SIGH…not this asshole again. What’d I ever do to BatYam to deserve this? Oh, yeah…that’s right! Sigh.
You’d think that after thirty years Les would have settled into a routine of sorts, but apparently the trauma he suffered back in 1986 still resonates every September, like clockwork. Because high school forever defines us, you see, and back in high school Les was an anxiety-ridden simpering pud, so there you go. Kind of makes you wonder why he decided to spend his entire teaching career at the scene of the crime, so to speak, but logic has never been BatYam’s strong suit (guffaw). At least Cayla looks properly annoyed in panel two instead of looking on stupidly like she usually does. Sigh. You NEVER follow up a major Les arc with a Les “slice o’ life” arc…NEVER. You go with a lite & breezy Funky or Crazy Harry arc in that situation, not more Les.
Son of Stuck Funky 
What’s the one thing worse than Les Moore? More Les Moore, of course!
Also…”How did you sleep”? You know, I’ve always had a feeling Lester and Cayla had separate bedrooms. I imagine his is filled with boxes of “Lisa’s Story” paperbacks, ready to be carted out to a book signing, movie premiere, bat mitzvah, or other public event at a moment’s notice.
So Les is going to visit the widow and torment her? “I haz bad feels because you married a bully! Let me remind you how bad he was to me!”
Of course, if this is the start of a long Halloween story, that ends with Linda using her mad bruja skillz to bring Bull back from the dead and drag Les to Hell, it will be worth it. And it would explain that smirk she wears in the banner.
Can we please find out that, like Phil Holt, Bull faked his death and that, like Mort Winkerbean’s dementia, Bull’s has been miraculously cured of his CTE? Nothing would serve Les (who seems to have the most flexible teaching schedule in the history of secondary education) better.
I know that won’t happen. TomBa despises “sportos” and mercilessly consigns them to the center of Hell.
Les’ arm fell asleep? I guess that newspaper he’s holding has better circulation than he does. I mean, we can hope, right?
It is pretty amazing that here we have Bull, who became one of Les’s best friends. Did Les favors and helped his child immensely. In fact, Bull would bear some responsibility for the athletic scholarships Summer and Keisha got. Bull was enough of a friend to Les that again and again Les would seek him out to talk to him, whether it was just to shoot the shit or something more significant. Bull’s widow is Les’s best friend at work, and has been for years. And although it hasn’t been shown recently, Summer was good friends with Bull’s adopted daughter. That’s a ton of really positive things between Les’s family and Bull’s family.
And yet when Bull’s dead, THIS is what he focuses on. His friend died, by suicide in fact, and Les still looks at him primarily as his childhood tormentor; not as a friend, not as a friend to his family, not as a valued coworker, not even as the beloved spouse of a dear friend. There’s nothing that happened in the decades since high school that’s changed Les’s view of Bull.
He comes across as some guy who doesn’t appreciate anything anyone does, but cross him and he’ll ride that grievance for the rest of his life.
Yes. Thank you. Perfect. No relationships ever change, even though we’ve seen them change. It’s always with the rope climbing, psychologically speaking.
Lately every time I click on the link for the day’s strip, I hear the voices of Statler and Waldorf from “The Muppet Show” singing…
Why do we always come here? I guess we’ll never know.
“He comes across as some guy who doesn’t appreciate anything anyone does, but cross him and he’ll ride that grievance for the rest of his life.”
Well said. And what is more than a little creepy is how well that describes the author of this comic strip.
So for Les, the start of a new school year is emotionally equivalent to a credible threat of severe physical harm? At the risk of sounding categorical: any teacher who hates school that much should not be teaching. The students deserve better.
Then again, Les will probably forget he ever had this emotion before the week is out. It’s called writing!
” . . . and in my dream, all my students looked like Bull! Why would I dream that those ignorant, lazy, ugly, untalented creeps hate me as much as he did?”
