“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”
Matthew 26:34
“I’ve just alerted all of our friends…” Hey Westview, you’ve got mail! Frankie and his “reality TV crew” (Lenny with a camcorder) are coming to get some dirt on St. Lisa. Not so as to waste any time, the “crew” does away with advance calls and pre-interviews and just shows up on the doorstep rolling film. Rather than flat-out telling Frankie to GTFO, they’ve been instructed by wise Les just to play dumb; i.e., to lie. Funky follows these instructions to the hilt, practically channeling his senile father. Bull, as always, is able to get by with physical intimidation: “Never heard of her.” SLAM! And Crazy Harry’s just dim; doesn’t realize that Lisa Crawford is that Lisa.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Wasn’t Lisa a gawky girl with glasses and a granny hairstyle in high school? I think Lenny unwittingly hit the nail on the head.
Of course rather than just be honest and say “I don’t want to be interviewed,” the good people of Westview have taken to yanking Frankie’s chain for their own amusement. Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!
Aaaauugghhhh, as Charlie Brown might say. Everyone remembers her as Lisa Moore, you dumb fucks. Batiuk wants to make Frankie a date rapist and emasculate him at the same time. Lisa wasn’t his girlfriend, she was a brief fling.
Anybody want to picture Les’s blog? I can’t imagine him using e-mail or instant messaging to alert the bloated crew that Frankie’s coming.
so i guess batty is done with crankshit crew,i can’t even remember seeing them our did i miss day ??
Um, apparently these guys haven’t heard about how memories need to be greased by money in their palms.
Maybe it’s just a relief to get away from the incredibly touchy subject of rape, but I didn’t hate this one. I even kinda like the way Frankie’s face is twisted in anger in the Crazy Harry panel; dude’s one denial away from strangling someone. Malignantly.
Quoting Matthew changed everything, though. XD That’s gold.
Well as dumb as it is. Playing dumb at the moment might actually be smart:P. Cause we all know Batiuk’s gonna drag this so we’ll see the two people who helped Lisa get Darin adopted and then we’ll probably see the part where they record them calling Frankie a rapist
Wait, but this is… this is not how you… you can’t… it isn’t… adda… wibba…
The saddest thing about this one is how Les’ moronic pals need to be TOLD to ignore some dimwit wandering around town asking questions about Lisa. The other saddest thing about it is everything else.
Basically repeating my post on NJ (will that site be consistent with whether they moderate all comments or not!).
This actually isn’t necessarily a bad way to handle the problem except that Frank can just edit it to look like they’re refusing to talk about a dark secret involving her.
And Lenny may or may not be African American in this strip!
Of course, there are probably already posters up all over town for this year’s Lisa Walk…
Here’s what I don’t get: in Act III, Batiuk treats Lisa like a goddess; yet in Act I and Act II, he seemed to take special glee in tormenting her: teen pregnancy, getting blown up, breast cancer TWICE… her final days “I can’t see! I can’t see!” was the equivalent of an ant being tortured to death by a kid with a magnifying glass.
That’s actually a common symptom of Mary Sueism. The more the character suffers, the more we feel sorry for them, the nobler they must be… supposedly. It’s basically confusing sympathetic and good.
OK, so NOW, how ’bout a made- for- TV movie about the plucky little town that banded together to preserve the sacred memory of yada, yada, you know, etc.
S.P. Charles: Lisa has always been the martyr, more concerned about the suffering of others than with her own, always fighting for the oppressed and so forth. And, like a few other legendary martyrs of note, after she died she ascended to godlike, mythic status. In the strip she was Les’ savior, rescuing him from a lifetime of nerdy bachelorhood. And in “real life” she was FW’s savior, rescuing it from gag-a-day mediocrity and etc (guffaw). Her death also inspired a popular book, a book with a devoted cult of followers and a select few have claimed to have communicated with her from beyond the grave. But it’s all done with such delicate understatement that you hardly notice it at all (chortle).
If you re-read today’s strip and pretend the locals are covering up a secret Lisa-worshipping death cult, it’s way more interesting and funny that way. I think FW would be far more popular if he went “Mad Libs” with it and just left all the word balloons blank for the readers to fill in themselves. He certainly has nothing to lose by trying it.
“Lisa Crawford? Yeah, she died about 6 or 16 years ago or something like that, and we all say Good Riddance! Oh, and Fuck Les Moore! Can we be on record as saying that, too?”
Oh, and does Frankie (Batiuk) not realize that Reality TV is scripted in advance? That’s so cute.
Inkwell and Epicus, I hear what you’re saying, but during Act II, the sense I got was not that Batiuk was preparing Lisa for sainted martyrdom, but that for some reason he really, really hated this character. Like she was a stand-in for an ex-wife or something.
What’s kind of interesting here is that not only does TB turn the entire town of Westview into a community of liars…he also turns Ste. Lisa into a liar.
