Well, Mason, if you didn’t want to freak Les out, maybe you should have been a little more subtle…you know, less following Les around in your little black car, less parking right across from their house–you know, that sort of thing.
Or, as all of us have been screaming for days now, maybe you could have realized that memorizing an idiot’s driving patterns isn’t going to help you in a drama about a man suffering because his wife is dying. Has Mason always been this stupid? I know, I know, to ask is to answer.
Cayla’s remark to the contrary, it would have been nice if Mason had made Les and Cayla act “weird or strange.” They’ve been just as boring as they always were, and always will be. I would have settled for “interesting,” too, but that ship has sailed.
Son of Stuck Funky 
This actually kinda gets my hopes up that Masone’s Lisa’s Story movie will largely consist of Les driving rather than, you know… everything else.
I hate to burst your bubble, Billy, but based on Mason’s research the movie will only depict Les being chauffeured around greater Westview…and by an African-American, no less (“Driving Mr. Moore”?).
And unless Mr. Jarre has X-ray vision, he did precious little observation of Les in his natural environment as a high school teacher. Maybe he should have acted the part of a retired band director, so that he could have gained entrance to the school and wandered its halls and classrooms with impunity.
That is less insufferable than Les hitting the sauce while talking to his imaginary depression cat and… well, most everything else that happened during the last years of Lisa’s life. More offensive, though. There will be no winners with this film…
Would’ve been interesting if he peeped Les and Cayla sex. “Only 15 seconds! Really?”…. Imagine what Pearls would’ve done with a see you in your natural environment arc. Would’ve been hilarious I’m sure. There is funny, and then there is Batty.
I don’t understand the chronology of “Lisa’s Story” at all. What good would it do to study Les now, many years after the book was written? I don’t know and neither does BatBrain, but you damn well know he’s gonna work Lisa in there somehow, at which point Cayla’s punch line streak is coming to an ignominious end. It’ll probably be years until she speaks again.
Before shooting “Dino Deer” Mason ran around in the woods on all fours for a month and before “Starbuck Jones” he spent seven weeks living in a really half-assed sub-universe, just to acquire a real empathy with the material.
“How’d you like the movie?”
“I dunno. The Les character was way more of a smug bearded dick with ears in the book. I guess that Jarre guy doesn’t put much into researching his roles.”
Umm, yeah, no, I don’t think so. Batom did say this arc was going to be “long” (shudder) and I’ve re-calibrated my expectations accordingly. There’s no way the cancer movie arc wraps up before 2022 at the earliest.
It’s “long”? Uh oh, we may be in the final Endgame of Funky after all.
The Lisa movie will premiere in Westview let’s say, oh, March 27, 2022, to pick a date at random. TB will announce next year he’s taking a vacation as the year-ahead schedule allows him to retire early.
You should see what’s on the Funkyblog now. Apparently there’s going to be… sit down for this one…
“a late summer comic book cover that will serve as a coda to the lengthy Lisa in Hollywood arc.”
And it’s going to be Rip Tide: Scuba Cop. You can tell because the .PNG filenames have the word scuba in them. And, there’s an easy-to-guess, not-shown filename that gives it away even more.
Let me repeat that. A Rip Tide: Scuba Cop comic book cover, that’s going to tie together the Lisa in Hollywood arc. In three months, after it’s taken nine just to get where we are now.
Did Batiuk get bored with the Lisa-goes-to-Hollywood story, like he did with Starbuck Jones and Butter Brinkle? Are we going to be mercifully spared from pitch meetings and shopping agreements? Does Batiuk even know what the word coda means? Is he going to apply Mason’s crazy suggestion to make Dead Lisa a superhero? Is any of this a death knell for Funky Winkerbean? We can hope, friends. We can hope.
I’ll hazard a guess. The second image is Lisa, Les and who knows who else “escaping” from the grasping tentacles of the “Hollywood octopus” as the movie is finally shut down.