As quoted in the Wikipedia entry for “repetition compulsion”:
In Freud’s understanding of mental life, ‘repetition compulsion’ … describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviour which were difficult or distressing in earlier life.
In short, Les continually puts himself in mope-inducing situations and expects the world to say “there, there.”
Also, “You’ve probably been like this…” How long have these two been married? She *knows* what he’s like on the first day of school; what’s with the “probably”? Try, “You’re always like this on the first day of school, you know.”
Only a few weeks shy of their 9th anniversary, same as the year Summer and Keisha went to college…. um, grad school?
They’re phys-ed majors and they’re doomed to return to Westview High School as instructors. Unfortunately they can’t do that because WHS girls are required to work under the supervision of a man, and Batiuk hasn’t bothered to replace Coach Bushka. They’ll probably have their PhDs in Basketball Bounceology before they return to the strip.
In two days, we go from Les crying out the window of an airplane, to Les being unable to sleep because of a high school bully.
What a basket case!
And not the fun kind of horror movie Henenlotter type Basket Case.
If Les was a horror movie, he’d be The Happening. Pointless, meandering, the main character is a self-obsessed robot pretending to be human who achieves nothing, and then it just kind of ends.
M. Night Shyamalan is a good comparison for Tom Batiuk. He thinks his work is so deep, when it’s laughable and obvious.
Les would be Manos, The Hands of Fate.
I thought we’d be seeing Crazy sitting at his favorite local pizza shop coffee bar that all neighborhoods have. A slice of pepperoni with your coffee?
Before I could even get to the subtext of this cartoon — ably dissected by Charles above — I stumbled on the “how did you sleep.”
Is this the first time they’ve seen each other this morning? He appears to be coming from the bedroom(?) to the kitchen for coffee. But he’s already fully dressed and even has the newspaper, which means he must have been outside. Yet “how did you sleep?” would typically be the first thing you’d say to your partner in the morning, not kitchen table talk.
I swear to God. I know it’s been said before, but it’s impossible to understand how Batiuk’s mind works. Everything is just so… off, by a few degrees. Off enough to make you disoriented, but not enough so you can pinpoint the exact reason for the weirdness.
Now, now, let’s use the proper terminology. It’s not “a few degrees,” it’s “a quarter inch.”
Yeah, every year all the kids beat Les’ tired ass on the first day. It’s Scapegoat tradition and the bright spot in Kayla’s school year.
A new school year? Alright, alright, alright.
Nice to see that Lester’s free vacation out to L.A. complete with a limo service and five-star hotel accommodations didn’t have any positive carryover effects on the drudgery of daily living… Which means Les saw the wrap party trip as nothing more than a chore, like going to the dentist or mowing the lawn…
It’s funny because Les hates teaching but nobody seems to have told him that he can retire and live off his pension and book/movie revenues…
Why the hell is Cayla still a high school receptionist 15 years later? And why isn’t she dressed and ready for work? Don’t she and Les carpool together?
It’s funny because Les just made his movie, he’s BFFs with two of the biggest stars in Hollywood, literally every teenager at Westview will have seen the Starsuck movie multiple times, and I promise you not one kid in his class will bring it up, or ask what Hollywood was like, or how it feels to personally know Marianne Winters (who I promise you every boy in his class is jacking off to nightly), or what advice he may have for other people who want to make it big in Hollywood… Westview exists in a vacuum where events taking place outside the state of Ohio never happened.
i agree that he doesn’t have the proportions of a high school student. Maybe it’s supposed to be prepubescent Les?
That could be Les at his current age, you know.
This morning, I realized something belatedly about the end of the Lisa’s Movie: The Story arc.
I was still a little puzzled about why Batiuk basically skipped over the movie itself to focus on Marianne Winters’ breast cancer. Wouldn’t he want Les to be celebrated with glitziest accolades Tinseltown has to offer, the way he had Dinkle flown to Switzerland for a big chocolate-selling-award ceremony, complete with medal on ribbon?
