And you thought the only businesses in town were Montoni’s and the Komix Korner? Welcome to the redundantly named WESTVIEW PRISON. Like all the signage in Westview, the prison sign looks like it’s hand drawn on oak tag with Magic Markers…I’m surprised it’s not Scotch taped to the fence. This drawn-out sequence which adds nothing to the narrative (we didn’t see Jessica driving to her other interviews) reminds me of Dean’s Comic Booth’s great parody of Darin’s birth mother quest.
22 thoughts on “Lockup: Westview”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
Had Durrwood driven Jess to Westview Prison in the Montoni’s pizza delivery car I would have died a happy man. A lost opportunity.
Westview Prison…mid-central Ohio’s grimmest town just got slightly grimmer. Boy Lisa and Jessica: FW’s all-time dialog-free strip champions. This is going to be interesting (?) relatively speaking, obviously.
The Westview Prison sign shop: two guys with some cardboard, magic markers and scotch tape.
I would like to think that a prison that is equipped to deal with split-personality murderers would have better security than a single length of chain link fence with a loop of barbed wire at the top and no gate. Springfield Minimum Security had a better perimeter.
100% Not Kidding: I once helped film an interview with a convicted murderer in a prison. (Don’t worry, he was a nice guy.) So… it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Jess: “Okay, I’m parking the car. Okay, I’m setting the parking brake. Okay, I’m unlocking the car door. URK. Okay, I’m undoing my seatbelt -before- I get up. Okay, my foot is totally stepping onto the pavement. Okay, I’m unlocking the back of my car. Okay, I’m gingerly lifting up the strap of the bag containing the best home video technology that 1982 had to offer! Okay, I’m primly pressing my non-existent lips into a li’l slanty line, to convey my emotional state of…um…SOMETHING…okay, I’m turning AROUND now! I’m walking up to the DOOR…step by step by step by step by ste-“
I’m with The Diva on this on–that length of fence has no gate and doesn’t even go all the way to the road.
On the other hand, where can the prisoners possibly escape to? Westview? Prison sounds a lot better. In fact, I bet the fences are to keep people out.
That said, the sequence does show Jess’s pretty palpable dread, so kudos to Tom Batiuk for that.
Who wants to guess how much fatter and older (than he should be) he looks?
So now we know where the other Westview residents who don’t work the High School, Montoni’s, and Komix Korner work.
But seriously, Westview actually has a prison called “Westview Prison?” How many citizens actually have prisons? They usual just call them “jails” or, nowadays, “correctional facilities.”
Great. A Trabant in every garage and a penitentiary that looks like an inadequately protected animal shelter. I sure can see why Funky never wanted to leave town. As for Durwood in drag, ‘she’ looks as if she fears Plantman can kill her with his brain.
(Also, couldn’t she have saved her a bunch of time and effort if she’d used Les’s book as a source instead of something to balance a table with?)
I wonder if this sequence will take as long as Wally and Buddy’s leisurely trip to the Akron VA clinic a few years ago, which lasted several days and featured an inordinate number of brick walls IIRC.
Strange that Batiuk has his characters use real life Ahia airports and shows the gang driving to Columbus for basketball tournaments but then plops a fictional, presumably maximum security prison in a Cleveland suburb.
Just a note TB, a strip like today’s isn’t called writing, it’s called padding.
Not bothering to research how the corrections system works: Pure Batiuk!
Like she could just pull in and start unloading stuff and nobody notices…..
Oh, wait, this is Westview, where everybody is a nobody.
Looks like Jess parked her Hyundai Elantra Touring in a trash compactor recently…
As someone who grew up a couple of miles from two of TDCJ’s finest facilities, I’m pretty sure visitations don’t happen in surplus red brick administration buildings located behind incomplete barbed wire-topped fences.
“Westview Prison”? The least he could do it is give it a punny name like “Unleavenworth” (being passover week and all).
Oops, that should be “cities” and not citizens.
There’s another thing that’s Classic Batiuk: not actually concerning himself with our reality when it gets in the way of his version. He doesn’t give a photon in a solar wind what a real prison visit would look like because he thinks that what he can imagine is somehow more real than our boring and wrong real reality.
Plantman: “Yes, I was a very sad, very disturbed young man…and my actions caused you a lot of pain, I know. I know I can never be truly forgiven for what I did. But I want you to know that I’ve changed since then, that I am now a better person, thanks to my new-found beliefs, and with a lot of time and effort, I have put the evil part of me away for good. I now devote my life to a much higher, far more noble cause.”
[Reaches down and holds up a copy of Starbuck Jones.]
What crimes do you have to commit to wind up in Westview Prison? Not smirking continuously? Not paying due homage to St. Lisa? Not patronizing Montoni’s on a daily basis? Not speaking in stilted dialogue.
I remember the Great Prison Riot arc of ’94, where the convicts went apeshit after pizza AND comic book privileges were revoked for 24 unendurable hours. Some of the handmade signs the prisoners wielded were nothing short of terrifying.
I hope Charlie Fungus (or whatever the hell his name is) gives her the last comic book she needs to finish her collection so we can wrap up this storyline.