I thought Les had already met Cliff and Vera, but then I thought that Les had nothing to do with Starbuck Jones, so maybe he didn’t meet them before.
So, they’re meeting now. Fine. Make another movie from it, “Les Moore Meets The Killer Klowns From Outer Space.”
Oh, and thanks Batiuk (via Cayla) for telling us how we’re supposed to regard this joke. Just for the record, it’s not cute. It’s not even clever. It barely recognizes as an attempt at humor.
And that’s why these two fossils are here, right? Who wants to bet they never make another appearance during this week? Batiuk just came up with a pun and had to shove it in here.
I could think of a better place he could have shoved it.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Look, Batiuk finally has a use for Cayla! She’s the comic-strip version of a laugh track. “This is a joke! The punchline has been delivered! Our research indicates that laughter is the appropriate response!”
Pastis is one of the last people on the comics page who brings his A-game every day…
Stephan Pastis frequently ridicules himself in Pearls Before Swine as a joke. Even to the point of getting physically assaulted by Rat. Can you imagine Tom Batiuk having the humility to present himself in Funky Winkerbean in that manner? Not bloody likely.
What’s the point of Batton Thomas anyway? Did Batty introduce Batton as some sort of smoke screen to defer belief that his real strip avatar is Les Moore? Sorry Batty, nobody in this discussion is buying it. You Les Moore wannabe. 😝
Shameless plug: If anyone reads GoComics, I highly recommend Wallace the Brave by Will Henry. Will lists Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson as a major influence. Cul de Sac is another one of my faves. Richard Thompson, in a little more than a half dozen years, accomplished a hell of a lot more than Batiuk has in almost fifty.
“He’s a banjo man! You can’t tie down a banjo man!”
I second your recommendations!
I will point out that Batton Thomas is usually shown in a mildly self-deprecating light. Often the joke is that no one has heard of him or his work.
Because a prophet is without honor in his own country. His humility is something of Biblical proportions.
I wonder how long it will take before the strip is populated entirely by:
a) TB avatar / Mary Sue figures like Les, Darin, Pete, Batton, Dinkle, John, …
b) silent and admiring women who provide cocoa and cookies like Cayla, Pam, Holly, Harriet, Mindy, …
c) Funky.
What’s the point of Batton Thomas anyway? Did Batty introduce Batton as some sort of smoke screen to defer belief that his real strip avatar is Les Moore?
I think he introduced him so he could have an author avatar that was more closely aligned with his actual life experiences. There’s only so far he can go with Les or Darin experiencing the same things he does.
I’m convinced that’s the reason why he gave Darin “an old soul”, too. So that no one would wonder why Darin was acting like a man in his 70s rather than a man in his 30s or early 40s. (Or knowing how Batiuk screws these things up, his late 20s)
“I think he introduced him so he could have an author avatar that was more closely aligned with his actual life experiences. There’s only so far he can go with Les or Darin experiencing the same things he does.”
I believe the first time we saw Batton Thomas, he was at the free comics day event at the Komix Korner. Batton was sitting all by himself until Bernie and whats-his-name went over to talk to him. Batton proceeded to alienate the kids with stories about the ‘old days’ of comic books.
Nailed it. Batty does base Batton Thomas on his own experiences. 😁
So, the people who had cameos in some sci-fi flick alongside Masonne was in are at the party, but his co-star and the woman playing the film’s namesake isn’t? Makes perfect sense.
Wow, talk about going a long way for a gag that wasn’t nearly worth the trip. Today he trots out Cliff and Vera for no plausible reason whatsoever just to use that woeful “anger management” gag. Right in the middle of a big major arc that’s taken years to play out, mind you. No one else writes like this.
“And the killer stalked his victim silently, hiding in the shadows. He saw his prey cowering behind the outhouse and he began silently creeping toward him with his knife firmly in his hand.
Then a pretty horsey ran by in the background. It was a brown horsey. It was just “horsing around”.
The deed done, the killer pulled into his driveway. He went inside his house, entered the kitchen, then ate a slice of cold pizza. He smirked wryly. The end.”
That’s our BatBrain, mindlessly stopping his stories on a dime to find an excuse to use some dumb throwaway “groaner” gag for his own amusement. Not that it makes any difference, of course, as this “story” has been dead for days anyhow. The corpse is still twitching a little but otherwise “Lisa’s Story” is done. Years of build-up, then he cuts right to the aftermath. Again, no one else writes like this and I don’t think they could even if they tried, as it’s just so unnatural.
