Whoa!
I know things get a bit rushed sometimes, what, with everyone’s busy schedule but what in the heck is going on with the human form in today’s strip?!
P1. Coach is literally as wide as he is tall. Jarod looks like he swallowed an ironing board while Wedgeman… whoa, dude, is your head even attached!?
P2. Wedgeman suddenly has the body of an 80 year old man while Coach’s legs deflate like two leaking innertubes as Jarod devolves even further…
P3. It’s the Geico Caveman!
Son of Stuck Funky 
Hey look, gang, it’s Wedgeman, yet another WHS student who never graduates! Unless this is a different frail-ankled, scrawny-legged bully with the same last name as Owen & Cody’s tormentor from last year. Nice “KICK” too, by the way, looks like it traveled all of three yards.
Re: Bull’s ass in panel one…one of those things you just cannot “un-see”. Thanks for that, Tom.
Hey, a teacher encouraging the asshole jock’s cruelty towards a sullen, trenchcoat-wearing loner. This will end well…
All this promises to be as bad as the reality TV show arc. I am so excited to see how horribly this all turns out!
Even though Trenchy gets balder every day, I think he’s becoming my favorite character.
tfhackett: I noticed that odd peculiarity as well. The whole perspective there is weird too, it looks like the ball came to rest on a slope of some kind. And why did Wedgeman kick the ball that way? Is he just breaking balls or is he just a really poor placekicker?
The art is really out of control today, with all those creepy spindly legs, that strange “mother hen” pose by Bull in panel two and Bull’s “ass eyes” in panel one. And Wedgeman is a total train wreck with that chin of his, yikes.
I want to see Jarod’s mother come to school to yell at Coach for forcing her child to participate in barbaric competetive sports. I am picturing her as an elderly female version of Jarod in a pink trench coat.
I wonder if Jarod is the kid that was in the gay prom arc, behind the castle. Probably not or I just gave Tb an idea.
>>Hey, a teacher encouraging the asshole jock’s cruelty towards a sullen, trenchcoat-wearing loner. This will end well…<<
Now wait one minute!
Today's comic depicts "Coach:" Bushka handling a contemporary issue affecting a young adult in a thought-provoking and sensitive manner.
I am sure it will turn out well by Westview standards.
BULL: Why didn’t you bully jocks tell me there’s no such thing as a featherweight football league BEFORE I put you on an extreme diet regimen?
WEDGEMAN: We did, coach! And you said, “Shut up, you stupid lazy teenagers, or I’ll have you expelled!”
BULL: Shut up, you stupid lazy teenager, or I’ll have you expelled!
Then he picks up the ball throws it back 100 yards and hits the coach in the balls and becomes the winning QB that takes them to the championship.
Off all the movies that Batiuk could rip off….he chooses the plot of Waterboy?
Man, J-Rod looks like a 1980’s era KGB agent in these panels. I half expect him to ask Bull if he knows where Krasny Oktoyabr is located.
Panel 1 appears to be the “wrong” illustration from a poster about good posture.
OK, so Posey saunters off, Bull screaming at him to “move it”, turning redder with each syllable . Posey retrieves the ball, coolly lights a Marlboro, and hums a rocket into Bull’s ample target zone. Posey suffers heart failure from too much smoking and keels over dead. Bull, hit squarely in the solar plexus immediately loses consciousness and suffers a series of strokes, leaving him dead as well. Meanwhile, Wedgeman is struck by lightning. Yup. Dead. Fade to… Les, furiously taking notes.
“Sadly, he didn’t have books to purchase at his table. He mentioned he used to bring books and often they just sat there.”
Tom Batiuk at San Diego ComicCon 2013
Jarod in panel 3 also looks quite a bit like Nicolas Cage.
–Jarod in panel 3 also looks quite a bit like Nicolas Cage.—
or Ray Dennis Steckler.
So, Tom Batiuk signs autographs with a picture of his character not as he is, but as he was, when the strip was funnier.
Speaking of funny…I honestly don’t see how there’s anything approaching a joke in today’s episode. The bully kicks the ball away, and yells at Jarod to get it, and Bull tells Jarod to get it? I know picking the humor out of a given FW strip is like spotting a particular fly in a ten-acre garbage dump, but most days I can see “Well, if I was lazy and just wanted to churn something out, I could see how that might constitute ‘humor.'” Not today, though.
TFHackett: Stories like that sometimes make me feel a little bad for ol’ TB. Then I go back and read a few FWs and the feeling goes away.
I’m sure we’ll all be laughing at these gags once we read them in context back-to-back in the softbound anthology — or is only Tom Batiuk laughing when someone actually buys one of those?