Yay, another flashback to another character having a baby!
Can I just say, my viewpoint is coming from someone who doesn’t have kids. The closest I’ve been to an actual delivery was watching a video in 8th grade health class on child birth. I’m not trying to discount the wonder of having a baby and the whole bringing a new life into the world and so on.
My only question is, what is Tombat actually bringing to the table here that’s new, or even amusing? Other directed? What does that even mean?
Today’s strip lack of sepia tone actually is the one thing the strip has going for it. It’s much better than the weird photo-album border of flashbacks past. I just wonder how this new baby is going to effect things like age continuity. Will Skyler catch up with little “perpetually four” Robbie?
Son of Stuck Funky 
I really can’t tell with the small resolution, but I think that baby is smirking.
“Other-directed”??? I don’t get it, unless there’s nothing TO get, in which case I definitely do. I also don’t recall any great demand for Jessica’s “origin story”, so to speak. But hey, Tom got to use a dead character again and at the end of the day that’s what’s truly important.
Only beady-eyed nitpickers would even know that Batiuk had another strip featuring the douchey John Darling. If you started reading FW a few years ago (not probable, I know), this shit would be perplexing. And of course not funny, but that’s expected.
Because the “angry wife in labor yells at husband” trope never gets old! Even if you do it twice in the same week!
Well, apparently Batiuk used an actual phrase correctly. It’s still an awkward phrase, which is probably why most of us have never heard of it before now.
lets just be happy that that strip was canceled ,could you imagine bathack with 3 strips going
John Darling, about whom Les wrote a book…you have already overstayed your welcome…you sucked in Dilly the Skink’s mock-up, and you sucked today…return to sit at the feet of Our Lady Of Perpetual Visitation, about whom Les wrote a book…let your grandson grow into the lead character on the next generation of Funkytown high schoolers, where, if he is lucky, real granddad Frankie’s other grandson, in an amazing twist of circumstance, will kill him in a fight over a skank he banged in the back of his van, and Step-granddad Les will write a book about him.
I’m beginning to think Les killed Jessica’s father, John Darling, himself, thereby leaving Les as King of the Insufferable Pricks.
We should be grateful TB killed John Darling (who is Jessica’s father, who was shot and Les wrote a book about him). Christ, what an asshole.
Jan: “So, basically Jess, the sole reason why I agreed to visit you was -not- to witness the birth of my first grandchild, but to make sure that you knew that your murdered father, John Darling, who Les Moore wrote the unpublished bestseller “Fallen Star” about…the man you’ve idealized and idolized for years, who you’ve obsessively spent the past few years plotting a docudrama about…was actually a clueless snot who was evil, stupid, and worthless in every way.”
Jess: “….*….gee. Um.”
Jan: “That out of the way, is there any of that “Breakfast Pizza” left? I saw a note scrawled in the window. What a charmingly rustic idea!”
Jess: “…so…*tears start to brim* so…you’re saying you could have told me that Dad was…was…”
Jan: “Hmmm? Oh, dear, have I shattered your entire life? Dopey me! Ah, well. Coffee?”
Seriously, though. When Jess returned to the strip, the -sole- character trait Tom gave her was that she had unresolved grief over her father’s murder, and as a result she’d cooked up this deeply cuckoo fantasy version of him that she planned to make a documentary about.
She shouldn’t be smirking in the last panel, she should at the very least look alarmed and confused.
And Jan could be a -lot- more sensitive, but who am I kidding? Tom doesn’t actually care about these characters. This is all just set up for another “moral” about Women Knowing Their Place and There Is No Good Man But Les. *sigh* >_<
Whatever
The Other—directed by Robert Mulligan. There, now that’s sorted!
I was amazed to learn that “JD” ended its “run” in 1991. And here I thought Lisa’s corpse was all old and moldy.
Today’s strip lack of sepia tone actually is the one thing the strip has going for it.
Also note the absence of the usual smirking, disembodied head next to the FW logotype in panel 1. Tom’s really slippin’.
Weird, i thought he would be running those Starbuck Jones covers he mooched from other artists through the holidays on Sundays. Let’s see how long he can stretch that one out–apparently we’ll still have troops in Afghanistan in 10 years, so that works for him!
TB stuck to his Thanksgiving deadline for the baby; now to move on to some band turkeys (may be a little late in real world) and then back to, i don’t know, Les probably.
Is it weird that the mom looks younger than the daughter? Personally, John Darling does have somethings over the other characters: he’s not a self-pitying, complaining sad sack with no direction and can talk about something other than old comic books.
at first i thought it was pmm n jfff
Considering how often Batiuk goes to the “flashback” or “sepia-toned” well, maybe he really should do a reboot, go back twenty years and feature all the characters he’d like to have in his comic. It’s not as if he’d really be abandoning any characters he’s using nowadays.
I mean, if you love a character and want to continue to write stories about them, the last thing you should do is kill them. But it’s obvious that he’d rather write stories about John Darling than Jess, and about Lisa rather than Summer. Just go back and let them live anew, and then we won’t have half a year devoted to flashbacks or “remember when?”