I would prefer to attend an Angua Management Course with Captain Carrot on Discworld. myself.
Terry Pratchett was much kinder to his Susan (Sto Helit) than Tom Batiuk was to his (Smith) . (But then again she is Death’s granddaughter.)
And yet, sadly, it’s one of the best gags I’ve seen in Funky Winkerbean in a very long time. It has a premise, a punchline, some passably clever wordplay, and it makes sense. It’s contrived as hell and ignores the strip’s own history, but it works as a standalone gag strip. This is how bad the strip has gotten: even an attempt at a joke is a blessed relief.
PLEASE KILL ME NOW…
And why the hell are they at the wrap party when they had zero involvement with the Lisa Movie?
I guess nobody cares to mention the fact that Marianne Winters was a no-show? I mean fuck it, right? She’s only playing the title character and the entire commercial success of the movie hinges on her performance…
Talent agency? I find it difficult to believe that a dude can have a 60-year gap in his work experience and instantly become a big time Hollywood player like he never left.. And isn’t Cliffe in his 90s?? Who the hell wants to work a 9 to 5 at that age? You’d think he’d want to take advantage of his second chance with Vera and make the most of whatever time he has left… Instead I guess he’d much rather spend eight hours of every day at work and another three hours stuck in traffic?
Scary thought: Cliff Anger is here to sign Les with his talent agency. “Other people laughed at you in the blooper reel, Les, but I saw your comedic genius!”
Marianne Winters was just another chew toy for Batty so he could do that whole attempted suicide bit in the hopes of garnering another New York Times puff piece interview.
He has forgotten all about her now.
And before the suicide arc, in which she was a young and wholesome girl-next-door who still ,lived with her mother and had just started her acting career, she was a sockdollagerizing mantrap who had torrid affairs with her male co-stars (and thus gave Cindy Summers yet another reason to be insanely jealous of Mason Jar.)
Yeah, exactly. Many people remain healthy and energetic enough into their 90s to do hobbies and keep up on their own housework, but a regular 9-5 takes a lot of stamina (and there’s a lot of “crunch” in the entertainment business on top of that.)
Maybe they see the same doctor that Phil Holt does.
Right. I’m sure actors are lining up around the block to sign with a couple of fossils who were completely out of touch with the entertainment industry for the better part of the last 66 years.
Once again, let’s consider just how old these two codgers are. The Starsux Jones serial could not have been made any earlier than 1954, the year TB tells us the comic debuted. Nor was it likely made after 1956, the year the last serials produced by a major company (Columbia) hit theaters. By then, the kind of material that would’ve been used for serials was being turned into TV series such as possible Starsux inspiration “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger.”
We know Cliff’s career was derailed when he refused to cooperate with McCarthy, but Tail Gunner Joe’s own career hit the skids in late ’54. So, as unlikely as it seems, the serial had to be produced immediately after the first issue of the comic came out in order for Cliff to have time to run afoul of the senator.
But how old was Cliff then? He sailed to the USSR while working on a tramp steamer in the summer of 1940. Let’s be charitable and say he was 17 passing for older then. That means he was 31 in 1954 and 98 now. And Vera must certainly be in her late 80s. And they just started a new business?!
Tolkien rewrote part of “The Hobbit” because he realized he had mentioned the full moon rising early in the evening at a time of year when that wasn’t possible. TB, on the other hand, does the bare minimum of research (clearly not even looking back at his own work) and tosses plot points in higgledy-piggledy without regard to history, logic, consistency or his own claims of close adherence to reality.
I know it was before the Cold War and before Pearl Harbor, but I’m still trying to figure out what kind of 17-year-old chooses to hop a ship to the Soviet Union just for the hell of it… How long did he stay? Did he even know the language? What did he do for money? Or is Cliffe just an ethnic Russian who wanted to see his motherland?
Considerably different circumstances, but the seventeen-year-old Gene Bullard stowed away on a German freighter in 1912 and made his way first to Scotland, and then to Paris. So there’s at ;east proof that it could have happened (although Batiuk was too inept to describe CA’s motives, or get realistic about historical circumstances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Bullard
Leave it to Batiuk to think that a 100 year old man would really be starting his own business, especially a business in the high stress, high speed world of entertainment management.
