Month: June 2016

J…E…R…K…E

Professor Fate
June 20, 2016 at 9:35 am
It had been established earlier that Mason was bi-polar could this be the start of a manic upswing? And since we are well into production of the SJ movie wouldn’t this require modifications to all the publicity material? And shouldn’t he be talking about this with his agent?

Mason’s supposed mental disorder, which he disclosed last fall and which has not been mentioned since, could indeed explain his impulsive desire to change his name. It’s certainly not a logical choice: for starters, the added “e” would change the pronunciation from “jar” to “jar-RAY” (or even “zhahr-RAY”). It would be only a couple degrees less confusing than when Prince changed his name to .

Wheel! Of! Torture!

Greetings, dear snarkers, hate-readers, and beady-eyed nitpickers. Please allow me to share with you my horrifying realization: with Cody, Owen, Wedgeman, et al, having finally graduated from Westview High, Tom Batiuk no longer needs to depict “contemporary issues affecting young adults”. After forty-four years, Batty’s decided to ditch the high school madness plotlines and focus full-time on what he really wants to write about: the Starbuck Jones universe. Brace yourself for strip after strip about how TB imagines Hollywood movies are made. At least he used to take the trouble of lurking around his old high school to glean details of “real” high school life (and he’d still get it wrong).

With such thin material from which to spin the Starbuck saga, Batiuk’s going to need to pad and plod even more than he typically does, which brings us to today’s strip, which starts out promisingly with a cameo from Pat Sajak. Turns out to be more of Batty’s bait-and-switch, and not to spoil it for you but I feel I must: this whole week revolves around Mason considering adding an “e” to his last name.

Double Shot of My Batty’s Love

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.

Honor Thy Anger

Scouring “Fleabay” for a decoder ring. Buying advertising space “in papers around the country” to run an encrypted invitation to fans. Booking an Art Deco palace for a reception and bringing in enough Ovaltine to float a  spaceship. The lengths that a major studio will go to in promoting a movie, right? Albeit a movie that’s still in production (and hell, we never even saw them delivering the finished script). Nope! Turns out this whole shindig was staged by Pete Regenbogen just to cheer up ol’ Cliff.

Thank You Vera Much

TheDiva
June 16, 2016 at 1:02 am
Cliff Anger gets a huge tribute in his honor, while his costar is just trotted out and expected to fawn on him the way everyone else does. Yep, sounds about right for this strip.

Eww! Old people flirting! Hard to find much else to say about today’s installment…Mason’s expression in panel one is not so much “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone” but rather more like he’s just lit a stinkbomb and is off to watch the ensuing hilarity from a safe distance. “I always wondered what…” And we’ll always wonder what Cliff was about to say before Vera cut him off mid-sentence.