Yesterday Epicus wondered “Is this some sort of cancer trilogy-con…Is there any Lisa cosplay going on?”
We have our answer today. The lady in the purple overcoat is a pretty decent Lisa, and there appears to be another in the background of panel two. That one might be more accurate since a pre-chemo Lisa cosplay should have an coppery to strawberry blond rather than a Barbie blond.
Also, ideally, the Lisa cosplayer should try to keep her lips around half an inch below the bottom of her nose at all times, rather than having it slip to the bottom of her chin at random.
So…both Les and his fan had Lisa’s Story get hard for them. That is a very specific fetish. If Les wasn’t already married, I would suggest a love connection here. But then again, what happens at the Cuyahoga Falls’ Annual Book-fair stays at the Best Western where this tiny conference room is located.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today it’s the other half of Les’ insufferable fan base, the ones whose sorrow and loss was never adequately captured by any other artist until The Delicate Genius composed his masterpiece. Apparently some folks see more depth in a collection of rather simplistic and hackneyed comic strips (which is not really a “book”, BTW) than I do, but then again I’m from New Jersey so you can’t go by me.
Anyway, it turns out that eleven years ago Batiuk killed off Lisa, who played Les’ wife in the strip. From the looks of it I bet it was pretty depressing, too. I can’t believe there’s anyone who’d want to buy this thing that hasn’t already, he must be hitting every fictional hick town in the ol’ Buckeye state. Midpointville, East Westerly, Neighborhood Heights, Hilltop Valley, Flathills, you know, those prized tertiary markets most writers people actually like NEVER visit.
You’re from New Jersey, TFH is from New Jersey, I lived in New Jersey for a few years and went to college there.
Coincidence? Yes.
Waiting for Pee Pee Township.
In the course of my career I have worked for, with and managed and even fired folks from New Jersey. Maybe I just got lucky but they were all awesome, give you the shirt off their back type folks.
“Lisa’s Story” was hard on these two? They have no idea. I would like to see them read it from this side of the newsprint.
Seeing Julia Child in the masthead the last few days intrigued me, as I was wondering what roll she would play (get it?).
Of course, the actual strip was as disappointing as my pun.
“…Lisa’s Story was hard for me.”
“Hard for you? Hard for YOU??? How? Any idiot can read. Even more than half my moron students can read. Writing is harrrddd. It’s sooooo haaaarrrrrddddd! Sometimes I’d sit for hours, even days, staring at a blank page in my typewriter.”
“You used a typewriter…?”
“SILENCE, WOMAN!! A MAN IS SPEAKING!!! I would stare at a blank page. That woman who hangs around my house would distract me by bringing me cocoa. And a talking cat would taunt me. The Lord of the Late would cast a spell on me… Writing is sooooooooo haaaaaaarrrrrrrddddd!!”
“But weren’t you writing about stuff that actually happened to you, and…”
“ENOUGH, FOOLISH WOMAN! BEGONE!! YOU HAVE NO MORE LINES TODAY!!!”
“Lisa’s Story was hard for me. I mean, all the overly flowery, pompous attempts at writing, jerking abruptly from storyline to storyline without resolving anything, and the author’s insufferable self-pity. It was impossible to follow what was going on with Lisa. It was hard to get through that dreck. I hope this one is a lot better.”
“Hmmmff. I guess some children WERE left behind!”
Tom Batyuck: “Kancer Porn Komix is difficult!”
Oh God, the woman in the background of panel three is that horrible Crankshaft woman, isn’t it? Batiuk, stop trying to make Crankshaft a thing. Crankshaft will never be a thing, nor will you win acclaim from it. Your shattered dreams cannot be forced to fit together again.
That makes me wonder if group book signings actually exist. Is it like a flea market of authors?
Boy, a convention where a serial mystery writer is placed next to a cancer misery porn writer must be a wild ride.
No, not really.
“I’m hard right now.”
Damn straight it was hard. Every so often, he’d catch himself wondering how her dying was affecting her and their daughter and he had to start from scratch because of course, everything is all about how it affects him.
Never mind the lady in the background with the brown coat, shaped so she nightmarishly resembles a giant brown coprinus comatus mushroom.
Must be the second week of May in that snowy tundra known as Ohio. They’ve put away their parkas until next October, and are now wearing only heavy coats.
Could be a bathrobe.
So is Les doing the comics convention circuit? I don’t know what other venue would have a room full of authors.
And are we going to just have a week of these snippets of people’s interactions with Les?
Why does that… object… behind Less in the first panel look so much like a steaming cow flop? OK, the colorist slipped up and made it red… a bloody steaming cow flop? Yeah, pretty much sums up this strip.
I guess Mr. Smirky, while wallowing in his self-centered pity, never thinks that maybe why it’s hard for the woman to read The Great Trilogy is that she might have cancer herself? Of course not, there is no reality outside of his life. Never even thought to ask “why is that?” Heaven forbid, he might have to actually engage one of his reader person to person, instead of High And Might Writer to lowly piece of crap.
Asking “why is that?” veers dangerously close to developing a plot line that might be unrelated to comic books. We can’t have that.
I imagine the ordeal was hardest of all on his dead wife, and most grieving husbands have to endure without the multi-volume book deal, TV rights, and all the other gravy train perks, but to acknowledge that would be to take some of the spotlight off of Les and we can’t have that, can we??
As an aside, what’s the point of Les even being married to Cayla? Because his story of pathos works SO much better as a bitter widower who refuses to let go of the past and crying himself to sleep every night watching his worn-out Lisa movies… And don’t think Batiuk can’t do this after he had Bull spend his entire retirement re-watching all his old game films and eternally replaying that infamous Fourth-and-Goal failure…
Batiuk needed to check off the box next to “Interracial Marriage” on the list of “contemporary issues affecting young adults” and Les was…available.
This. He had to do an interracial dating arc and as usual he wrote himself into another corner. He couldn’t break them up and he couldn’t just pretend it never happened, so he married them.
Wait- interracial?!
This is of course the part where I ask why Batiuk didn’t just, you know, marry off one of his younger characters with a woman of color instead??
I’ve posted a few times my belief why Batiuk initially had Les and Cayla dating, and why he wrote himself into corner that resulted in him having to have Les marry her. Here’s the relevant quote from one of them, from the entry on the 9/20/15 strip:
I think if he were trying to be edgy, he would have made a much bigger deal about it, perhaps enlisting Roberta once again to condemn this beautiful interracial couple so we’d know just how edgy Batiuk is. This is Tom Batiuk we’re talking about, after all; the man who doesn’t realize there’s a B in subtle.
Again, one of the common situations he mined earlier on in Act 3 was Les and Summer chafing each other with their embarrassing or willful behavior. So he came up with the idea of having Les get involved with the mother of Summer’s biggest basketball rival just to grate on Summer. He had already introduced the rival as a black girl so obviously her mom had to be black as well. But then he realized that he couldn’t hook Les up with a white woman without breaking them up, but if he broke Les and Cayla up and then had Les hook up with a white woman, he’d look palpably racist. So rather than doing that, he changed Cayla’s character design to make her more distinctively white, and reduced her role down to pretty much nothing. Remember that the hairstyle change from a distinctly black style to a distinctly white style was done with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, and happened right when Les was deciding to commit to her.
Just as Batty was high fiving himself in the mirror and taking a victory lap around his mom’s attic for this “edgy” interracial marriage, everyone else noticed that the majority of TV commercials these days feature interracial couples.
No need to hold your breath waiting for an award for this, Batso.
Yeah once again Lisa herself if ignored except in how her death affected Les Moore’s life.
“Now now lady, let’s bring this back around to me.”