But then, Batiuk apparently is unaware that people retire. His conception of Hollywood is that Cliff only needs to call up Mason when he’s looking for a job for a client. Mason will either create the job on the fly for Cliff’s client, like he did for Cliff himself, or he’ll have a job immediately that somehow hasn’t been filled despite the fact that really ought to have been filled at that point, like Les’s cameo as a waiter. (That’ll be 15% of your income, sir!) Cliff of course has the necessary money to start his own business because he was no doubt paid millions of dollars for his superfluous cameo in the Starbuck Jones movie. Failing that (sure), he’s sure to find a bank willing to loan a 100 year old man money to start a business. It’s a snap!
This despite the fact that Batiuk apparently has no idea what management does, as he has never shown any evidence that major media stars Mason and Cindy have agents or managers.
Batty loves to trot out all kinds of old people. I guess it gives him an excuse to wallow in pointless and boring nostalgia that only he finds interesting.
I’m waiting for Batiuk to contradict himself within a single sentence. It’s just a matter of time.
“It’s called writing!”
I don’t know that he ever contradicted himself in a single sentence, but Dick Locher came close once in a “Dick Tracy” strip. A killer was explaining the motive for his crimes and it literally changed from one thing to something completely different within a single word balloon. It was amazing, like a glimpse into another universe where logic and the laws of science are opposite to those of our own. Oh, how I miss him.
There was that Sunday strip with the Butter Brickle/Brinkel/Brinkley story where he had two different versions of his analog for William Randolph Hearst within a few panels of each other. I think it was within the same sentence, but I won’t be looking to verify.
As with that, as with this, as with Holt, as with so much of his content, it doesn’t matter. He can do fundamentally anything he wants, no matter how bad it is, and not suffer any kind of negative consequence for it.
And Vera should resent being called “the original Jupiter Moon” since unlike Cliffe, she still had a career after the show and continued to act for many years afterwards, iirc…
And Cliffe shouldn’t need an introduction, either — In the span of 2-3 years he had a memorable return to the screen in that Starsuck reboot that took in billions at the box office, he married Vera at the world premiere in front of a legion of cosplay geeks, he did the national interview circuit on virtue of being the last surviving actor who got put on the HUAC blacklist, and he was part of an Emmy award winning documentary where he not only filled in the pieces of a 70-year-old murder, HE ACKNOWLEDGED THE LEGENDARY EXISTENCE OF A CIGAR SMOKING, WHISKEY SWILLING, CAR DRIVING CHIMPANZEE WHO COULD ALSO SPEAK PERFECT ENGLISH (!!)
So I daresay Cliffe Angere gets more media spotlight nationwide than Lebron James, Kanye West, Tom Brady and the entire Kardashian family combined…
Jesus, Batiuk go back and look up your god damn strip every once in a while. I know you’re in love with your writing so it shouldn’t be difficult.
Les met Cliff and Vera because he attended their wedding at the Starbuck Jones premiere at the Putrid Valentine theater in 2017. They were more properly introduced less than a year later when Les and Cayla were visiting Mason and Cindy following the Eisner Awards. There was no reason for Cliff and Vera to be there, but I guess that where ever Mason is, Cliff is never far away. This was also the sequence that introduced the Butter Brinkel storyline, although back then he was referred to as Butter Brickle, because of course he was.
These idiots know each other already. I mean, come on, Batiuk. Cliff’s your stupid darling, so you had to know that you introduced him to your other stupid darling Les at some point in the last several years since you introduced Cliff.
Thank you, Charles, for confirming that Les and the Dodderers had already met. See, I thought they had, but I would have had to look it up…
*shudder*
Honestly, I’d rather check out those noises coming from the basement.
Vera and Cliff don’t actually have a talent agency. They’ve both become senile and people humor their delusions to keep them calm. Like those nursing homes that have fake bus stops outside.
It’s why they have to be introduced to Les Moore again.
Funny you should mention ol’ Brickle/Brinkel…
Did anyone figure out the reason behind the name change? if not, I may have stumbled onto a possibility.
I was digging through the old newspapers again last week when I came upon a story about the sale of Fenn Brothers Ice Cream and Candy Co. to L.S. Heath & Sons Inc. in 1971. The Fenn Brothers did not create Butter Brickle, but they did trademark it as a candy and an ice cream flavoring. The Heath company, of course, produced the Heath English Toffee Bar.
