No sooner does the much-hyped Coming Gay Prom story get underway than we take a detour into "Sundays with Crazy Harry"-land. No wonder the United States Postal Service is on the brink of bankruptcy, with goldbricks like carrier Klinghorn on the payroll. I'll overlook John's improper grammar in panel 4, to focus on what I hope is the real gag today (because the punchline sucks, as usual): in the penultimate panel, John is expressing optimism about the state of his business; meanwhile he's holding a comic book titled The Grim Ghost. Irony?
It gets better (hah!): Maybe TB is a little more clever than we give him credit for! A little more "komix" research turned up this factoid courtesy of Wikipedia:
An earlier and somewhat similar character called the Gay Ghost has since been named the Grim Ghost due to the modern connotations of the word "gay".
Is Batiuk going meta on us? Naw…probably just a coinky-dink.
Coming Tomorrow!
Wouldn't Crazy know how business is doing? He in that place only slightly less often as he is at Monotony's!
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Given how lame and stupid the pun is in the last panel, I can't help but be intrigued by the fallout shelter sign on the wall. While some may consider it a type of ironic wall art. I actually tend to subscribe to the idea that the comic shop was actually indeed a fall out shelter made by the paranoid denizens of Westview way back when. Given the plethora of cancer cases in the area, it seems they are well founded.
And no…. I could care less about Tom Batiuks little "meta inside joke-whatever" regarding the Gay-Grey-Grim-Ghouly Goats-Ghosts or whatever the hell the character is!
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The Grim Ghost of Comic Strip writers future….. but no Batdick….it doesn't have to turn out this way., what your reputation soiled and spat upon as the inept trite it has become as of late.
Just be kind…create characters people can cheer for not hate.
IF NOT… the Grim Ghost will be knock knock knocking on your back door.
Go ahead, answer it.
Ah Mr Police man what makes America great?
(sorry, couldn't help it)
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I thought Lisa was the "Grim Ghost"? Yet another strip built entirely around a bit of god-awful wordplay that (ahem) SOMEONE found witty and clever. And leave it to Westview to put their fallout shelter on the second floor of a pizza joint. I guess they assumed everyone would just die faster that way.
I would figure that owning a comic book store (and/or an oncology clinic) would be a recession-proof business in ol' Westview-town.
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Once again, it's not so much that Batiuk has given us a slow build to stupid punchline… it's the fact that he omits all context for the joke. What the hell does any of this dialogue mean?
"How's business these days?" Oh, pretty damn good ever since you spent your daughter's college savings on that Tarzan collection. Oh, wait — he bought that from a third party online, didn't he? Never mind. Business is bad, man… real bad. For one thing, no one else is ever here.
"The recession hit us pretty hard." Meaning… what, exactly? Example, please? Show, don't tell.
"Things have slowly been coming back." See above paragraph.
"Light at the end of the bat-cave." Huh? A cave with an end is not a cave, it's a tunnel. And a donut without a hole is a danish. And a Funky Winkerbean strip without a punchline is par for the course.
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It's gotten to the point where I'm looking forward to the lame smirking puns of the Sunday strips, just because I know there won't be any smug moralizing on gay rights involved.
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Actually, most direct market comic shops are doing far, far worse than ever now, to the point that most can't afford to carry any book that doesn't feature the big name characters.
But I guess as long as Skunk Head here has a secret audience for his black market Tarzan collections, furry porn, and valuable golden age comics that sometimes exist, but not when he needs to pay his rent, he'll be able to squeak by!
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Skunkhead John in the first panel and the last panel: WTF does this certified loser have to smirk about? Honestly, I can't think of a single character in this effing strip that I don't hate out loud!
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By the way, I just want to point out that my local paper hasn't carried Flunky Wankerbone for years. Today's episode shows, in part, why. There's no storyline. There's no joke. The cave/tunnel attempted PUNchline was as bad a swing and a miss as when Goatee Boy attempted to hit a slow-pitch softball last Summer and took a ball in the face. (Yay, ball!)
This is filler, and it's crap. It doesn't even come up to BatCrap's usual standard of lameness. And why does Bat Hack spend FOUR panels of dialog setting up this moronic PUNchline only to have Pudgy Pervboy add a superfluous comment? Oh, right. I forgot. "Writing."
I'd love it if the next hard-hitting journalist who interviews him for some Ahia supermarket rag asks him if he's aware of how utterly creepy Skunkhead (or as I call him, Seaweedhead) is. Seriously, someone tell me, what the hell is on his head? Is it shaved on the sides and grown out on top? Is it naturally gray on the sides and heavily dyed on top? Is it a weird toupee? IS it actually a dead skunk? A live one? In any case, nobody over the age of 15 should have that kind of hairdo going on.
If he were a normal looking guy running a comic shop, I'd say hey whatever — he runs a business dealing in material he's familiar with. But here's a guy who dresses like a teen and has hair like a teen, and is in a business likely to attract teens. Throw in a hefty portion of "meat face" and you have a registered sex offender. Know what's REALLY creepy? BatYuck doesn't see this character as creepy. That's what weirds me out the most.
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Today's "called a comic through an accident of history" seems to exist only so TomBat can draw a dude wearing tight pants.
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" in a business likely to attract teens. "
Not for almost 20 years, Beanie. That's part of why direct market comic shops are dying in droves. The last time even a minority of teens shopped in such shops was the 90s. Now days, teens either pick up trade collections at the big chain book stores, purchase much cheaper and more convenient digital downloads (evil technoology strikes again!) or are more interested in Asian and European comics thanks to the exposure brought on by the big chain stores and the popularity of certain international franchises.
The typical customer of a store like John's is (sigh) Crazy Harry, part of an aging, jaded, rapidly vanishing fanbase.
Why has Marvel sold itself to Disney? Why has DC so desperately tried to radically reinvent its image? That's why. Neither can survive on what the direct market gives. And it's a pity, as the direct market stores in decades past were once havens for more unique, expressive, less commercial projects. No more.
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Thanks for the info, John.
So maybe, in a way, you are saying Skunkhead is also a failure at trolling for underage boys. But he has had Cody and Owen sniffing around. Must be more of that "writing" I keep hearing about!
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How does Crazy Harry's family eat? Does he force them to subsist on leftover pizza crusts and non-mint "Tarzan" comics? Or did they all starve to death because he spends all his pay at Montoni's and Dead Skunk Head's comics lair?
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