So, apparently Starbuck Jones has another sidekick in addition to Jupiter Moon and Isaac the robot, apparently named Moon Mile Meek, and about whom we have heard nothing before this day. Way to keep the quality control on high, there. This seems to flatly contradict the advice Tom Batiuk was given (reprinted on his blog), about referring to characters by name, etc, so new readers are quickly brought up to speed.
I happen to agree with that, by the way. While there are certainly ways to make it really awkward (“Miss Jameson, you may be the best-selling mystery author of all time, but even I, your agent, don’t know why you need to spend a night in a haunted house!”), I’ve seen movies where the lead character wasn’t given a name until halfway though the movie. It’s nice to know who the characters are, so when they’re not around and someone refers to them, you can say “Oh, that guy. That cartoonist guy who draws that dull strip.”
So, this Moon Mile Meek might be anyone. Perhaps on your way home someone will pass you in the dark, and you will never know it, for they will be from outer space, and their name will be Moon Mile Meek! Can you prove that it didn’t happen?
At any rate, or rather because of, we have today’s thing. Those characters in panel one are really poorly drawn–I mean, that is some seriously bad artwork, but…no matter, for we’re off to Nostalgia Park. See, it’s funny because the boss is a fat stupid guy, and the artists are all like “Whoa” because they have to make a space comic in just a couple of days. You can start slapping your knees…now.
Actually, I don’t see how the Deflated Due have a problem here. They can just concoct a story where Starbuck, Moon Mile, Jupiter and Isaac are all sitting around the space office, space bitching because the space boss expects them to go out on space patrol, and they’d rather not. They’d rather wax space nostalgic about the olden days when–and here’s the space twist–old TV movies were made and the staff totally hated working on them.
They hated working so much, they actually broke the space barrier and space hated it.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Yep!
Boy, the comics industry sure is terrible! We should all boycott it, really teach those amoral morons a lesson!
I don’t think that’s Batiuk’s message here.
@TFHackett:
I really hate how easy this strip is to predict. So often when a new story starts, I can see how it could maybe be interesting, and it is a little intriguing, because it’s new. Even when the strip was over the top melodrama, it had me invested in wanting to see what would happen next. Now the only suspense is seeing exactly how it’ll be a boring disappointment.
Knowing how much L’ Auteur Glorieux loves these sepia-toned, photo-cornered flashbacks, I’m guessing this one runs through next week Saturday, at the least.
With his amazing powers of quietly and politely encouraging the rest of the solar system to adopt Imperial weights and measures, Moon Mile Meek’s spin off title was surely a smash hit in the pizza-induced fever dream universe where Batom Comics exists.
And how, exactly, is Pete channeling Stan Musial?
Did he just call the Starbuck Jones movie a digital deuce? Okay.
FW: the only comic strip where the characters’ fantasies are just as boring as their “real lives” are. Except for Crankshaft, maybe, as I assume he does the same thing there. But Crankshaft never counts, so who cares?
Seriously though, who the f*ck daydreams about the same stuff that you’re doing at that moment? “Gee, work is so dull, I wonder what it was like to be bored in the past?”…that’s a mental defect right there. Every FW daydream is like that too, which says plenty about the guy who writes this f*cking thing.
I’ve grown to genuinely dislike Retro Pete and Darin, nearly as much as their modern day counterparts, in fact. And this Editor Guy shtick, how many times is he going to that well? What is it about that scenario that amuses him so damn much? When he does these “art is suffering” arcs is he seriously trying to pretend he’s speaking from real experience? Because hey, come on. Or is this all just wish-fulfillment, a vision of what he’d like “writing” to be?
Wow, even the characters are calling the Starbuck Jones movie a piece of shit…unless there’s a different meaning for the word “deuce” in Batland. (Wouldn’t be the first time.)
@Epicus Doomus:
That’s what’s really bizarre about this. Batiuk sets up the premise of “Starbuck Jones and the Rise of the Zeton Warriors”. In any other story ever written, the cutaway would be to show Starbuck Jones fighting Zeton Warriors. Which would be legitimately interesting.
Instead, what Batiuk seems to find interesting is imaginary people bitching about having to write Starbuck Jones.