Heath acquired the Butter Brickle trademark when it bought Fenn Brothers. It was later acquired by Leaf North America Inc. when the Heath family sold out to the corporation in 1989. Seven years after that, Leaf’s Finnish parent company sold its North American holdings — apparently including the Butter Brickle trademark — to Hershey.
Understandably, Hershey takes a dim view of possible trademark infringement and has not shied away from legal action. I’m not saying Hershey threatened to sue over the use of the name Butter Brickle in the strip (or even that the company was even aware of it), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a King Features attorney, seeing the strip after it was too late to change it, feared it could cause problems and suggested a minor spelling change in future strips might be wise.
Or maybe TB just screwed up…
My feeling, which is unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, is that Batiuk realized that calling him Butter Brickle was absolutely ridiculous and tended to undercut the seriousness he wanted the story to have.
“When Moopsie Poopsie was shot in the head and killed, Butter Brickle was considered a prime suspect, only because the police deliberately ignored that shooting women in the head appeared to be the favored killing method of fellow star Winky Tinky Pinky, who was also at the party where Moopsie Poopsie was murdered execution style.”
“Gasp!”
I suspect your theory is correct. Even though it is absurd for “Butter Brickle” to be the bridge too far in a story that includes “Cliff Anger” and a talking murder chimp, it’s exactly the kind of thing we would expect TB to do. What is funny to me is that by changing his name from Brickle to Brinkel, TB actually made the whole thing slightly less realistic, statistically. There are more than twice as many known Brickles (720, 579 in the US) in the world than Brinkels (348, 89 in the US), though neither name is common.
Now, Pete’s last name going from Roberts to Reynolds? No idea what the point of that was.
One major flaw in your theory: it requires Tom Batiuk to recognize when his work is ridiculous. And, have a desire to avoid this. And do actual work to achieve it.
Honestly, I liked “Brickle” better. It sounded like a name a jolly, goofy silent film star would give himself. It was also common for Hollywood stage names to downplay any perceived foreign-ness. I imagined his real name was something like Karl-Heinz Brinkëlfanger.
That’s absolutely true. That said, I think Batiuk has recognized how his strip’s name Funky Winkerbean has hampered the effectiveness of his attempts to tackle serious issues. Considering the ego he has for this, I suspect he may even place greater importance on it than it deserves.
So if he wanted this murder scandal to resonate rather than call attention to its ridiculousness, he probably realized that his main character couldn’t be named Butter Brickle. The victim couldn’t be named Candy Barr, and the murderous chimpanzee at the bottom of it all couldn’t be named Bananas Foster.
Actually, forget everything I said. The fact that the revelation was “The talking chimp did it” obliterates any claim that this story should be taken seriously.
The name of the strip is just another one of Batiuk’s lame excuses for why it’s not as successful as he thinks it should be. The silliness of the name Funky Winkerbean didn’t prevent the strip from becoming synonymous with cancer, disease, and melodrama. So there’s no reason it couldn’t have represented a serious, well-written comic strip. But it simply isn’t that.
Sure, it wasn’t the best choice for a title, but names are just names. People get used to them, even ones that seem unusual at first. It’s also common for names to become artifacts.
I’ve totally talked myself into writing a serial about an anthropomorphic chimp named Bananas Foster who’s a hard bitten, hard drinking, hard smoking private detective. And all the people populating the world are anthropomorphic animals with names of things they like to eat.
Joining Bananas is his wily assistant, an anthropomorphic cat named Tuna O’Malley, who’s a smooth ladies man. His happy-go-lucky exterior both hides a dark side and provides a good contrast to the brutally cynical Bananas.
There’s the femme fatale, an anthropomorphic rabbit named Romaine Paluzzi. Bananas longs for her but doesn’t know quite what she’s about. Will she love him or sell him out? And if she sells him out, to whom? The cops or the criminals?
Plus Bananas’ job necessitates encounters with the criminal underworld, so he frequently has to deal with the local crime boss, an anthropomorphic boar named Potatoes O’Brien. Bananas lives in existential dread that someday he’s gonna go somewhere Potatoes doesn’t want him to.
