Son Of Masky McDeath: A Winkerbean Travesty.
As you might recall, most people would agree that one of the stupidest decisions Tom Batiuk has ever made in his career was to try to turn his mildly amusing strip about the students and faculty of a third-rate high school in the Cleveland area into Serious Business. Most people would think better of him than they do now were Funky Winkerbean were to be a sort of cross between the Archie comic strip and Beetle Bailey but he doesn't see it that way. He clearly seems to hunger for the legitimacy he wants so bad, he can taste it and the only way he seems to see getting it is to inflict horrible calamities on his cast to be thought well of and also to make life better for his audience by curing them of what he sees as a bad habit: wanting to laugh once in a while instead of living in a world of pointless bleating and whining about how bad life is. One would assume given statements he's made in the press that he believes that only by admitting that the world is a horrible place in which everyone is crushed down and helpless can people live life to its fullest.
He would simply be another irritating dolt boring people to death and stirring up apathy were it not for another horrible tendency of his: being a vindictive clod using his strip to lash out in impotent rage at people having a better time than he has. The main character lives an armpit of a life in the here and now because life was easier for him as a kid than it was for Batiuk's self-portrait Les Moore. It matters not that Les was and is an oblivious dolt who never met a social norm he could understand, Funky has to be smitten with the Mighty Fist Of Ham because people in the real world wanted little to do with a moody goof jabbering about comic books.
This is why we are about to be subjected to the end-game of a very long failed prestige arc in which Batiuk avenges himself against what he calls sportos and what everyone else in the world calls jocks by finally killing off Bull Bushka after years of tormenting him with Sports Brain Damage. For years, people who have had to live with relatives suffering from mental decline have been aggravated by Batiuk's refusal to do research on the subject and treating it like something of a joke. They're really going to love the stupid reason why Bull ends his suffering (whatever it turns out to be) and the character's stomach-turning reaction to it. It's going to be like watching a train wreck made of dumpster fires.
He would simply be another irritating dolt boring people to death and stirring up apathy were it not for another horrible tendency of his: being a vindictive clod using his strip to lash out in impotent rage at people having a better time than he has. The main character lives an armpit of a life in the here and now because life was easier for him as a kid than it was for Batiuk's self-portrait Les Moore. It matters not that Les was and is an oblivious dolt who never met a social norm he could understand, Funky has to be smitten with the Mighty Fist Of Ham because people in the real world wanted little to do with a moody goof jabbering about comic books.
This is why we are about to be subjected to the end-game of a very long failed prestige arc in which Batiuk avenges himself against what he calls sportos and what everyone else in the world calls jocks by finally killing off Bull Bushka after years of tormenting him with Sports Brain Damage. For years, people who have had to live with relatives suffering from mental decline have been aggravated by Batiuk's refusal to do research on the subject and treating it like something of a joke. They're really going to love the stupid reason why Bull ends his suffering (whatever it turns out to be) and the character's stomach-turning reaction to it. It's going to be like watching a train wreck made of dumpster fires.