Archive: Funky Winkerbean

Monday, Nov 30, 2009 Comments are closed

Pool party NIGHTMARE

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Mary Worth, 11/30/09

At last, the long, dragged-out saga of Adrian and Scott and Adrian’s Hesitation To Love and Scott’s Many Bullet Wounds is over. (And how did you do in faithful reader 8th Man Fan’s pool? See the results online here, or download them in an OpenOffice or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet!) As is the style of this feature, the details of the new story will emerge at a Charterstone Pool Party, and I’m very excited to see that said new story will involve Mary’s long-neglected neighbor Wilbur Weston, who, for an extra added bonus, has just had his heart ripped from his sweaty, hairy chest (metaphorically), as his girlfriend has skipped town without him. I’m guessing that Mary is oh-no-ing not because Wilbur is sad (as Wilbur’s sadness is hilarious), but rather because, as Charterstone’s resident manager, she was supposed to make sure that Iris hadn’t trashed her apartment before leaving in the dead of night, as one might be prone to do after God knows how many months in a relationship with Wilbur Weston.

Anyhoo, today’s strip is quite satisfying not just because it presages Wilbur’s long-term humiliation, but because it features Ian Cameron in his most outrageous pool party outfit yet. He pays a lot in condo fees and works hard reading years-old lecture notes on Robert Burns to bored undergraduates, damn it, and he deserves to unwind a little, and if that means matching up a Hawaiian shirt, electric blue cargo shorts, white socks, and (invisible, but a pretty safe bet) Birkenstocks, then so be it. Toby has put on her most bland off-pink shirt-dress to make sure that nothing outshines her husband’s aggressive sartorial choices.

Wizard of Id, 11/30/09

Speaking of hirsute humanoids, today’s Wizard of Id contains what I’m pretty sure is another instance of a legacy strip forgetting its own gimmick. Perpetual prisoner Spook, I have always assumed, is portrayed as hairy because he’s been in a dank jail cell, forgotten by the outside world, for decades, and has never been allowed any kind of razor or scissors to cut his hair or otherwise groom himself because he might use them to commit suicide and end his torment. This strip, however, seems to imply that he’s not just someone with long, matted hair, but is rather a member of a particularly hairy hominid species; perhaps his detention is not a result of some long-ago act defined as a crime by Id’s repressive regime, but was dictated by racial purity laws that keep his kind out of the public’s sight. It may be that he is in fact the last of his race, which makes his request for the depiction of a comely she-Spook all the more poignant.

Mark Trail, 11/30/09

Oh, and speaking of soap strips changing storylines, usually in the transition between Mark Trail plots, Mark briefly revisits Lost Forest and spends a few days avoiding his wife’s marital advances before going out on another moronic assignment. Therefore, I’m assuming that what Rusty is warning Mark to LOOK OUT for in eight-gazillion point font is Cherry lying in wait on the side of the road in her attempt to sex-ambush him. On the other hand, they are near the ocean, so it’s possible that their car is coming under attack from a flock of vicious flying squid.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/30/09

Oh look, Peter the Sex Chameleon has made an appearance! He’s normally blond when interacting with his similarly fair wife, but can darken up when necessary to woo a raven-haired beauty. And now that he has encountered a rival for his wife’s affection, his hair has turned red, for anger! Tim’s going to need those throttling-and-punching skills soon enough.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/30/09

Funky is leading Les down into the basement so that he can feed him into the meat grinder and serve him as pepperoni on Montoni’s awful pizzas. Thus Funky Winkerbean’s feel-good holiday storyline begins!

Sunday, Nov 22, 2009 Comments are closed

It Came From The Hills

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/22/09

Wow, that big-eyed grinning severed teddy bear head in the third panel is certainly one of the more horrifying things I’ve seen today, yet it’s worth noting that, as the first panel shows, it’s only slightly less frightening while dangling detached from a dog’s jaws than it was when firmly attached to its original body. I can’t imagine ever giving such a nightmare-fueling monstrosity to a child, but I suppose that Li’l Tater will see worse things in the cesspool of incest and clan feuds that is Hootin’ Holler, so one might as well accustom the lad to horror from the get-go. And so why not attach the teddy bear head to what I assume is the skin of a real bear in some sort of unsettling hybrid? (The question of whatever became of the real head originally attached to the bearskin rug is best not thought about at any length.)

I do have to admit that the fifth panel, in which Loweezy holds the bear head gingerly by the ears and regards it dubiously while her useless husband cheerfully wanders off to get drunk on corn likker and then shoot at things, is a little masterpiece.