And finally there’s the local Chief of Police who has a love-hate relationship with Bananas. Sometimes they’re friends, but sometimes Bananas comes into conflict with him just as part of his job. Chief’s an anthropomorphic dog named Dogshit Derringer.
.
.
.
.
Thank you for entertaining my incredibly stupid idea that was inspired by the idiotic names Batiuk gives his throwaway characters.
I so hope he was confronted by a King Features attorney. I can picture Batty pouting and acting like a spoiled little brat over this.
He isn’t shy to call up his attorneys, so it would be fitting to for him to get dose of his own medicine.
Tomorrow we hear about their restaurant franchise, Anger Steaks.
On Sunday, we’ll hear all about his podcast, “Look Back in Anger”.
And Monday is the first edition of their relationship advice column, “Words in Anger.”
And Vera’s city-planning business, Metropolitan Nash.
After she murders Cliff, she’ll be known as Nash the Slash. The police will not arrest her, but give her an airline ticket to Westview.
John Simon reviewed a revival of the play *Look Back in Anger* and called it a museum piece. He then went on to say that he meant it respectfully, because things are in museums for a reason.
“Squirrels” and “bears” are important in the play. Could this be why Dinkle was reading about squirrels not too long ago?
Shut up, Cayla.
Local gossip: “I feel sorry for that poor woman. You can tell he’s physically as well as emotionally abusive to her.”
She looks drunk. Good for her!
It’s breathtaking how thoroughly the Cliff Anger character showcases how little thought, research, and effort TomBa puts into the strip. Reading everyone’s comments above caused me to look up the timeline of the events he’s thrown together in the Batom/Starbuck Jones/Cliff Anger saga.
According to the Batom Comics history, Flash Freeman and Phil Holt created Starbuck Jones as the initial Batom title. Batom was founded following the Congressional hearings sparked by the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. Those hearings occurred in April of 1954, coincidentally the same time that the Army-McCarthy hearings that ended the McCarthy era. Army-McCarthy ran from April through June of 1954.
The two sets of hearings that sparked and sustained the Hollywood Blacklist were held in 1946-47 and 1951-52 respectively.
What we’re left with is that the Starbuck Jones serial would have to have been made somewhere between two and eight years before the establishment of Batom Comics.
Also, if memory serves, Cliff was being questioned by McCarthy. McCarthy’s hearings were conducted in the Senate and were focused on communist infiltration in the US government.
Converesely, the hearings that led to the Hollywood Blacklist were conducted in the House of Representatives by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). McCarthy would not have been part of these hearings.
None of this matter to TomBa. I suspect that what’s being set up here is a way to have Cliff Anger join the Atomik Comix crew. He can be Phil and Flash’s agent when The Subterranean movie gats made by Mason’s production company.
Good sir. That is an amazing amount of thought put into parsing out the hidden plot holes of this very messed up timeline. I doff my hat. I stand in line. I bow, as is tradition.
CBH,
I have to hold up my end. The level of talent and knowledge you and the other members of this community bring to this site is exemplary.
Ok, well FW is always bad, so let’s peruse the comics page to see what else is going on.
Crankshaft: insensitive wordplay. Crappy.
Mary Worth: Wilbur is about to be thrashed by Libby the one eyed cat. Yes! Finally some quality content!
So I guess it’s not a total loss today.
Mary Worth delivers yet again!
it took maybe 2 minutes to find a strip with Less, Cayla and the fossils.
Sorry, don’t know how to embed the strip in WordPress. Help Mods?!?
Never mind, it worked. I’ll be a murder chimp’s uncle.
Between this and Phil Holt’s resurrection from the dead, TB lately likes retconning things that were printed during Rick Burchett’s brief tenure drawing the strip.
I can only assume that Burchett’s transgression was his superior drawing ability.
Not being a long-term reader, I was wondering why that strip looks so much better. Would that Mr. Burchett came back. Too much to ask for, I know. And thanks to all for the PhD-level backstory research. Fascinating and maddening. The fact that you guys get so much out of such a very thin gruel every day continues to delight.
Yeah, but there’s two things.
1) Vera was speaking. Vera’s a woman, and she’s not even Lisa.
2) She was not speaking about creepy Les.
Therefore, there’s no way creepy Les Moore would remember her or her husband. Heck, he probably isn’t even listening in that strip.
Vera and Cliff are starting a talent agency. In their 90s? Sure they are. Only in the Batiukverse.
