Disturbing Sunday
Post Content
Hi and Lois, 9/27/26
My first impression reading this was that Hi seems so youthful in the first panel in the second row that he must be imagining himself as a Little Leaguer; but the mustache on the outfielder means that’s not right, and I realized that, of course, he’s imagining himself as a Major League Baseball player, and MLB players are on average men in their mid to late 20s, younger than Hi and certainly much younger than me, but not children by any means. It’s a lot to think about! And I honestly would prefer to think about this, to muse melancholy on middle age, and not think at all about the throwaway panel that includes what I guess is supposed to be Hi dozing off thinking happy thoughts but it looks like a portrait of JFK zooted out of his mind on all the off-label drugs they were giving him for his back pain plus whatever sex pills he was taking. I have to admit, not thinking about that is getting more and more difficult.
Family Circus, 9/27/26
We criticize Marvin a lot for all the piss and shit jokes it does, but honestly its worst sin is just to be so in your face about it. Like, here’s a Family Circus about a carpet remembering all the good times it’s had with the Keane Kids over the years as it’s being driven to the landfill, and only one of the seven little vignettes it’s visualizing involves being peed on. That’s how you elicit a healthy chuckle from the piss joke appreciating community while still getting grandparents to faithfully cut your comic and hang it on the fridge.
Panel from The Lockhorns, 9/27/26
You ever notice that we never see Leroy’s mother? I feel like Loretta gets mad at moments like this not just for the obvious reasons, but because Leroy’s mother’s presumably early death — or perhaps her decision to go no-contact with her son for reasons we could easily guess at — have denied Loretta ammunition in the constant marital battle that is the focus of her every waking thought.
Crankshaft, 9/27/26
Hey, I don’t want to overstep here, but … do you ever get the feeling that, just maybe, everyone involved in the creation of the Funkyverse strips has a terrible inability to feel pleasure, like in a pathological way? Just putting that out there.
64 replies to “Disturbing Sunday”
Family Circlejerk – Meanwhile, Bil has fond memories of the carpet burns he got on his knees.
H&L: Field of Dreams? More like Hi is trying to replace his worthless kids by fantasies involving “Rookie of the Year” and “Little Big League.”
Mary Worth Mashup: Mary Worth, Comics Curmudgeon Edition®. You like?
MW-Finally someone who is scoffing at the rumors.
FC-So many accidents and uh ohs to make on the new carpet.
RMMD-No recaps please. Just keep walking.
CS: “Look at that sky. I use to think life sucks but it’s really God, isn’t it?”
H&L: Not to be too rude on a Sunday morning, but did Hi just rub one out to a baseball game in that throwaway panel? Because…it sure looks like it.
FC: It’s actually Big Daddy Kane wrapped up in that carpet, just remembering all the good time he had with it as he’s carted off to a shallow grave.
LHs: The funniest bit of this to me is that fact that Leroy and Loretta seem to be completely along in there. It’s hard to imagine what kind of behaviour would clear out a bowling alley, but if anyone could do it, these two could.
JP So now the hand-off is to Mud and Mae Mae. With about a week per character set this is beginning to feel less like “survey the subplots before the next big thing” and more “series wrapup episode”
MW: I fear the entire next week will be an increasingly-unhinged Toby obsessing over the rumor. I’m not looking forward to three panels a day of “it’s ridiculous” thought balloons, though I expect Baja Gaijin will fill up a clip art folder with her facial expressions.
Hi and Lois: Hi is lost in his “Field of Dreams.” Drawing from the movie, that means he had a terrible relationship with his father, and now would rather sleep the afternoon away than spend any time having a catch with his own kids.
Family Circus: Only an adult writer would think little kids would get excited about a new living room carpet — which they realize will just show every stain they make and every muddy footprint they track in the house that much more prominently. Thinking ahead for once, Billy is bringing home an entire handwritten essay arguing that, no matter what spill his parents happen to be yelling about, his sister did it.
The Lockhorns: Look, an entire bowling alley without bowling balls or ball-return apparatus. Leroy has knocked down all ten pins with nothing but a forceful blast of anger and resentment.