Then I realized: A Hollywood movie is a collaborative work. Everyone contributes, so honoring a movie means honoring everyone from the producer to the costumer to the set dresser. That CANNOT happen. The only one we can see honored is Les. And not for something as shallow as an artistic endeavor; no, he saved someone’s life! (Echoing the comics nerds in the strip who’ve credited comic books for saving their lives.)
I think the story is going more in the direction of “Les is a hero because he saved lives” than actual Hollywood awards. It would indulge Batiuk’s “I’m too deep for the shallow, greedy mainstream to understand” conceit, while still framing Lisa’s Bore-y as some kind of important cultural touchstone.
In a way, it’s how he probably views the actual book of Lisa’s Story. It didn’t win the awards, and maybe it’s not selling the greatest right now, but if it saves one lady then I’m a hero.
Oh, SNAP! Of course you’re right, CBH. I’m so used to naked wish fulfillment and instant acclaim for everyone in the strip that I never expected to see this level of realism and resignation from Batiuk (via Les, his primary avatar).
The Cruel World will never give him (Batiuk/Les) the accolades he deserves — but, like a superhero, he is content to live his outwardly boring secret-identity life, knowing that the world will never realize how many damsels in distress he’s saved.
It’s how Tom Batiuk views everything when he doesn’t win any real awards. It’s his rationalization for why his work gets so little positive attention: “oh, it’s too mature and sophisticated for the masses, and takes on difficult topics that comics page doesn’t want to hear about.” Even though all of that is steaming pile of horseshit.
So it’s not surprising he assigns this attitude to his avatar Les. On top of that, the story pre-emptively explains away Les’ lack of success, by saying that Lisa’s Movie: The Story (I like that) will only get a small release. As if the audience would have wondered why Les didn’t win an Oscar for so bravely writing the book, allowing other people make a movie of it, and letting Marianne watch the precious Lisa tapes. The self-entitlement just never ends.
I think the bigger question is, “Why does Tom Batiuk hate August?”
You know, if there’s anyone who shouldn’t be defined by high school, it’s the guy who just came back from a Hollywood wrap party for a movie he wrote and produced, hugging an A-list starlet, who was thanking him for saving her life. That was TWO DAYS AGO. And he was crying about it yesterday.
It’s like I said about Sunday’s strip. Les is so manipulative he can’t even turn it off anymore. He must be an constant state of Upset About Something, so he can mope and pout and whine and never say what the actual problem is, so everyone in Westview will pat him on the back and worry about his pwecious widdwe feefees.
Put a sock in it, Les.
Whine whine whine. Complain complain complain. Nothing but negativity from Les.
He’s a real ray of sunshine. /s
Batty may as well fill all of Les’s word balloons with the same word over and over again. Just like the baby in Daddy Daze. Instead of “Ba”, Batty can use “Wah”.
Cayla: How did you sleep?
Less: Wah wah… wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.
Cayla: You’ve probably always been this way on the first day of school, haven’t you?
Less: Wah… wah wah!
Occasionally, Batty made need Cayla to translate like the father in Daddy Daze, but in most cases we already know what Les is going to say.
I’m reading those “wah”s as the trombone noises from the Peanuts specials. Was that your intent?
I’m afraid that wasn’t my intention. A baby crying is often represented as “wah” in many examples of English writing.
I was trying to joke that since Les is always whining his standard vocabulary can be reduced to one word – “wah”. The varied meanings can be inferred by the situation or can be deciphered by the person he’s speaking to if need be.
Daddy Daze is a relatively new comic strip and the reference may have been too obscure.
Cheers.
Who is Les’s “Bull Bushka” bully nowadays? Is it Principal Nate? Cayla? Another teacher? A student?
Does little Bernie Silver lock Les in his locker and give him swirlies?
Bernie: Give me your lunch money, Moore, and nobody gets hurt.
Thanks for the pity upvote! 😁