Add aging and retirement to the list of items that Batty knows nothing about.
Both of my adoptive parents lived well into their 90s. Mom was mentally sharp until the end, but her body failed. She was on oxygen 24-7, required a walker, and never even left her assisted-living apartment during the final two years of her life. Whereas Mom physically failed, she made quite a team with my adoptive dad, who unfortunately developed Alzheimer’s. Mom supplied the brains while Dad supplied the brawn. Dad performed physical tasks for Mom while she reminded him to take his prescriptions and pay the bills. Mom passed just two weeks short of her 97th birthday. After mom passed, dad went on a steep mental and physical decline. He died from complications of Alzheimer’s at 93 last Summer. Mom and Dad outlived most of their friends. While those surviving friends are younger than my parents, they are both widowed, live in assisted-living facilities, and haven’t worked in decades.
Despite being reasonably calculated to both be in their 90s, Cliff and Vera are veritable spring chickens. I assume they’ll both be completing the Lisa’s Larceny Run next year in record times.
First, Ruby Lith, Flash Freeman, and Phil Holt are hired by Atomik Komix. Now Cliff and Vera are starting their own business. The fact that Batty doesn’t comprehend the concept of retirement makes his own next year highly improbable. Sorry.
Don’t forget Ed Crankshaft, who canonically pitched an exhibition game against the Detroit Tigers in 1940. Do the math on that. No real-life MLB player from the 1940 season is even alive now. There are only four living people who played in the majors before 1947. And Crankshaft is still driving a bus!
But… but… but… Ed Crankshaft has been portrayed as a wheelchair bound invalid at the Beside Manor in Funky Winkerbean. Mindy took Pete to meet him when they got engaged. Crankshaft confirmed he had suffered a stroke by giving a thumbs up.
Crankshaft is supposed to be 10-15 years behind Funky Winkerbean but Batiuk continually blows up that theory with blunders in timelines and technology.
First of all, condolences for your parents. Even if they were butting against the the upper limits of a natural lifespan, it can still be hard to let people go.
Second of all, I’ve suggested before that the older Batiuk gets, the more spry his all his old people become. He’s 74 years old. He’s at the age where, if you’ve been healthy and active up to that point, you start wondering what your odds are. Are you gonna be one of the lucky ones that has another 20 years of independence? Or are you five years away from a diagnosis that will doom you to a more precipitous decline?
He can’t let these people slow down. He can’t let them retire. He has to imagine a world where he has another 20 years.
Marking the half-century of my high school graduation this year and noting the number of classmates I lost, I’m definitely encountering the question of what’s left in the tank. Looked at it that way, I can understand his drive to continue. I just wish he’d put more effort into his work. He might even find the research energizing or, if research is tedious, that working with a researcher is mentally stimulating.
Thank you for the condolences.
Your theory makes sense. I just turned 60 a couple of months ago. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m a 60-year-old grandmother. Just bury my body on the lone prairie.
Even the 120+year-old Walt Wallet, in Gasoline Alley, a veteran of the war against the Kaiser, is acknowledged to have slowed down considerably.
Not to mention, the other characters have noticed how improbably old he is. At one point he was investigated for potential Social Security fraud.
Ah. I checked out of the strip somewhere in year two of the scrapbooking story.
So pointless a strip it might as well be round. This has indeed be a dispiriting week – Actually it is rather telling that in an arc that one presumes was to show or tell the reader of the many virtues of Les and the film the Author ran out of things to say and inserted these old coots and bit of painful wordplay.
Rather telling that.
And it must be noted other than from cancer or suicide nobody dies in this strip. Which is why we have hordes of folks in their 90’s about.
The whole Weekend At Lisa’s 2 arc is pointless. It spent so many weeks on shopping agreements and Lisa tours and producer meetings and casting and so much other folderol. Then it slammed to a halt more abruptly than Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and disappeared for over a year.
This story makes me feel like I fell asleep on a plane during an especially tedious in-flight movie, and woke up for the last five minutes. I don’t have any idea what’s going on, but the unlikable protagonist seems to be happy, so I just this thing to end so we can land.
“This story makes me feel like I fell asleep on a plane during an especially tedious in-flight movie, and woke up for the last five minutes.”
That would be explicable. Sadly, the disconnect engendered by FW is solely due to the haphazard plotting of the author.