We can add acting techniques to the list of things TomBa doesn’t understand.
Aside from being filler it does nothing to advance the plot of the “Making Lisa’s Story – The Movie” arc. It’s quintessential “write the first thing that pops into my head so I can get back to my comic books”.
Just a guess here, Todd likes watching L&O: Criminal Intent. There’s an episode of a method actor who’s a homicidal maniac serving as a model for this arc.
One of these days I want to query Amazon sales data and see how many of these asinine Dead Lisa books people have actually bought. Outside of Baldwin-Wallace College and Kent State, of course.
I’ll save you the trouble: it ranks 2084 in graphic novels. 2.6 million overall.
Ha! Good one. From what I’ve seen, the Lisa books (and there are a surprising number of them) rank 800,000th or more on Amazon, which translates to sales of more or less zero. One of them was #5,000 among breast cancer books. Way to be a small fish in a small pond.
You cant use the graphic novel ranking for the sales estimate- you have to use overall rank
Either way, he isn’t selling a ton of books.
Those 14 a month are probably him purchasing books to schlep around for book signings.
QFT, my friend
The ranking for his newest book – the one that dropped in February – has it selling about 14 copies a month.
Too bad all of Todd’s gee-whiz sci-fi komix writing background stopped short of his actually learning about the Observer Effect in physics. No wonder those Sunday strips dealing with that pompously lame science teacher are so utterly fucked up.
Jim Kablichnik. The character that gave us the infamous “Ultima Thules” non-joke. Ugh, he is the worst. He’s basically Les from a distance: a smug, unkempt, condescending dick who thinks he’s an intellectual when he’s not even a competent high school teacher. Fortunately, we don’t have to hear about his personal life.
Todd came off as the Ultimate Tool with that one. If you have to put fucking footnotes in a strip to explain yourself, just stop and maybe consider another line of work, like navel lint harvesting. Because you’re an unfunny jerk and you’ve already failed miserably. And since he STILL managed to mispronounce the airbase in that idiot footnote, so much for his preening “joke.”
Todd not only didn’t realize that the hard-T pronunciation of the airbase is unique to Danish and isn’t how the Greeks pronounced “Thule” in “Ultima Thule,” but since “Thor” isn’t Danish but Old Norse, it doesn’t have a modern Danish clipped Germanic hard-T pronunciation, either. And just to cap it off, he didn’t bother to educate himself that the the contact binary’s actual name is 486958 Arrokoth, chosen to honor the Powatan indigenous peoples, and ‘Ultima Thule” is merely a nickname. in sum, he managed to smugly insult just about every culture associated with the entire fucking mess, as well as shit all over the supposedly wisearse students who actually deserved a lesson plan that wasn’t entirely chock full o’ misinformation.
Um, does anyone remember that the last person Mason worked on a movie with almost killed herself because of an incident he was involved in? (And she is supposed to be starring in this movie too, somehow). If you take that into consideration this comes off extra stalkery. Which, Batiuk being a terrible writer, I have no idea if that’s the intended reading or not.
The intended reading is as always “The genius who wrote this is worthy of a Pulitzer.”
“You see, I am in reality Starbuck Jones, a space-traveling visitor from the future! My assignment is to study the most remarkable man of this era without being detected! I decided to practice my stalking skills on you before I seek out Funky Winkerbean.”
Les has been a weird little monstrosity since the get-go so it is way too late to worry about that now.
So I guess Lisa’s story will have a lot of driving scenes like say Manos the Hands of Fate or Birdemic. Good to know.
Over on the FW Blog some sketches were posted today with this caption:
“Here are some Pipeline preliminary sketches for an upcoming comic book cover by Craig Rousseau that will run in Funky at the end of the summer. The cover will be a coda to the lengthy Lisa in Hollywood story arc.”
A coda is a conclusion. How “lengthy” can the Lisa in Hollywood arc be if it ends in August or September? The Starbuck Jones arc ran for over a year.