Mary Worth: Another day of Toby laughing off the rumors about Mary and her husband — but maybe it’s verging on the slightly hysterical at this point? Are the nasty-tongued gossips finally getting to her? Maybe she should wonder if Mary is feeding Ian muffins and fish squares as we speak, while Toby spends his hard-earned professor’s salary on expensive Rao’s marinara sauce instead of making it from scratch.
Marvin: There is no chance that sandbox wasn’t already covered in urine and feces. In the Marvin universe I would just assume that everything is that way.
Oh yes, the famous Agatha Christie novel “Ten little Mother-in Laws”
Crankshaft: So Batiuk is making a jab at Davis?
@pugfuggly: Naw, all guys watch TV with their hands down their pants; it’s not sex, more like cradling a baby in your hand.
In panel one, Hi appears to be living up to his name.
Lack-Horniness: I’d ask where Leroy’s balls are, but I’m pretty sure Loretta took them a long time ago.
How many forced puns did Batiuk attempt here before giving up?
Josh thinks there are Grandparents cutting out newspaper printed comics and putting them on the refrigerator. Apparently he’s not aware that people born in the 1980s are now grandparents, they don’t buy or read printed newspapers, they don’t give a shit about The Family Circus, and even if they did they would be sharing it on Facebook or Instagram or whatever platform they use.
CRANKSHAFT: Les Moore left some mighty mopey shoes to fill.
MW: And then, Toby heard a mysterious sound from behind the closed bedroom door…
RMMD: “I’ve been workin’ on a song; ‘My Gal, Mae Mae,’ but the rhymin’s REALLY hard!”
FC: That poor carpet is heavily traumatized by having those things crawling over it for years.
@The Rambling Otter: I had to read And Then There Were None in school, and it was decades later when I learned the original (extremely racist) title.
Are we sure Hi ISN’T just remembering Little League? Look at opposing player, with his short arms and big head. He’s that guy in every school who somehow hit puberty YEARS before the rest of us.
The Lockhorns:
The vast majority of modern bowling alleys feature automatic scoring, and you can even see a digital scoreboard in the background here, so I’m not sure what Loretta is doing at her little drawing board. My best guess is that after months of practice, she’s finally going to put the caricaturing skills she’s been honing to use in a devastating non-verbal artistic comeback to Leroy’s jibe about her mother-in-law. Leroy won’t just take that sitting down, of course, so after a few years of him taking secret night classes Loretta will in turn be presented with a monumental fresco depicting the food she prepares as one of the infernal torments in a Hieronymus Bosch-style hell.
(Hey! After a few months’ hiatus I’ve started up my blog again. I do something fairly similar to what Josh does, except for video game ephemera like box art, magazine covers, and advertisements. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, why not click the link in my username and check it out?)
Family Circus: Waiting for the eventual Disney Pixar movie about carpet with human emotions. Maybe the carpet is actually into being peed on. I just watched Toy Story 5 and there’s an entire character they created to make potty jokes.
@nescio: But the poem recited in the book is still called “Ten little… you know”. Or did they change that as well?
Don’t worry. That carpet is moving to a nice farmhouse upstate where it’ll be walked on and appreciated every day.
Hi feels oppressed by his ordinary bourgeois middle America lifestyle. But he can escape in his dreams! And his dreams are… still ordinary and low-ambition. You cannot escape if you cannot even imagine an out!
FC: The kids are still young and yet their rug is filthy enough to qualify as toxic waste? They might want to consider a more robust flooring like vinyl planking or cobble stones.
The Keane Kompound breaks with traditional theology arguing that not only humans have souls and consciousness but things do as well. So dancing and the heliocentric system were too unchristian but this wasn’t!?!?
@Ettorre: Ok, I read And Then There Were None in 1981 or 1982, so if I’m recalling it correctly, in that version the poem was “Ten Little Indians”, which was also used as an alternate title in some other versions. I had thought that was the original title of the book. It wasn’t.
