Hello loyal SOSFers, noted Betamax enthusiast billytheskink here for another couple weeks at the helm. My goal today is simple, to see if I can get more writing done than Les did over the last couple months. Let’s dive in:
Here’s the link to today’s strip.
Let’s see; 1, 2, 3… 6. I wrote six words! “Once upon a time” is; 1, 2… 4. Four words. Mission accomplished!
Also, major newspapers across the country are now printing and delivering today’s strip, in which an adult son ogles a photograph of his late mother from when she was in high school while telling her widower about how attractive she became after high school. And we all called Pete the creepy one…
For reference, Lisa looked like this for much of Act II:
Durwood, meanwhile, looked like this before his nose went all Pinocchio/Jughead/Doonesbury in the early 2000s:
Separated at birth? Why yes, actually, they were.
Son of Stuck Funky 
First of all, Darin’s “mom” is named Mrs. Fairgood. Once again Batiuk minimizes Boy Lisa’s adoptive parents in order to beatify Lisa just a little bit more. Lisa was his “mom” for like twenty minutes so please, let’s not pretend that Boy Lisa had some everlasting maternal bond with her.
Second, are FW readers being asked to believe that Les has spent the last twenty months or so struggling to tell the story of how he and Lisa met? I remember when she was first introduced to the strip and trust me, it wasn’t exactly a nuanced or complicated story. And I’m sure she either wrote about it in her journal or videotaped it or something, in case that was the one Lisa detail Les hasn’t permanently committed to memory.
And finally, is it just me or is it kind of disturbing to watch Boy Lisa gawking over how “swanned out” his biological mother was back in the day? I mean seriously, man, it’s OK if every single character in the strip isn’t constantly reminding the readers that Lisa was the world’s most perfect female specimen and that Les was the only one smart enough to see it, I mean we got it the first seventy-five thousand times around. It was like twenty years of the strip for God’s sake.
You’re all well aware of how I feel about Les but in my book Lisa is right there, barely twenty lengths behind. He wrote Lisa differently than he writes for all the other female characters. It’s like he saved every positive trait for her, then put her in positions where her awesomeness would save the day and/or set an example for everyone else. Oh it was so sickening. And at first Lisa was indeed uglier than the south end of a north-facing mule and not even half as funny as a two-week long “Funky exercises” arc.
This episode is nonsense. Is Tom Batiuk trying to say that, in a town that worships Les and Lisa, Dullard has never seen these photographs before? Photos of his own biological mother? Yeah, pull the other one.
I suspect this is some kind of role-playing game that Les has set up, that he demands all his visitors play: he pulls out a huge box of Lisa pictures and his visitor has to swoon over them, even though said visitor has seen them thousands of times. But that’s okay, because the only people who would visit Les are people so brain-damaged that they think the Les-Lisa story is super-neat-o.
“I just can’t figure out how to start the story of how I met Lisa.”
“Man, Lisa sure was hot, Les.”
“OH, I remember it like it was YESTERDAY!!!!”
I mean seriously man, it doesn’t make a lick of sense on any level. I really hope he isn’t planning on plodding through that pregnancy story again, that’s only been re-visited a thousand times already.
Last week Darin said he was coming into town to “see Mom and Dad”. Now he’s referring to Lisa as “Mom”. What is it, Batiuk?
Not that Lisa was an ugly duckling… she was more of a sheep in a hairnet.
And didn’t Les spend the entirity of high school that didn’t involve Lisa’s pregnancy pining for Mary Sue Sweetwater?
“Holy crap, Mom sure was fugly in high school.”
“Yeah, Frankie was really drunk when he hit that.”
“You’ve only gotten more douchebaggier over the years.”
“Well, I always was a big disappointment to my folks.”
“Umm…I’ve got to go now…and do…stuff.”
“Darrell, I’m glad we had this convo. Anytime you fell like rapping, come on by.”
Batiuk needs to forget his own history in order to support his need to make a tribal god image of the bore Lisa Crawford. We remember a homely girl with unfortunate hair and ugly clothes that hung off of her life a tent and we remember Les futilely pining away for a girl who didn’t feel like acknowledging his existence but he needs to make a myth of things in order to sanctify her borderline competence as an attorney and theatrical exitus from this life.
Lisa always looked kind of like a duck, now that you mention it.
Lisa Lisa Lisa Lisa. That’s all Batty has anymore.
The level of smug self-satisfaction is off the charts in panel 3. So Les was unable for months (years?) to look at the photos he had on hand to jump-start his book/graphic novel?
Lisa pictures must be shared, like a fine bottle of aged wine.
“Cayla, bring the hot chocolate and cookies! The men have important business to discuss!”
“Boy, mom’s appearance sure did change since she was in high school! It’s almost as if a caricature artist decided to draw more realistically, with no regard to the previous depiction!”
Young Lisa looks as if she has Muppet ping-ping ball eyes.
1. Yeah, Darrin — You bio-mom was the first person in recorded history to go from awkward geeky teen in high school to moderately attractive in adulthood…
2. Did a grown-assed man just say “swanned up”? Isn’t this proof positive that Darrin in addition to Les has a “Lisa outfit” he makes his wife wear before sex?
3. We’re going to get another long flashback again, aren’t we?
Writer’s block huh? Needs pictures to get the book going, huh? Gesh, just transcribe all those worthless Lisa tapes, and BOOM! there’s your book Less.
“Swanned up” – another entry for the Batiuktionary. Anyway, I don’t think I would really consider Lisa’s transformation swan-like. She became less goofy looking, but she still was never particularly attractive (in my opinion, at least). At least she avoided the elephantiasis that seems to have stricken all the other older female characters (besides Cindy)
Before Darin made the trip from Hollywood to work on Illos, wouldn’t Les tell him he hasn’t written the book? Colossal dick move wasting Darin’s time.
The Author really has the amazing ability to be both tedious and creepy at the same time.
I remember reading somewhere that a good author lets his/her characters develop once they’ve been created and that at times that means the plot of a story takes a turn that the author had not planned. I suspect that Batiuk has regretted his decision to kill off Lisa ever since the strip with Masky McDeath was published. A quick list of some storylines that he was able to explore (admittedly not always thoroughly) through her – sexism in law firms, the death penalty, date rape, the issue of sale of adult-themed comics. These were issues for which he could probably obtain accurate information pretty readily without having to do a deep-dive of research.
Act 3 started with his attempt to address PTSD but the complexity of the issue appears to have daunted him, so we started to get the Hollywood and Batom arcs. Given the rich backstory he created for Batom on his blog site, it’s actually unfortunate that he didn’t just timejump backwards and spin out stories about the industry during its “silver age.”
When was the last time we’ve seen Summer? Genuinely curious.
January 27, 2016 – 1 year, 1 month, and 7 days ago.
At least we know Lisa didn’t die from cancer of the forehead- since she appears to lack one in these photos. Or perhaps she just grew her eyebrows long and combed them straight back…