Wow! More comic book collectibles! Those will no doubt triple in value within a few decades and might be worth WELL over nine cents apiece by then! That Skyler sure is a lucky kid, when Boy Lisa kicks the bucket he’ll stand to inherit the ENTIRE Boy Lisa collection! That oughta be enough to pay for college AND a few pizzas too! Well, a good online college at least…IF he qualifies for some sort of comic book scholarship program, that is. Otherwise his path seems shaky at best right now unless he really, really likes old comic books.
Congrats to the SoSF snarkers who successfully predicted the contents of Boy Lisa’s Mystery-Pak. Although in fairness what else could it have been? After all, it was the wrong shape for a pizza box. I likewise assume that Phil Holt is dead, which makes him the shortest-lived FW character ever, assuming that Darin’s weird half-sister is still alive, that is. BatNom has spent countless weeks on Pete and Darin daydreaming about what it must have been like to work at ol’ Batom Comics, then he introduces a character that actually did work there only to kill him off after one appearance. Apparently the great comic book art master had no one better to leave his career-defining work to other than a guy he met and hung out with exactly once, which says a lot about the glories of being a comic book artist, at least from one perspective.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Among things one could receive from an attorney, I think I’d rather get a subpoena.
Aw crap, this is going to be an ad for that silly auction Batiuk has for those dumb covers, isn’t it?
Oh God I hope not, as that would mean he created Phil specifically to kill him. If these fictional SJ covers are actually worth anything, why was Phil working at children’s birthday parties? How’d HE miss out on the SJ goldmine? Cliff Anger sat on his ass for sixty years and got a movie role AND a wife out of the deal, meanwhile Phil gets the indignity of leaving his stuff to Boy Lisa after he dies. And why did he have to die at all? Couldn’t he have just given his drawings to Darin without actually having to die?
Why was the lawyer acting like Darin was especially tough to track down? Why didn’t he just call him? How many Darin Fairgoods can there be in Hollywood anyway? Once again the way every single little element of the story makes no sense whatsoever just never fails to impress.
Since Batiuk apparently hates the name “Funky Winkerbean”, he should just rename this strip “First Draft”, since that’s so obviously what it is. For years now this strip really just seems like he thought it up as he was writing it in ink and never read it over again before it was published.
If (as it appears) that Batty created the entire Phil Holt arc for the purpose of giving Darin a big posthumous bequest, then he has truly outdone himself in the area of gratuitous character manipulation and unbelievable plotlpnes. On the basis of one chance meeting at a child’s birthday party, a ride home and one conversation we’re to believe that Holt included Darin in his will. Did Darin ever follow up on visiting him?
Yeah, dumb on so many levels. But I’d rather read about comic books than a stupid fun run. Or maybe not, I’m really not sure why I read this strip at all anymore.
I think the head of the nail has been struck. I can imagine it–
“Gee, it sure was nice of Phil to give me all these comic book covers…I should do something with them, like auction them off to benefit the Lisa Run.”
And Pete Rhubarb and will bid on them all.
It would make more sense if he’d accidentally found them at a garage sale. Then again, we know how little Batiuk cares for what we call common sense. All we get from him is a greasy, stupid smile and a smug, stupid comment about how an ill-thought out first draft is ‘writing’ instead of ‘writing practice.’
What the he*k? Those are most likely forgeries! Don’t those assholes read Rex Morgan, MD?
So, I guess Durwood can now afford that house in Malibu that Jessica’s been craving.
So Phil must have gotten dropped off by Boy Lisa, quickly decided to revise his will, got his very-expensive high-rise office building attorneys to change his will, and promptly died. Then the very expensive law firm executed the will in record time, and finally did the painstaking research of tracking down Boy Lisa so his photo could be displayed on Senior Partner’s computer prior to delivering the gift-wrapped comic book covers.
Not to mention that even though California doesn’t have an inheritance tax, Phil may have left debts that the estate would have to pay. Creditors have a window (in Pennsylvania it’s a year) to file a claim with the estate. If an executor makes distributions without keeping enough in reserve, he would be personally liable.
And, seeing that these include a couple of the Starbuck Jones covers we’ve seen in previous Sunday strips: If these were Phil Holt’s, why are they drawn in so many different styles? Was Phil an artistic chameleon, able to change his style at will? Or did he steal his fellow artists’ original artwork from the Batom Comics offices?
I like to think that Phil Holt put a poison that can be absorbed by the skin on the covers knowing that Boy Lisa and whatever dolt he was working with would be unable to resist. it’s the romantic in me.
What’s really amazing is, they managed to be delivered in a package without any hard covering (e.g. cardboard), and yet none of them are bent, much less creased.
I just realized that we’ve neglected the possibility that Phil is still alive, has developed a crush on Darin, and hired a detective agency to locate him. This would explain the presentlike packaging.