Even when Leroy fantasises about having multiple women, he falls back into the dread of having multiple mothers-in-law. This is either depression or a fetish
@Ettorre: I don’t recall the racist rhyme in the ATTWN version I read in the 1990s, it might already have been the “10 Little Soldiers”. There’s a section on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None#Motivating_rhyme
@nescio: Yes, I remember when Ten little Indians was the most common title. “And then there were none” is a relatively recent change. But I have seen a recent manga adaptation where they changed the poem to “ten little soldiers”
@CanuckDownSouth: Ah yes, that’s what I saw recently
FC: Actually all seven of the panels involve the carpet being peed on. “But in the panel on the top left, isn’t P.J. wearing a diaper?” Oh my sweet summer child, wait until you learn the damage having four melon-headed babies wreaks on a mother’s pelvic floor muscles.
The Funkyverse is set in an alternative universe where there are no meds for depression but each pun release a dose of endorphins (the worse the pun, the bigger the release)
It’s a well known factoid (though in fact apocryphal) that Soseki Natsume argued that “I love you” is too strong a word in Japanese, so “I love you” in English should be translated in Japanese as “The moon is beautiful tonight”. So Jeff is using poetry to tell his wife that he doesn’t love her. Still better than a pun!
*What* is this little desk that Loretta is depicted in front of?
Marvin: How does it feel now that the shit is on the other foot?
MW: Toby is holding a box labelled ‘Bucatini’ meaning little hole in Italian. Is that to imply she has the proverbial “hole-in-her-head? but it’s just a little one? She may be dumb but not that dumb? These understated clues are a bit confusing. There’s something to be said about the ‘in-your-face’ lack of subtlety in Moy’s Wilbur stories.
@Ettorre: Yes, well apparently the original title was “Ten Little _________”, the missing word beginning with an “N”.
LUANN: Sweet. Luann, cleans up Puddles’s messes and Puddles cleans up those of Shannon. Community
BF: Sweet. Hire daughter to work with Maeve so daughter can learn the business. Unless they mentor her, nameless daughter will be lost . Community.
@nescio: Yeah, there’s the mildly racist version everyone assumes it got changed from, and there’s the really extremely racist version that that got changed from.
Overheard in Crankshaft HQ: “Draw a moonscape with clouds over it. Your usual style, put a little extra effort into it maybe. The punchline is ‘It looks like a bad painting.’ …what did you call me?”
FC: That puppy (Barfy?) is pooping, not peeing.
H&I: It’s tough drawing a strip with multiple characters when you can only render one face.
“That’s no moon, it’s a . . . .”
“I want a divorce.”
FC: Starting at the top going clockwise: captions cropped from the original art.
Billy reads pictorial instructions from IKEA. Invents the Järvfjället
Thel vacuums up pubes from her and Bil’s traditional under the tree Xmas eve boink
Billy tells Barfy “Wait for me!” Pulls down pants
Jeffy gets his first of many golden showers
The Keanes use a stolen curb stop as a flatscreen TV stand
Billy cheats his siblings out of their Christmas money
Thel finds a random baby wandering around their apartment
Cranky — “Yeah, It looks just like a bad painting.”
Drawn by whom, exactly?
@nescio:
If you actually type that word out in a comment will it automatically get rejected? Apparently using the word fuck is completely fine but that N word is censored. What other words are automatically cut out from the comments here?
FC – This seems like the sort of fantasy that could make people become hoarders. “I CAN’T throw away my old baby toys! Think how betrayed they would feel, after all the happiness they brought me!”
Lockhorns – The Lockhorns bowl at the last remaining alley that still employs human pinsetters. Unfortunately, after the pinsetters’ union called one strike too many, management got fed up and brought in automation.
Don Abundio, translated:
“How come you’ve been walking Monin so much lately?”
“All the women adore him, pet him, and talk baby talk to him”
“I figure if I copy everything he does, maybe they’ll treat me the same way!”
@TimP: Many dogs squat to pee, it’s not limited to females either.
Hi And Lois: “Daddy’s on a drug trip again!” “Hopefully this is a good one and Mommy doesn’t have to get the gun like last time!”
Family Circus: Today’s Family Circus decides to radically challenge the series’ ostensibly Christian roots and become a advocate for animism.
