After a long, insufferable summer of sitting around doing nothing, Dickface just can’t wait to get home so he can sit THERE doing nothing. The sheer ambition of the man boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Porch swings, gazebos, pizza, his overweight dimwitted pals, comic books, pizza…maybe if he’s lucky his wife will get sick and die so he’ll finally have some new material to work with. Then everything will TRULY be just like it was before!
It’s increasingly clear that Author Guy’s greatest talent is the ability to keep a straight face during those moronic puff-piece interviews of his. I’ve seen better “writing” on cereal boxes. The guy who does “Bazooka Joe” is practically Hemingway next to this joker. This was a complete shambles from top to bottom, obviously the “work” of someone who stopped giving a shit years ago.
The funniest thing about this is how everyone respects Les AFTER he gives up and quits. Welcome to the Batiukverse, where up is down, black is white and apathy is a virtue to be respected and admired.
Son of Stuck Funky 
So, did I call it about Thelma calling Les “Les” instead of “Writer Guy” at the end of this arc, or did I call it? Pardon my smugness. (It goes with the territory I think.)
You know what would be incredible? If someone optioned a Funky Winkerbean movie, negotiated with Batiuk for the rights to the Act III characters, and he gave his blessing, looking forward to it.
Sometime into production, one of the producers decides to send Batiuk a copy of the script. “Of course! I’d love to read it!” And he gets the script in the mail, settles down with a pizza one evening to read through it…
…and in the entire script, Les Moore isn’t mentioned even once. He doesn’t appear in the story at all!
I leave it to you all to imagine the resulting explosion.
Don’t you mean self-absorption, sneering at students, ignoring your family, and contenting yourself with being a
bignot quite as small fish in a little, little, little pond, Les?You did indeed, BC, good call. If you REALLY want to get under Lestom’s skin, though, don’t mention Lisa. It’d be like throwing a vampire in a pool full of holy water.
Coming next week: Les arrives home to discover that his current still-living wife embarked on a major shopping spree over the summer, as she assumed Les’ big Hollywood payday had finally come in. Cayla appears ambivalent and mildly amused by Les’ rage and she soothes his shattered nerves with a cool glass of lemonade. Le Chat laughs.
It’s about a week away from Labor Day. A traditional Westview summer is typically depicted as marching around at band camp, watching female joggers pee behind some shrubbery, and sitting on the big-ass porch swing at the Taj WhateverthefucktheycallLesandCayla’s house. With any luck at all Batiuk will show Les and Cayla packing the swing away in a week or so.
If Depression Cat is only a figment of Les’s imagination, why is it still hanging around when he is clearly orgasmic? Sorry about the possessive form of Les, I always had trouble with nouns ending in “s.” Unless I’m correct, of course.
In the second panel Les’ the first written line ends with Summer for a brief moment I thought Les was thinking about his daughter. Then my eyes hit the second line and saw it was Summer evenings he was pining for. What the hell was I thinking that Les might even for a moment think about someone besides himself.
“…people who love me.” Yep, kinda says it all.
Oh, like Thelma would give a shit about “what now” with Les.
Hey, you know what might make a good movie? There’s a guy in Westview who was held as a prisoner of war by the Taliban for over a decade. Just a thought. No one has approached him at all to write a book about his experiences so there’s that.
There’s something else he can look forward to: making sweeping, ill-informed comments about the bad, scary and wrong world outside his bunker-like small town and the scary, bad and wrong things they do there. Anything to avoid looking in the mirror and seeing a gutless also-ran…..
The smugness, it burns!!!
And when have we ever seen Les condescend to attend a county fair?
And when have we ever seen Les condescend to attend a county fair?
Oh, that’s just Batiuk speaking through his avatar. TB loves the county fair! Check out his blog (scroll down to the Aug. 2 post).
He may have done a book signing there once.
Quitting a writing assignment with righteous indignation, a FW theme since 1975.
“Write what you know” appears to be the only classic writing advice that TB has taken to heart.
This is one thing that’s always bothered me. Out of all the stories in Westview, Lisa’s story is perhaps the least interesting. I mean if you take away the “Lisa dies of Cancer” point, what is left that constitutes an compelling story that is worthy of writing a book and producing a movie? I just haven’t seen it. There’s only so much drama that can be extracted from this situation, and it’s already been done a lot more effectively in a bunch of other books and movies.
@billytheskink The hilarious thing about this trope is that in 1975 the ragequitting primadonna writer was treated with snide contempt, by Les no less; in 2014 Les gets hugs and cuddles and thanks for behaving in much the same way.
What the hell happened to Batiuk over those 40 years?
Lord just everybody called this:
Going back to the dying small town to sit on my porch swing with the people that love me – I can’t think of their names right off but i know they love me for me.
What cheeses me off the most about this storyline is that Les does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to protest the garbage “Lust for Lisa” became. . If I’d been Les, I would’ve protest everything the studio did. If that didn’t work, I’d go to the media–both mass and social. He knows somebody in the news media. I’d threaten to boycott the movie or boycott the movies sponsor (if it had first appeared on cable, Les is a whiny loser.
Not to mention the fact that the supposed purpose of writing it was to tell people about the dangers of breast cancer. Now that the movie is in Limbo, his message will be untold. BUT NO! Les is bloody ecstatic about it
@bobanero: What REALLY bothers me is that Les has the same blind spot Batiuk has: the inability to see that Les’s putting his life back together after Lisa died is a far more compelling story than waiting for a tumorous bore to pass away.
@Doug Puthoff: That’s Les’s major malfunction right there: his passivity in the face of problems. Rather than get spitting mad at people who cross him, he stands there like a wooden Jesus in a country graveyard whining about a side issue.
I hope Cayla cheated on him all summer.
Thing that’s so funny and screwed up about Batiuk’s rendering of this is that Westview’s a miserable shithole. This isn’t me being a snarky, provincial ass about this (ie. “Ohio, eww.”), this is just an objective observation based on how he presents the place in the strip. The people there are miserable and failing and the only reason why they don’t hate each other openly is they lack the courage and the energy.
I’m reminded of that scene from Good Will Hunting, where Ben Affleck’s character tells Matt Damon’s character that if he’s still hanging around in 20 years, he’ll fucking kill him. Les had a chance to get out. To leave all the misery behind him, but he chose not to. Just like he can’t leave the misery and pain of Lisa’s Story behind him. He’d rather be miserable than happy. He’d rather be a teacher to students he loathes than a prosperous writer.
Funky should fucking kill him for coming back to that hellhole a failure. But he’s not going to, because Funky was actually anticipating it gleefully. The look on his face when he told Les not to get too uppity about his screenwriting deal showed a man who was going to enjoy Les falling back to earth.
Not that I can blame him personally, but he’s supposed to be Les’s friend for Christ’s sake.