Month: November 2016

Blathering Heights

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Huh? Cliff was in prison? What was he convicted of, impersonating an interesting comic strip character? Comic book theft? Counterfeiting pizzas? Violating the super-strict NYC lampshade statutes? And no one knew anything about this until right now? Well, that’s just fascinating and by “fascinating” I of course mean “duh”. I can’t wait to see where this latest twist takes us and of course by that I mean “please kill me now”.

So Cindy is only finding out about Cliff’s prison past right now? There’s no documentarian like a Westviewian documentarian, like no documentarian I know as a matter of fact. Once her crack team figures out The Google thing this project is really going to take off, mark my words. And correct me if I’m mistaken here but wasn’t Vera supposed to be “long lost” when they dredged her up to appear at Starbuck-Con? So she was long lost AND ardently following Anger’s life at the same time? Hey, it’s the Batiukverse…why the hell not?

A Peck Before Lying

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Wow, talk about a pathetic waste of time, even more so than the usual Sunday strip. Apparently TomBan had a bunch of extra “Ominously Smirking Frankie” drawings lying around that he felt he needed to re-purpose, or perhaps he once again assumes his readers will forget the plot unless he drives it home over and over again for days on end. Either way the hackery just leaps off the page as the “story” (as it were) continues its inexorable death spiral into nothingness. What a sad-sack-sorry display.

The Winters Of Our Non-Content

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That hair strand invading the word balloon in panel three is one of the single most enraging things I’ve ever seen. And Marianne’s peculiarly proportioned body probably says a lot about the artist responsible for drawing it, the less said there the better. The biggest question at this point is how long can Frankie continue to make that ominously sneering face? Is that his default expression now? Did he remember to lock up the Food Film truck before he left? And why did Mason and Marianne leave the front door open like that?  Mysteries abound.

The dialog today is really bottom of the barrel though. Hey, remember back before Marianne was a real character, back when she was still a mysterious home-wrecking vixen? Me either. Turns out she’s just an ordinary girl with a solid set of good old fashioned mid-central-Ohioian values who just happens to live in Hollywood with her adorable stereotypical mom, that’s all. As always, BatNom grinds everything down until there’s not a single edge of entertainment left, just a smooth flat bland surface full of contrived dialog and stupid smirks.

Jarre Adore

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Finally. And what a payoff! It turns out that Mrs. Winters is a frumpy, Westviewian-bodied, patented Tomban “cute mom”-type who probably has the milk, cookies and comic books on the coffee table already. That BanTom, never afraid to firmly stick with what works.

Meanwhile we can probably assume that the perennially disappointing Frankie will use the dismal lighting at Marianne’s mom’s house to his advantage via the magic of those darn computer machines they make these days and create a scandalous video he’ll sell to DMZ for cash-money-profit. I guess he’ll use some sort of filter to rein in Mrs. Winters…uh…”ample” behind to match Marianne’s painfully bony and weirdly angular body type. Absolutely brilliant.  God I just want to punch this comic strip so hard sometimes, you know?

Seriously though, how much would some gossip outlet really be willing to pay for something like this? Maybe ten thousand dollars or thereabouts? I just can’t see how Frankie breaks even here, much less makes a profit at this. And I still don’t understand his motive here, did he choose the SJ production because it’s the next big thing and just happened to run into Darin by chance or did he choose to target SJ because Boy Lisa works there? Because right now Frankie is a guy who laid out what had to have been many tens of thousands of dollars at the least to obtain a piece of gossip worth a fraction of that, for no established reason other than he just does stuff like that sometimes. As usual, none of the pieces fit together at all and everything contradicts everything else.

And No One’s Gonna Save You When DMZ Reports This Tripe

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(Note to Ban, Tom: using words like “thrilling” in the dialog fools no one. “Gee Mason, this sure is an entertaining briskly-paced car ride!”…see what I mean?)

The greatest trick BanTom ever pulled was somehow managing to rehash the plot of the very story he was telling even as it was unfolding, something few if any writers have ever pulled off. Mainly because most other ordinary writers like to entertain their readers with, you know, ideas and plot twists and cool stuff like that. But not our pal BatNom, no sir, he likes to keep things simple and repetitive. Repetition: the shitty writer’s best friend, lifelong pal, reliable chum. Good ol’ repetition. Always there when you need it.

(SIGH) So Frankie is still scheming will ill intent and Mason and Marianne are still driving around. The studio certainly grants Mr. Jarre a lot of leeway, you know? The guy abandons the set on a whim whenever he likes, sometimes for days or weeks at a time. Maybe he can score Mrs. Winters a job on the movie, I mean why not just go all-in at this point? I will tell you this though, if they’re not at her mother’s house by tomorrow, everyone dies. One of the things I really miss about old-fashioned newspapers was the way I could always tear out that day’s FW strip and angrily rip it up when it annoyed me like it is today, but that’s too expensive nowadays.