Four things–
1. HeyItsDave is truly a genius of our times.
2. I want that font, dammit, or I spill the beans that you’re really Tom Batiuk in disguise!
3. Uh, did I say that out loud? I meant it a lot quieter.
4. Will the Press be allowed to ask questions, Mr. Batiuk?
@HeyItsDave,
I think that he may have intentionally inserted that. It certainly would fit the opinion that Pete and Darin have exhibited so far toward the project that pays their salary. (It also shows how little oversight his work gets from the distributor. An editor would have caught and flagged that euphemism – unless they think it accurately describes The Author’s work overall.)
Your parodies are more creative and amusing than the originals.
It’s irritating being able to predict which form Batiuk’s whining will take. The studio wanting to ride the buzz will of course lead to Fat Editor wanting to pile more work on the suffering creator to mess with the purity of things. It couldn’t possibly be that we’d see them try to think up things for the Zetom Warriors to actually do, that’s crazy.
Y’know, in the days before everything was about computers and electronic gadgets (y’know, the days The Author seems to view as the Golden Age of humanity), the word “digital” had a much different meaning; namely, something done with the fingers. Which in turn gives “digital deuce” a whole new meaning…
Where’d I put the brain bleach…?
Gad the way they mope you’d think they just heard their boss yell “ramming speed!”
Am I the only one who first read that as “Meek Mill”? Like Batiuk would even know who that is in a million years, lolz…
And I don’t care what anyone says, “HeyItsDave” needs to start sending his ‘improvements’ directly to Batiuk’s inbox… Sooner or later Batiuk will get the message and start incorporating it into his work, or he’ll hire HeyItsDave as a consultant or something…
Dave, please tell me you’ve archived all your strips on photobucket or whatever…
I wish I could get my hands on the font T-Bats uses for his strip. I’m pretty sure, though, that he ran a custom-lettered template through a font generator and he’s the only one with the file.
I do all my text editing with good ol’ MS Paint, cutting and pasting letters from the strip itself and from a common-words file I have saved.
@hitorque – They’re all on imgur.
Stan Lee, I want to apologize on behalf of this hack Tom Batiuk. You’re name and his should NEVER be mentioned again in the same breath.
BTW, if you ever want to see this type of theme done well, check out Bloom County circa 1981. Theres’s a series of strips were Milo Bloom daydreams that he is a cartoonist for a syndicate. The syndicate head is dressed as an executioner who tortures Milo when he makes mistakes. It’s hilarious and done in in a tongue and cheek manner. In fact if I remember, Breathes real syndicate person had those strips put on his wall.
@HeyItsDave – wow, I’m even more impressed by your work. I used to do the cut-n-paste thing as well, but it got to be even more mind-numbing than actually reading the strip. I stand in line!
@HeyItsDave I can’t seem to find them? Can you post a link?
It’s becoming clear to me that Batiuk does these flashbacks in order to avoid having to actually come up with six individual strips. He gets to repeat the premise and spin his wheels by not advancing the story at all.
Here’s how it goes:
Monday- Smug Producer: “Hey you guys, I have more work for you to do.”
Tuesday- Whiner: “You have more work for us to do?”
START FLASHBACK
Wednesday- Smug Producer: “Hey you guys, I have more work for you to do.”
Thursday- Whiner: “You have more work for us to do?”
Friday- Smug Producer: “Yes, I have more work for you to do.”
Saturday- Whiner: “Can you believe that guy, giving us more work to do?”
And he doesn’t follow the standard trope of coming out of the flashback to relate the flashback’s relevance to the current story, because there IS NO relevance. It’s all pointless.
Charles: It’s unbelievable, the exact same thing every single time. AND these are fantasy sequences, no less. These two nimrods are so incompetent they can’t even daydream correctly. IMO it says plenty about Batiuk’s incredibly limited imagination, at least where this trip is concerned. On his own dime he’s reeling off insane flights of imaginary comic book fancy but with FW it’s plodding tedium, day after wretched day.
I was googling around trying to find TB’s font the other day and found them credited to a guy who runs a font shop called Blambot. Apparently he did two custom fonts for TB, one for each strip, at least ~5 years ago. Unfortunately for those of us who’d like them for snark purposes, the custom jobs are not available publicly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120327095712/http://www.blambot.com/customfonts.shtml
Actually further googling shows that TFH posted this info here a few years ago already! 🙂