Mary Worth, 11/22/09

Well, it looks like Delilah’s sudden and discombobulating reappearance this week is really just meant to serve as a sort of a coda to Adrian and Scott’s story, the relevance of which I’d have an easier time parsing if I could remember what exactly the point of Delilah’s story was in the first place. Uh, true love triumphs over adversity, given enough time? Yeah, let’s go with that. Mostly I just feel bad that poor Leonard Cohen had to get dragged into this; he, along with Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova and Daniel Johnston, are victims of this strip’s ongoing attempt to destroy the reputation of various hipster indie musicians by associating them with Mary Worth.

Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 11/22/09

A man tries to relax by rediscovering his favorite music, only to receive an unwelcome reminder of his own mortality; another man suffers from recurring stress nightmares, years after being forced to retire from the job that prompted them, and wonders when they’ll finally stop haunting him. A relaxing Sunday afternoon in the Funkyverse, everybody!

Mark Trail, 11/22/09

“The ocean without kelp is like the Earth without trees. That’s why we’re harvesting all the kelp for chemical and industrial purposes. Soon there will be no more kelp, just like there will soon be no more trees!”

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/22/09

I thought that those of you who don’t read Rex Morgan except when I mention it here might enjoy this panel, which features Tim throttling the hapless Cue, who soon provided the requested information. See, torture works! Specifically, Cue told Tim that Henry and Pearl had wandered off, which means that we’ll have to endure yet more oldster pursuit across various waterlogged golf courses.

Monday, Nov 09, 2009 Comments are closed

Love and the silver screen

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Curtis, 11/9/09

This may not be interesting to anybody else (though really, what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t write about things that aren’t interesting to anybody else?), but I was sort of intrigued by Curtis’s father describing The Day After Tomorrow as a “Dennis Quaid movie.” I mean, yes, Quaid got top billing, but the film featured an ensemble cast, and you certainly wouldn’t call it a Dennis Quaid vehicle. It got me wondering whether films with large casts jockeying for screentime aren’t sort of Rorschach tests, with people seeing as most prominent the actor with whom they have the most in common. So, whereas middle-aged dad Greg Wilkins might call the film a Dennis Quaid movie, younger adults might consider it a Jake Gyllenhaal flick, whereas short sixtysomething Brits would identify it as an Ian Holm film. (As a believer in the auteur theory, I’d call it a Roland Emmerich movie myself, and who else is going out on opening day with me to see 2012, the latest from history’s greatest artiste of delightful computer-generated mass destruction? Anyone? Anyone?)

Getting back to the comic, I’m sort of amused by Curtis’s “Um, yeah” in panel three. “Dad, The Day After Tomorrow was a huge Hollywood blockbuster with an enormous marketing budget, so obviously I saw it. I’m the film industry’s perfect consumer! It’s like they grew me in a lab!”

Shoe, 11/9/09

Have you ever noticed that virtually all of Shoe’s distasteful romantic interludes are depicted as occurring in bars? I’m not just talking about the creepy courtship; even the sort of relationship talks that you’d expect to take place at home, or in the car, or in one of the more secluded booths at Pizza Hut, or really just somewhere that provides a little privacy, are instead aired out with Shoe and some interchangeable member of his cast of soul-deadened lady birds bellied up to the same bar where they presumably first set bleary, bloodshot eyes on one another. It leads one to believe each partner has someone or something at home that much be kept in the dark (e.g., children, spouse) or kept secret (e.g., porn collection, spouse) about/from the other. The logical conclusion is that the entire duration of these ephemeral relationships takes place at smoke-filled watering holes, with the drunken lovers hopefully retiring to the backseat of one of their cars to get it on rather than taking up a valuable toilet stall in the men’s room.

Marvin, 11/9/09

In somehow even more distasteful romantic news, today we learn what odor Marvin finds sexually arousing: the unguent one has smeared on one’s nether parts to soothe rashes caused by sitting in one’s own urine or feces for extended periods of time.

Marmaduke, 11/9/09

Hey, lady, don’t try to impose your square heteronormality on Marmaduke! Unfettered by humanity’s hang-ups, he’s free in his polymorphously perverse state to flirt with either the carefully groomed poodle or the big butch terrier, or both, whatever strikes his fancy. And anyway, this being Marmaduke, he’s probably not planning to “flirt with” anyone so much as to “kill and eat” them.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/9/09

Meanwhile, Wally Winkerbean, his life torn apart by a cruel twist of fate and his mind tortured by traumatic brain injury and PTSD, has decided to drink himself to death. Gonna be a fun week!