching band conductor with one arm. I mean, just wow. Utterly spectacular.

A Coach Stropp Saved Is A Coach Stropp Urned

Link To Today’s Strip

And suddenly, many months after the fact, that moronic arc where Bull dug up a hunk of grass and plopped it on his special “football memories” shelf comes full circle. Apparently vandalizing WHS property is OK if it’s for nostalgic purposes, which doesn’t surprise me at all. I like how the grass on his shelf is still sort of green, seeing how it’s all uprooted and dead and all. Quite a hardy turfgrass blend on that field, although it would have been funnier if Bull had ruined a costly Astroturf field instead.

So is the little tuft supposed to be where Bull stupidly dropped Coach Stropp? And if so, is he suggesting that Coach Stropp’s remains acted as a fertilizer that cause the grass to rapidly grow on that spot? Because if so, ewwww. Not to mention totally inaccurate, as you’d really want to use a higher nitrogen fertilizer at this time of year, one with a nice pre-emergent to keep those unsightly crabgrass clumps at bay. If Coach Stropp was a lifelong Westviewian I would suspect his ashes would mostly contain some carbon, traces of comic book printing ink and lots and lots of mozzarella cheese, none of which is especially good for your lawn.

Anyhow, the moral here is apparently that Bull is an inconsiderate moron who makes everyone’s jobs just a little more difficult via his special brand of dementia and idiocy. What a zany character, eh?

Press “Eject”, Linda

Oh, so now Linda wants Bull to do something other than binge videocassettes and relive his days as the best player on a winless high school football team? In today’s strip, she has finally decided to stop enabling him and wants him to do something he has not done since, uh…
– his retirement ceremony in 2016?
– he dropped that glass of water (a glass glass by a water cooler)?
– the tennis match where Les triggered his CTE?
However you want to define it, it has certainly been awhile.

Well, with a broken VCR, maybe Bull and Linda will finally get to doing all of that stuff they planned to do in retirement while Bull “still can”…
Or maybe they’ll go and find a way for Bull to continue watching the ’77 Scapegoats get their teeth kicked in so badly that the Centerville team that starts kneeling the ball in the 2nd quarter.

What do you all think is more likely?

Boresday, February 1

Today’s strip was, again, not available for preview.

So, let’s look back at the 1983 introduction of the goat that so disturbed Buck back in the day, Billy the Scapegoat. Or was his name actually Billy? The answer may surprise you… but probably won’t interest you.

First, the whole thing was Dinkle’s idea, including the name “Billy”. Unfortunately for the Westview football team, the goat did not possess divine power.

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“Billy” was under the impression that Westview had the only terrible high school football team in existence. Though this might explain why he ran onto the field hitting players.

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He also didn’t care for the uninspired name Dinkle gave him, preferring his own uninspired name. No ever called him Paul, of course, because he couldn’t talk.

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While called a “scapegoat”, Billy-Paul was more like an oracle, his heavy-lidded ennui a prophesy of things to come for this strip.

The Men Who Swear At Goats

Today’s strip is what passes for levity in Funky Winkerbean these days, I guess. Buck was apparently disturbed by a commonly-milked farm animal when he really should have been disturbed by the complete lack of almost everything at this football game. There appears to be no crowd, no officials, almost no players (look at that empty bench behind Stropp), and apparently no one else but Bull around to wrangle a loose mascot. Was Westview’s football stadium nicknamed “Uncanny Valley”?

Oh, and did you know that the Scapegoat mascot had a name back in Act I? It’s Billy, much to my chagrin… He once appeared on a book cover with Erma Bombeck’s name.

You know you've got trouble when you have an animal sacrifice at every pep rally