My Cage "Classic" 07/19/2009

I thought Batiuk made it clear that Bull (the CTE sufferer) killed himself, as he was wearing a helmet when they found him. Read: He wanted them to find him with his brain intact.

Freezer

Man, this opens up so many trapdoors... I will try not to rant too long or loud. I used to read FW when it first came out. My most vivid picture from these strips is Les as a hall monitor, sitting at one of those high school desks with a WWII era, water-cooled Vickers machine gun bolted to it. (OK, or Crazy what'shisname, or Montoni's pizza or band turkey sales) I didn't quit reading it for any particular reason, but it WAS a newspaper only strip at the time and MOST comics from that era kinda slipped away from my attention. If I didn't take it back up again in later years, I think it was only because it seemed too much to invest to unravel all the history I had missed. Anyway, in defence of FW, and, really, almost every strip out there, in the end it (they) are just, after all, comic strips. Whether serious, or antic or anyplace in between, they have only 4 panels, if they're lucky, on a daily basis, (remembering that Sundays don't really seem to count as far as continuity goes), so 24 panels a week, to make you laugh or cry or think, or go read something else, this last of which they try to avoid at all costs. This needs to be kept in mind when judging the work of any comic strip artist(s). (And, if you've even looked at an actual newspaper printed comic strip these days, they are roughly the size of postage stamps. Thank God for the Internet.) And as for content, really, even if the artists are extremely good, there is only so much you can depict within the framework of a comic strip. That comic strips are as good as they are is a testament to the artists who have created them. So, when an artist expands out of his comfort zone, you have to at least respect the effort, given the incredible restrictions that a daily comic format imposes on the work. OK. Rant done. Goodnight Funky, wherever you are.

Jon Benson

I agree with Brian. My feeling is that the strip was punching above its weight when it handled serious topics. The Author meant well but in my opinion is that he simply did not have the writing chops to pull these off. For example, the strip’s most famous arc, Lisa’s dying of cancer was nothing but a misery wallow, made more problematic by Lisa’s passive acceptance. Then, after Lisa died, he time-jumped the strip forward ten years, which to me, argues an unwillingness to deal with uncomfortable feelings things like grief. And, he did that more than once. Another dealt with a character who was suffering from CTE. One thinks he committed suicide but you really weren’t sure from the storytelling. And, by the end of the arc, he dramatically shorted the denouement and changed the focus away from CTE to the fact that the character was a bully in high school. The strip just did not work – and that sadly is why when it ended, there was almost no awareness of it. The most common reaction was ‘Really? It was still going?”