I thought the final strip in the “Darin discovers his skank mother” arc had her saying “Just make sure you use precaution, unlike me…” or something to that effect.
In other words, according to 2013, “Yeah, I was totally raped, but I didn’t ask my rapist to use protection…I think that’s what most rape victims request and I just dropped the ball on that one!” Smacks bald forehead. “Got me on that one!”
The end.
Thank God…
P.S. @ Becks – Thanks for validating my shit attitude toward Batiuk’s retcons and their lame acceptance on SoSF.
“Do I know Lisa “Flounder” Crawford, the crazy looking chick with both eyes on one side of her head?” *shudder* “Nope, can;t say as I do. But now Jessica’s father, John Darling, not let me tell you….”
BUT… Remember that terrible series of events that occured at “The Lighthouse”…… Whatever happened to that “guy”?
I can’t help but think Kerry will have something to do in all of this….oh and Kahn too! And, summer and jinx and Pete and mouch…chien…Toni….Buddy…Wally jr. …Cory….All of them!
I think Frankie is making the wrong show here. He should be making a show about the weird city of Westview and its slavish devotion to one of its dead residents, and that some are able to still converse with her. He can also show that the economy seems to run on pizza and comic books, and that a torrential downpour always happens during the school’s Battle of the Bands.
I hate to say this, but I still don’t think this plotline is over. We still have the revelation from Lisa’s diary.
S.P. Charles: IMO what he really hated about Lisa was that she failed to capture his reader’s imaginations as he had hoped she would. No one liked her as much as he did, so he amped up the cheesy melodrama as much as he could in an attempt to force his readers to love her. That was why he went so far over the top in depicting her as the embodiment of selflessness and why he’d constantly place her in “peril”, just to generate sympathy. Which is why he eventually took it all the way and killed her off, basically saying “I DARE you to not love her NOW”.
@S.P. Charles: That’s a possibility, given how vile and mean-spirited this comic is. She probably only became a martyr after death because that makes Les more sympathetic, now that I think about it. After all, everything goes back to him.
Well, I originally Lisa was a means to lionize Les through the teen pregnancy story, where Les was such a great guy because he was the only one who treated her decently and helped her out when everyone else was condemning or abandoning her.
But at some point, because she was the focus of all these “serious” storylines, which got him cred from shallow-reading observers, he started to love Lisa as much or more than Les. She was the one defending Gross John and comic books as a serious medium. She was the one who suffered through cancer saintfully. She was the one who enabled him to get his hard on about being a serious writer; someone superior to all the other unserious comic strip writers like Schulz and Watterson and Larson (and other lesser luminaries, of course).
Which brings us back to this storyline, which was probably conceived solely for retconning the one unsaintly moment in Lisa’s history, so she will have no moments of bad judgment or poor decisions in her life, and if that makes her a noble victim and a means to shine his “serious writer” knob some more, all the better. He originally tried to do it by showing Lisa regretting having Darin right to his face by urging the use of contraceptives, but that wasn’t sufficient. Indeed, while that’s admirable advice to give, it merely confirmed her imperfections and that’s just not the Lisa TB wants in his comic.
Wait… are they lizard-like humanoids, or just people who are really into lizards? Because both kinda freak me out.
Well… that comment went pear-shaped.
IGNORE ME!!
Dear Tom:
In real life, adults know far more folk than a tiny selection of the people they went to high school with.
In real life, there are brutally effective ways to goad people into granting personal info. And a devoted con artist would know these techniques.
In real life, nobody -really- feels the way you do about Lisa.
Just sayin’.
Westview Omertà!
This makes no sense. Funky, Bull and Crazy *can’t* deny they knew Lisa because they are all in Les’s book, which Frankie obviously has a copy! “Funky you didn’t know Lisa? Let me show you page 226 of Lisa’s Story where your wife is helping Lisa when she’s sick, and you were there!”
Hmmmm……I actually would like to see a reality show about a one-stoplight suburb of Cleveland that made a saint of a rather unremarkable woman who died of a sadly common disease despite her claims to sainthood being suspect. As a for instance, anyone with two clues to rub together would realize that if she’d bothered with chemo, she’d have a really good shot of still being alive right now. That doesn’t say ‘saint’ to me….it says ‘melodramatic idiot who died a futile, theatrical and needless death.’
You know, I thought, originally, because the stupid strip seemed to suggest this, that the “reality show” was some front for Frankie to scam/extort money from Les and his Lisa Gravy Train. Lord knows from his ominous stalking at the beginning of the arc to his smirks and his insistence that Darin be on board for his plan, you’d think it’d be something sinister. Wanting to pursue his dream by making a reality show about his experiences really doesn’t pass that sinister test. As people have noted, it’s really no different or any more callously exploitative of Lisa’s experience than what Les has been doing.
So I was a bit surprised to see that Frankie is going on ahead with it. This is apparently his plan.
Everything about this storyline is stupid.