Lockhorns: Too bad Leeroy’s foot went an inch over the line. No matter how much he was enjoying his fantasies of killing his mother-in-law, he’s gonna have to mark it zero or John Goodman will blow his head off.
Crankshaft: “I fucking HATE having a nice quiet evening stargazing with my wife! It fucking enrages me! I’d rather be watching an old man do bad puns with a cartoon robot >:(“
@Ettorre: According to Wikipedia (or was it TvTropes) Agatha Christie books have been censored inside-and-out. So undoubtably the poem in the book was altered as well?
@ectojazzmage: Kind of funny, my mind didn’t initially go to The Big Lebowski, but rather the bowling scene in “The Flintstones Movie” (which also starred John Goodman)
Hi and Lois: Maybe that outfielder’s a Little League ringer!
It must be really rewarding to work for Batuik.
Hey Davis, maybe draw a comic about unfunny, egotistical nerds who failed as middle school English teachers.
Crankshaft: Aren’t they witnessing the robot invasion from afar? We are sticking with the plot, right? I’d be in a bad mood if that was smoke from Akron in the distance.
MW: I see this limping towards the lamest surprise anniversary party catered with Mary’s crusty muffins, ever.
Batiuk’s wife dies of Cancer, he writes a terrible comic strip.
(Castlevania) Dracula’s wife is burnt at the stake for falling in love with a vampire, so he wages war on humanity with the legions of Hell at his side.
Dracula is more likeable than Batiuk here.
@The Rambling Otter: Yes, she herself made changes, removing the mild antisemitism of some pre-war books. The problem with Ten Little You Know is that it is a pre-existing poem and it needs to scan the meter
One conclusion I’ve drawn from this site is that Tom Batiuk is just the most annoying human in comics.
H&L: “He’s lost in his ‘field of dreams,'” said the grade-school-aged child born decades after Field of Dreams came out.
FC: And there goes Harold, about to resell the Keanes’ carpet to some other poor sucker. A little Febreze, and you’d never know.
‘horns: “I am motivated in life by my singular hatred of your mother. So … sex later?”
‘shaft: “Let’s not talk about the moon or the clouds. In fact, let’s never talk again.”
The original 1945 film version, the only one worth seeing, was titled And Then There Were None. All the remakes (and there were a lot of them) were called Ten Little Indians.
BF: The guy’s French, so of course they’re going to “retire and start a boutique winery.” It could just as easily be “a turnip farm” as the turnip fields have also been in his family for generations, but I guess that’s not French and fancy enough.
Slut Friend sees herself hostessing genteel parties where her friends and guests exchange witty repartee and knock back the exquisite wine they make in the backyard, not keeping the books and managing all the employees. Or maybe she figures she’ll be stomping the grapes and moving enormous casks and bottling the wine and pasting on the labels with her own hands. She’ll be retired! All this will be so much fun!
Okay, I’m firmly on the side of Poubelle, or whatever the daughter’s name is. Her plan is to rent the vineyards out to E & J Gallo Brothers to create cheap commercial plonk they’ll blend with whatever other bulk wine they make and sell to Americans in enormous glass jugs. Those boys pay good money.
@Ettorre: “I’m not an addict! I can quit anytime I… wonton to!” *gets dragged away by orderlies at the rehab center*
@Anonymous: There are absolutely still grandparents (or great-grandparents) out there that do what Josh is making fun of. They’re just more and more vanishingly rare, reflecting how the newspaper comics in general have an increasingly shrinking audience.
@Ken: This whole arc is gonna be like Death of a Salesman with Toby playing Willy Loman.
@CanuckDownSouth: Someone else made a similar suggestion a few days ago. If this does end up being some kind of series finale for Rex Morgan or just a changeover in writers, then it’s pretty hilarious that the huge emotional climax of Beatty’s tenure on the comic was two dipshits spending over a month talking in circles about doing crimes only to chicken out and run away when their decrepit granddad told them not to do crimes. Truly, an epic conclusion to this mythos.
@Ettorre: It was also “Ten Little Soldiers” in the 2015 BBC miniseries, which was quite good–and freed from the Hays Office-era mindset which forced a happy ending into so many adaptations.