I sometimes wonder if Author Guy sits there in Batom Inc. World HQ with felt tip in hand, poring over his little stories and occasionally leaping from his chair and yelling “No! Dammit, this still makes too much sense! I have to dumb it down again and again until it’s JUST RIGHT!!!!”. It’s just difficult for me to accept that someone…anyone…could come up with anything this stupid accidentally. The way he ignores his own continuity, the way he glosses right over plot developments that just happened mere days ago, the way he does it time after time after time with such predictable ease…it has to be a con, it just has to be. No one can be this consistently awful without trying to be.
As far as today’s strip is concerned, uh, yeah. Dumb “insider” lingo, idiotic contrivance out of nowhere, plot details at odds with things that just happened a few days before, Les behaving like a self-centered narcissistic jerk-off, that stupid cat hanging around for no reason…yup, sounds about right. Why even bother with these plodding mega-arcs if you’re just going to give up halfway through and resort to crappy filler and nonsensical garbage to finish them up? Again, it makes no sense unless it’s on purpose. It has to be.
Son of Stuck Funky 
What language is this strip written in?
So, a few dozen people are now out of work, and Les is happy as a cancer cell.
Of course, you have to see the benefit all these people got from Les: they now know in their hearts that life is a parade of misery and ruin, and there is no other happiness than the weary pun, the knowing smirk.
What a terrible, terrible man.
Casting Couch time.
How does he do it? No, seriously, how does Batiuk write this, day in and day out, and still remain completely oblivious to the fact that Les Moore is the most loathsome character in fiction ever? (Yes, worse than Dolores Umbridge, Uriah Heep, Ramsay Bolton, and the entire cast of 9 Chickweed Lane.) I’d think it would be obvious by now.
In Panel 3, Le Chat Bleu just left a turd in Les’ box.
@Nelson Puppet – the cat’s probably just trying to make the box smell better.
In other words, Writer Guy, you suck as a writer. That’s why the sizzle reel has no sizzle, the story arc has no story, and the punch line has no punch.
Where to start when there is this much wrong? OK lets start with what a Sizzle Reel is.
http://prsizzlereel.com/sizzlereel/what-is-a-sizzle-reel/
The key word in this description is advertising. Since the movie was already in production (while still being rewritten and recast) who were they advertising it to? The execs who already bought it? If they were advertising to the audience then they have a schedule date (again on a movie that is being rewritten and recast). And why in heavens name does showing it in mid-season mean its dead in the water. It just means they’re burning off a weak property when there is little competition and they might get some viewers.
I swear TB couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag with directions and a trail of breadcrumbs.
Les’ over-the-top reaction doesn’t even make sense unless you’re familiar with Lestom’s whole bizarre back story with Lisa and that stupid cancer book. Keeping his story and Her legacy pure, pristine and untainted is the only thing that could possibly make Les that happy, short of finding a way to re-animate her corpse, that is. Believe me, he’s tried.
Les does seem to see himself as being guardian of Saint Dead Lisa’s memory. It doesn’t matter how many people have to suffer to keep the image of someone who was a different sort of tiresome jerk when she was alive pure from the forces of commercialization, accessibility and an honest accounting of events, he’s only going to be satisfied when people are cowed into submission to the forces of idiot nihilism. To think DC used Black Hand as the personification of Death and Nothingness when this hamster was available.
@Paul Jones:
Speaking of comics, I hope Batiuk never learns that Marvel has an entire dimension called the Cancerverse.
Let’s see if I have this straight. Ignoring for the moment that none of the individual items works as depicted:
First, Les invokes the kill fee, killing the project. Then Steel Drumm quits the dead project to take the role he failed to get over at the Starbuck Jones project, which departure kills the already dead Lisa project; Les becomes his mentor. Last, they do a sizzle reel that doesn’t—what? Reel from the blatant narrative nonsense? No sizzle, no project. It is thrice dead, not unlike Dead St. Lisa.
Ponderous, man! Ed Wood had nothing on this guy.
As you might imagine, this has sapped my very will to even.
Now let’s play it backwards:
The sizzle reel has no sizzle, so it gets bumped to midseason (wait, I thought this was a movie not a tv show?, and really, no midseason show ever panned out?)
So that prompts Mason to jump ship (for a project he already didn’t get?)
Now that the production is dead, Les gets his kill fee (what’s a kill fee?)
At least the chronology would make more sense, even if the plot still wouldn’t.
