I suppose we can’t blame Tom Batiuk for taking Fathers Day off and yielding the floor to a “real” comic artist. But we’re left with so many unanswered questions.
Mason Jarr casually informs Cliff, on-set and in costume, that they are concurrently “shooting” Starbuck Jones and its sequel? Did Cliff not read and sign a contract? Or is he so delighted to have been rescued from obscurity that anything is fine with him? “I can’t believe they’re shooting two at once!” This from a man who became (obstensibly) famous as an actor in serial films. Do you suppose these were shot episode by episode, totally in sequence?
Let’s move on to the content that’s not drawn by Batiuk: a fucking Western? Because “shooting two at once”? Maybe this one of Batty’s obscure, beloved old comic covers that he tries to to bend the narrative in order to make it fit? We Google “comic book ‘arizona ranger‘” to find the source…there’s Lone Ranger comics…Texas Ranger comics…there’s, um, this…
Turns out it’s not a vintage comic after all, but is instead another title from TB’s imaginary Batom Comics: he mentioned The Arizona Ranger in his blog two years ago (along with Charlie and Chuck and Mr. Sponge). So TB commissioned this “tribute” (from an artist who is old enough to be a contemporary of Cliff Anger’s) and really doesn’t care if it makes any sense.
Son of Stuck Funky 
It should be pointed out that bullets in the real world don’t behave the way that one’s trajectory is portrayed (but the tie-in to Cliff’s line trumps physics).
I do like the Cindy Summers hairdo on our pal !aon today.
Mason. Apparently, my autocorrect thinks it’s a swear word based upon what it hears me say when he appears.
I don’t really mind the guest artists and they always do a bang-up job with Batty’s various nutty ideas. Unfortunately, though, they don’t get to do BanTom’s always crappy little “reality bubbles” too, as maybe then they wouldn’t be so annoying, stupid and totally useless. I say just ditch the reality bubbles, just publish the stupid cover. No one’s going to notice the difference anyway.
T-Bats is in the wrong business. He should be a magician… maybe Colon the Clown, in honor of number of ridiculous things he consistently pulls out of his ass.
An old west lawman riding his horse right through a saloon door with guns a-blazin’ is one of the most entertaining Batom comic book cover concepts we’ve seen. I suspect TB’s involvement here was more limited than usual…
The best part? The cowboy is holding two guns, but only shooting one. And the way the drawing is, that’s not two at once. It’s one, then the other.
He’s just bursting with all these ideas and premises but his strips themselves are as barren and lifeless as ever, none of this imagination ever finds its way into FW, not even accidentally. And I’ll never for the life of me understand it, either.
@ Epicus Doomus – You’ve hit on the thing that mystifies me as well. It’s as if the work of developing a storyline from his ideas is too much work. He didn’t even appear to be able to coherently flesh out the Batom backstory when he tossed it into the “Pete and Darren write a screenplay” arc.
I get the sinking feeling that Batiuk is trying to build an entire Batom Cinematic Universe, with Cliff Anger in the Stan Lee role of doing indulgent self-referential cameos in every single episode. And he’s going to make us sit through every single one.
This having big ideas but not having enough in the tank to actually do anything with them is why he was told to go home by DC and Marvel. He’s better at regurgitating stale gags about old men who get to be jerks because Nazis shot at them.
BanTom HAS created a whole magical Batom Comics universe…but it’s all on his official FW blog which no one (other than us) ever reads. In his actual comic strip it’s all been reduced to its dumbest common denominator, as I assume he feels that his readers are too dumb to follow a story that isn’t the premise repeated five times followed by the most idiotic and/or sappy bow he can slap on it before calling it a morning. On his blog he has entire fictional histories of various titles and writers and publishers, meanwhile his comic strip is like a big shapeless blob where things barely happen and nothing makes sense. Maybe it’s all the felt-tip fumes or something.
Here, Tom… just to make your life easier, a Sunday strip you can use over and over and over…
Meanwhile, over at my paper, the Raleigh News And Observer, they are adding Big Nate and dropping… nope, no such luck. Talk about editorial tin ears. I will miss Get Fuzzy…
And interestingly, the paper also published an official rationale for its decision. They name checked FW as one people tend to complain about as not being funny… http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article84388947.html
um..I admit I don’t know a lot about the movie industry, but what if the first movie bombs? Don’t they kind of want to see how the box office is on the first movie. You know it is a slight possibility this movie might…you know..SUCK ASS!!!
If Mason and Cliff are talking about shooting two movies, why isn’t the artist shooting two guns? FAIL!
@Westview Oncologist: It has been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_back_film_production
Waiting to see what new spore of madness Batiuk will unleash upon us next week (with apologies to Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug).
I wonder what it was like back in the old days, 1972, when Tom Batiuk was just starting Funky Winkerbean, a strip about a regular guy who was trying to figure out plane geometry—and his pals, including a girl who was sneaking behind the back of women’s lib for inexplicable reasons.
He’d be at his desk, trying to draw some bricks, but the junior-high brats would constantly be bugging him: “Mister BuhTIEuck,” they’d whine, “I’m out of magenta.”
I think the baseball diamonds were smaller back then, too. You could always see a tiny one out his classroom window. An awkward kid with glasses would always trip over first base.
Ah 1972, those were the days… People talked about teens and the counter culture. But now, nobody cares. Adults act like teens and Batty is now part of the establishment. Teens today cannot relate to anything he does.
And now we have the Internet…so no longer are newspapers the gate keepers. Cartoonists can (gasp) publish what they like and fans can say what they like. But Batty
Looking at that list of back to back sequels most of those were sequels being filmed back to back. I guess Batiuk is referencing Superman & Superman II.
I’ll stand by my skepticism that a movie like Starbucks Jones would be filmed back to back.,
Howcan they be filming two movies at once when writers Pete and Darrin are only just told, right before they left for Cleveland that tnetre would be a second movie. They haven’t had atime to write it