This is totally babies

One of our twin boys, Chase, had to spend a few days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit because he was having trouble regulating his blood sugar. (They hooked him up to an IV which fed him sugar water for a while and then dropped it off little by little until his blood sugar was stable – it’s not an uncommon problem for a late preterm baby.)

But just outside the NICU, on the wall of the waiting room, is a framed collection of old Funky Winkerbean strips from back when Summer, Les and Lisa Moore’s daughter, was a preemie. My god, these are horrifying. And, like, they’re designed to be. So many final panels where we’re supposed to believe that Summer is dead, only for it to be revealed in the next day’s strip that, naw, she’s cool, through either mundane or ridiculous reveals. Like Les seeing an empty incubator, somehow missing seeing his wife holding their baby like five feet to the left until the following strip. I mean, how does that train of narrative work, anyway? What, Les believed his child was dead and they let him come on in and see her incubator and figgered it’d be easier for him to find out that way?

But I understand that this is important to some people. The trials of having a preemie aren’t addressed much in media, or at least they weren’t years and years ago when this ran in the newspaper. It’s probably nice to see a reflection of what you’re going through SOMEWHERE. That’s probably why that sequence is framed up on the wall of the NICU. And for that reason, I wouldn’t want them taken down.

Yet here’s where those strips don’t work for me, personally, and where I became angry. The final week of the sequence, as Lisa and Les finally take Summer home, is this week long troll. In each strip, we’re given a few panels of the happy family, and then a final panel where we see an unknown person sneaking into their house, looking at them approaching through the blinds, and culminating in a final cliffhanger where Lisa comes through the door, sees the intruder, and shouts “YOU!”

And it’s just her goddamned parents.

(who she gets along with)

((WHO THE FUCK EXCLAIMS “YOU?!?!?!” WHEN THEY SEE THEIR LOVING PARENTS))

That just colors the whole story badly for me. The juxtaposition of “Les has many cliffhangers where he worries his premature daughter is dead but we find out she’s all right tomorrow” and “we think somebody’s breaking into their apartment to attack them but it’s just the kindly grandparents” just makes the whole thing seem fucking disingenuous. Does Batiuk really want to make us understand what parents of preemies go through, or is this, like the bait-and-switch with the “intruders,” him tricking the readership because he loves tricking the readership, but using an infant’s life as currency.

I don’t like cliffhangers in bad faith. If you are purposefully misleading your readers just so in the next strip you can go HAW HAW GOT YOU, that’s not… good. And seeing that kind of shit using an NICU setting IN an NICU setting with my 2-day-old child in there was not a pleasant experience.

funky winkerbean babies

See more posts like this on Tumblr

#funky winkerbean #babies

More you might like

When you’re up all night with sleeping babies, you sometimes have a lot of time to yourself that you might not know how to spend. For example, you might end up spending a non-zero amount of time tooling around on Google Maps trying to find out which section of road the cartoonist sought out for reference in last Sunday’s Funky Winkerbean.

funky winkerbean

zzedar asked:

Why do you feel so strongly about Funky Winkerbean, anyway?

I remember when I was young, and Funky Winkerbean was in the newspaper, and it was starting to talk about more serious topics. And it was cool! I liked the idea of taking something silly and then finding something deeper in it, or putting characters who are generally humorous through something serious to see how they deepen. I still like that idea, obviously, if you see the kinds of stuff I write and the kinds of stuff I like that’s made by other people (Scrubs, MTMTE, etc., stuff where the tone can shift dramatically from hilarious to depressing within the span of minutes)

But, as y’all are probably well aware, I’ve come to not like Funky Winkerbean. Stuff it does is grating and drives me up the wall. And yet this is a bunch of ridiculous characters who have terrible things happen to them and became more serious, and that’s like my jam. What’s going wrong? AND HOW DO I AVOID THIS MYSELF IN MY OWN SHIT???? And so it just becomes a workshop session, you know? Trying to examine what it’s doing badly that I can avoid like the plague. Like, it’s become this example of What Not To Do. And, honestly, it’s become pretty valuable to me in that respect!

The most important lesson it’s imparted on me is this:

Manage the bad things that happen to your characters as if it’s a bank account. You first spend a while building capital on a character, and then when you’re ready, you make that withdrawal from the Bad Stuff Bank. The problem you want to avoid is to not keep withdrawing and withdrawing and withdrawing from the Bad Stuff Bank that you stop remembering to put shit back in. Eventually your nerve endings are all frayed and you don’t even remember why the fuck you liked this character to begin with. They haven’t even been themselves for forever, and they’ve just become a person-shaped object to heap Bad Stuff on. The story ceases being about the character and becomes about the overdrawing from the bank itself. There’s no longer an arc, there’s just a freefall.

And some people mistake that freefall for Important Deep Writing. They point to their Bad Stuff as if it’s amazing on the face of it, not realizing nobody cares because for years now it’s been happening to a bunch of assholes.

Don’t overdraw from your Bad Stuff Bank.

Don’t be Funky Winkerbean. Or Electroma.

god, electroma

funky winkerbean

theisb

comicsalliance

FunkyWatch: August’s Most Depressing (and Confusing) ‘Funky Winkerbean’ Strips

By Chris Sims

Thanks to Josh Fruhlinger at the Comics Curmudgeon, I started reading Tom Batiuk’s long-running newspaper comic strip, Funky Winkerbean. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, what started as a strip full of wacky high-school hijinx has slowly transitioned into being an inescapable quagmire of despair. It is, without question, the single most depressing long-form work in comics history.

And I am completely obsessed with it.

Over the past month, Batiuk has reached new highs (or lows, as the case may be) in chronicling the wretched, godforsaken lives of his cast of characters, and if you’re a regular reader of this column, you’ll know that he had to pull out something special. Something even more alarming than Les Moore’s romantic entanglements. That’s right everybody — we’re talking about cross-time head trauma.

Before we get to that, though, there are still plenty of other misery-filled plot threads left over from last month that need to be resolved, specifically Les getting a movie option for the book he wrote about his wife dying of cancer. And don’t worry, just in case you forget that’s what the book was about, Batiuk offers plenty of reminders.

Anyway, you’d think this would be good news — if nothing else, Les could maybe bank a little bit of that option money for his daughter’s college fund, what with her dreams of a basketball scholarship maybe getting crushed with a painful knee injury back in February — but in Westview, there is no good news that cannot be twisted to result in still more suffering. As evidence, I give Les Moore’s glum face as he hears that having someone make a movie out of his book is an event not unlike watching someone feast on the flesh of his offspring. Welcome back to Funky Winkerbean, everybody!

Read more at ComicsAlliance.