Writer Guy my flat foot … more like Rudimentary Typist Guy … or maybe just Schmuck.
Yesterday I compared (unfavorably, but still compared) the all-too-convenient conclusion of this story line with some of Neal Rubin’s Gil Thorp conclusions.
I was wrong. Very wrong. That was a grave insult to Neal Rubin, Rod Whigham, Jerry B. Jenkins, Jack Berrill, Jack Kirby, Jack Hanna, the Jack of Clubs, Barry Pepper, and humanity as a whole. I sincerely apologize.
So, Les, regarding your kill fee. We’ve deducted the cost of the month-long stay at the Chateau Marmot, the first class round-trip airfare, the lavish lunches, the cash advance, and the settlement of the sexual harassment suit from the lead actress. Now, if you just zip off a check for $72,831, you’ll be free to go back to Ohio.
“…it has to be a con, it just has to be.”
You may be onto something here. Maybe Batty is trying to see how awful he has to make this strip before the syndicate stops paying him for it. Maybe he wants out, but is so damned passive-aggressive that he can’t bring himself to just announce his retirement, so he’s doing this as a way out. Kind of like he ended the John Darling strip years ago by killing off the title character.
Three things:
1) Les’ panel 3 smugness from yesterday deserves a spot in the SOSF banner.
2) What Les doesn’t seem to understand is the Westview pizza economy has crumbled in his absence.
3) You know what would be great? A story arc detailing how this trip to evil Hollywood has created real tension between Les and Cayla, seeing as how he just completely ignores her, his daughter and his career (going by the official Centreville High School calendar, school started last week).
It just can’t be said enough: Les Moore is a terrible person.
He was flown out first class, put up in a five-star hotel, wined and dined and fawned over, given the chance for a professional screenwriting credit and the chance for a new, rewarding career–and his only thought this entire time was to stop production and get everyone fired, because precious Lisa.
I guess the “thought process,” if I can apply such a phrase, is that everyone saw what a deep, insightful man Les was, and they all felt bad because they were tainting his legacy, so they all decided Hey, I’d rather be waiting tables for another year after all, than disappoint that man.
In real life, had Les caused such damage, Bobanero’s probably close to the truth–he’d be presented with a massive bill and threatened with legal action.
I don’t see how anyone, Tom Batiuk included, could look at Les with anything other than loathing.
“(going by the official Centreville High School calendar, school started last week)”
TB is my age &, when we were kids, American public schools didn’t start until the Tuesday after Labor Day. That changed at some point in the last 50 years, but apparently he hasn’t quite caught up yet — as with so many other aspects of life in TB’s world.
@beckoningchasm
“I don’t see how anyone, Tom Batiuk included, could look at Les with anything other than loathing.”
Which is really says something disturbing about Tom B., considering that it’s pretty widely accepted that Less More is the Glorious Author’s avatar.
Really how can you have a sizzle reel before you have finished the damn table read? where they filming the auditons. Also one must assume that since this work is being judged by Hollywoods standards “not art” the final script was still too much of a work of art to satisfy the studio.
Thing that amazes me about this is how Batiuk assumes that his audience would be thrilled right along with Les about the production being killed. He really does seem to believe that the fictional integrity of fictional Les’s fictional book about his fictional dead wife is important to his readers.
Also amazing is how much the complaints about his strip’s morose joylessness have mindscrewed him. If you look at this storyline, all it’s been is a Take That at his critics. You like stupid, simple minded things! You don’t simply fail to appreciate art, you in fact reject its value in your life because you’re fools. But see? You fail in the end because all right-thinking people would know that you’re wrong and I’m right!
And he couldn’t have Les raise any objections to what was happening, because that would have screwed up that narrative. Les has to be a hateful, passive lump who openly insults the people around him because if he actually addressed what was so upsetting to him, Batiuk would reveal just how shallow and ill-considered his point of view really is. He wins this argument the only way he can, by not having it in the first place and then writing the “appropriate” ending that had absolutely nothing to do with the story that preceded it.
And what also makes Les reprehensible is if he was really only concerned about the integrity of Lisa’s Story, he simply wouldn’t have sold the film rights to this group in the first place. He instead wanted them to give him lots of money but he didn’t want to have to give them anything in return, and that’s, in fact, exactly what he has been doing through this entire movie plot. The thing about the Kill Fee wasn’t that he wanted to quit the production. It was that he wanted to quit the production and still be paid for it.
And no doubt he deserves it, because he’s suffered so.