Jeeves! What is this awful creature you’ve let in? It looks like an orangutan in drag. Oh dear me, it speaks! How dreadful!
So we finally meet Mr. Hagglemore in today’s strip and sure enough, he’s every bit the perception the 99.5% have of the .5% you could imagine. All that’s lacking is a white cat for him to stroke.
I wonder what he did to earn the Golden Popeye Award shown in Panel 3?
Son of Stuck Funky 
Haha. That’s so cute, Batiuk projecting a Starbuck Jones movie deal in the second panel.
Also, misplaced apostrophe in panel 3.
Do you ever get the impression that Batiuk is a wee bit bitter about his mother putting his comics out on the curb when he left for college? It’s subtle, but I think the subtext is there.
Good grief, he does look like the producer who hated Les’ book title! With his hairpiece missing, of course.
Oh, so “The Chiseler”, the comic book collecting legend, is a wealthy pompous stuffed-shirt ass who’s regarding Holly with what I feel is absolutely the proper degree of disgust and disdain. Kind of a letdown IMO, as I was hoping for a genuine weirdo as opposed to a stock character straight out of the Big Book Of Comic Strip Tropes Vol. 1. Maybe like a guy wearing a cape or something, I don’t know.
There’s only one conceivable way this can go. Hagglemore, true to his name, will make the deal but only if Holly throws in a lifetime supply of free Montoni’s pizzas (with delivery) for life. A somewhat disinterested Funky shrugs and agrees to take the loss on behalf of our star-freckled fighting troops who make things like pizza and comic books possible. FW characters are at long last directly exchanging pizza for comic books and comic books for pizza and the entire Funkyverse implodes upon itself in a blissed-out state of total pizza and comic book nirvana. Its mission complete, the strip cuts to black and ends, audience goes f*cking apeshit. That’s my prediction. Or maybe my wish, not sure.
Well, this makes my comparing him to Lex Luthor seem less ridiculous. He’s practically a super-villain.
I’ll give him this, Hagglemore is the first character we’ve seen in this storyline who has not assumed Holly knows absolutely nothing about comics because of her gender.
I think this guy is just disappointed that Holly makes a poor participant for his weekly round of “The Most Dangerous Game”.
I note they have quickly put the whole cut up the spalsh page with scissors incident behind them. This srip doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Be careful Holly, lest you end up in a hole in the basement while Hagglemore says “it rubs the lotion on the skin, or else it gets the hose again”
Hey. That’s right. He assumes that she’s a very rare comics-LOVING mother.
I wonder what the mother of Batominc’s major stockholder did to him. Author avatar Les, as the blue cat recently reminded us, has major mommy issues, and “mom threw out the invaluable comic books” is a recurring trope in this oeuvre.
And he just so very badly wants one of his fictional creations to be made into a movie, doesn’t he? Don’t we all, TB, don’t we all.
He should settle for getting on FX. He’d fit right in with Louis CK’s non-stop gloom and Archer’s being a crazy jerk.
I was out of town last week and was hoping this latest Starbuck Jones nonsense would have wrapped up before my return. “Holly collects comic books for her dreadful son” has to be among the most annoying FW storylines of all time.