Greetings Fellow Comstoks! (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fengi) wrote,@ 2007-10-08 18:01:00 |
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The Doom That Came To Westview
Tom Batiuk is rebooting Funky Winkerbean again following the demise of his character Lisa Moore. The narrative will skip ahead 10 years, moving the original teens into their 40s with teenagers of their own. It starts with a visibly older Les remembering his life just after Lisa's funeral during a therapy session.
Batiuk is apparently doing this in part to evade the difficulty of showing Les grieving. His penchant for milking topical material, however, includes stories about Afghanistan and Iraq which anchor the strip within a few years of the present. This means the strip is now set in the future.
It's common for continuity strips to age characters more slowly than reality and out of sync with each other. Even legendary "natural time" strips Gasoline Alley and For Better Or Worse have characters older or younger than the central timeframe. Yet they are careful not to strain credulity too much. Funky Winkerbean is the first to defy internal logic en masse.
The previous leap worked as it brought an ageless 70's strip into the present. This one, not so much. It's Batiuk's gag strip approach to drama write large - disregarding his Very Special Episode realism for the sake of convenience.*
This also involves jettisoning, revising or dropping a number of plots so people wondered if it also signals a genre shift into science fiction. One can imagine Les finishing up his session and donning his hazmat suit to enter a dystopic landscape of environmental disaster. Punchline: "Ultimately, I'm glad she didn't live to see this."
Or Funky Winkerbean could progress in a How I Met Your Mother style back to the present narrative voice until the present catches up with the strip.
According to a source Batiuk gets prickly when pressed on continuity, insisting he's not doing science fiction or some extended flashback. Yet one can't wonder if the time shift can't still be explained within the story to be explained in some darker way.
Alas, Les failed to anticipate how eldritch forces summoned by the arcane rituals on the Plateau of Leng will resonate through all of Lisa's corporeal form, including that part already interred in Westview's cemetery. Thus his attempt to resurrect the pocket dimension of his school days created a cataclysm which aged him and all he had every known a decade overnight. Worse, Les was the only one left with a memory of the disaster. He tried to expunge it through therapy, but he was hamstrung by the inability to explain the true nature of his disorder without ending up in the Dinkle Asylum for the Deaf and/or Insane.
Unless Batiuk's goal was to have the most temporal surrealism and post-modern depression this side of Chris Ware, he's lost his grip on the story. Les could recover at some level in a time frame which does less violence to plausibility. It's a symptom of the absurdly downbeat pretense of Funky Winkerbean that ten years on Les is still talking about it. Such prolonged morbid introspection must have made him anawesome Dad.
Also, how weird is it to have a character narrate a story named after someone who is now a tertiary character at best? Funky Winkerbean has almost reached Barney Google status.
Tom Batiuk is rebooting Funky Winkerbean again following the demise of his character Lisa Moore. The narrative will skip ahead 10 years, moving the original teens into their 40s with teenagers of their own. It starts with a visibly older Les remembering his life just after Lisa's funeral during a therapy session.
Batiuk is apparently doing this in part to evade the difficulty of showing Les grieving. His penchant for milking topical material, however, includes stories about Afghanistan and Iraq which anchor the strip within a few years of the present. This means the strip is now set in the future.
It's common for continuity strips to age characters more slowly than reality and out of sync with each other. Even legendary "natural time" strips Gasoline Alley and For Better Or Worse have characters older or younger than the central timeframe. Yet they are careful not to strain credulity too much. Funky Winkerbean is the first to defy internal logic en masse.
The previous leap worked as it brought an ageless 70's strip into the present. This one, not so much. It's Batiuk's gag strip approach to drama write large - disregarding his Very Special Episode realism for the sake of convenience.*
This also involves jettisoning, revising or dropping a number of plots so people wondered if it also signals a genre shift into science fiction. One can imagine Les finishing up his session and donning his hazmat suit to enter a dystopic landscape of environmental disaster. Punchline: "Ultimately, I'm glad she didn't live to see this."
Or Funky Winkerbean could progress in a How I Met Your Mother style back to the present narrative voice until the present catches up with the strip.
According to a source Batiuk gets prickly when pressed on continuity, insisting he's not doing science fiction or some extended flashback. Yet one can't wonder if the time shift can't still be explained within the story to be explained in some darker way.
Alas, Les failed to anticipate how eldritch forces summoned by the arcane rituals on the Plateau of Leng will resonate through all of Lisa's corporeal form, including that part already interred in Westview's cemetery. Thus his attempt to resurrect the pocket dimension of his school days created a cataclysm which aged him and all he had every known a decade overnight. Worse, Les was the only one left with a memory of the disaster. He tried to expunge it through therapy, but he was hamstrung by the inability to explain the true nature of his disorder without ending up in the Dinkle Asylum for the Deaf and/or Insane.
Unless Batiuk's goal was to have the most temporal surrealism and post-modern depression this side of Chris Ware, he's lost his grip on the story. Les could recover at some level in a time frame which does less violence to plausibility. It's a symptom of the absurdly downbeat pretense of Funky Winkerbean that ten years on Les is still talking about it. Such prolonged morbid introspection must have made him anawesome Dad.
Also, how weird is it to have a character narrate a story named after someone who is now a tertiary character at best? Funky Winkerbean has almost reached Barney Google status.
