“The more things change…the more you’re going to find to worry about”. Uh, sure Cayla, whatever you awkwardly say. If she’d said “the more YOU’LL find to worry about” it’d sort of be a gag directed at Les and his endless complaining, but “you’re” kind of turns it into a totally meaningless platitude, which sounds about right.
Coming tomorrow: the latest very timely FW prestige arc begins as an enraged Bernie arrives at WHS with his COVID-19 gun in his backpack. Tragedy is averted, however, when Principal Nate cites the WHS handbook, which forbids “virus, germ and chemical dispersant devices” of any kind. Bernie receives some much-needed counseling.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Les got up on the wrong side of bed today. If only Cayla had placed the bear traps on that side!
(There! Is that convoluted enough, inane enough, and most importantly dumb enough, to suit this strip?)
Mr. Snark, always dumping on the students, telling them how dumb they are, and we’re supposed to believe that he’s wracked with concern? Darn BatHack, read your own strip and see what BS that is! Just have Less take retirement, get whatever they give teachers, and disappear.
Saltines and a ream of copy paper, no?
Nice callback!
The terrible things Les Moore makes you root for…
“The gunman, armed with a COVID-19 rifle, was subdued by police after a wry conversation tinged with ennui and grim smirking acceptance of his fate. The only victim, Les Moore of Westview, was hospitalized and is currently listed in fussy condition. Police say it appears as if Mr. Moore was used as a human shield, possibly by faculty, students or a combination of both. When asked to comment, Mrs. Cayla Moore smirked and said “sometimes things happen and sometimes they don’t.”
“grim smirking acceptance of his fate”
Boy, that must have been a fun breakfast that Lester and Cayla shared between yesterday’s and today’s strips, huh:
“Do you want toast or an English muffin?”
“Bullies, bullies, bullies…”
“More coffee, dear?”
“Waiting for me, the bullies…”
“Would you like me to drive today?”
“I’m gonna run over all the bullies, mow ’em down…”
Has it been brought up that this two-days-and-counting Lesfest that he is constantly harping on a situation that was supposedly retconned out of existence, that Bull was looking out for him to keep him from worse abuse, or was the good that Mr. Bushka did interred with his bones?
And, in spite of the Covid mention here, anyone want to wager as to whether or not we’ll see anyone wearing a facemask this week?
Yeah, you know, the kind of guy who is still waking up and filled with dread first thing in the morning because of one person who (pretended to?) bully him decades ago (and is actually dead now) probably should not be teaching, or around kids at all.
This is like his thirtieth “first day of school”. With a little effort he could have cranked out a “here we go again” type of thing, but “a little effort” is expecting way, way too much.
I was surprised he finally said covid-19. I thought he would just use the generic word pandemic indefinitely.
I’m still amazed he was so lazy that he wouldn’t break his rotation and slip in some covid related strips back when it was at its peak.
I have to give him credit for committing to the bit—never EVER being topical. I just noticed Crankshaft talking about the songbird illness that just came up last month and i couldn’t believe it—i was sure that strip was also phoned in months ahead of time.
It gets even better with Covid though—he thought it would be over quickly and could just refer back to it, but the _masks and lockdowns appear to keep coming up over and over again_. He will miss his opportunities to complain about them many more times to come.
I think with Crankshaft he has an army of helpers that produce the strip, so it is probably easier to change things up.
Wait, now the pandemic isn’t over? I thought we established that the entire pandemic happened offscreen in the “lost year”. It was an odd concept, sure, but it was something to hang your hat on. Why is Batiuk walking it back?
Let me pretend to be an optimist for a moment. Yesterday, Cayla criticized Les for being a pathetic wimp every time the first day of school comes up. Today, she tells him that he’ll always find something to whine and bitch about, no matter what. She’s sick of his wretched act, almost as much as we are. By the end of the week, she’ll be asking for a divorce. Should be simple, seeing how they have no kids. (At least none that they remember.)
Just kidding. But I’d like that twist.
Bernie receives some much-needed counseling.
In the form of comic books, of course.
By lumping school shootings in with Covid, Les is either massively overestimating gun violence in his little podunk school, or downplaying a pandemic.
Isn’t this the guy who used to sit in the hallway with a machine gun?
M60E3… Classic!
Who can blame Les for being so jittery when the last incident at school to cause him such mental anguish was (checks notes)…. Masone Jarre secretly following him around in the most obvious manner possible, all in the name of “getting into his character” or some such bullshit…?
Les, the job is what it is at this point… God knows you’ve been doing it for an eternity. But the hard reality here is believe me, you aren’t the only bastard on the face of the Earth who gets up every morning and drags himself to a 9-to-5 he hates. Hell, everyone else in Westview seems indifferent at best about their daily jobs, with the notable exception of Harold Leroy Dinkle… The only difference is the rest of us don’t have book and movie revenues in the bank which would easily allow us to take early retirement. So either grow a ballsack and man up or walk away for good; but for the love of God, QUIT YOUR BITCHING AND MOANING ABOUT IT ALREADY!!
I have friends and family who are educators, and all they do is complain too. They complain about their pay, the hours they work, and on and on.
So Batty inadvertently got this aspect right. You know what they say about blind squirrels.
Oh, I work at a state university (staff, not faculty) and I’ve been praying for death for a long time now… Only because I don’t have the stomach to carry out a workplace shooting spree (yes I know I should just get out, I’m working on it)
Ironically my mother was a veep at another college for decades and she loved every minute of the chaos and insanity…
I feel for you. I was a Teaching Assistant in grad school so I know that routine.
I was referring to Public School teachers who have excellent pay and benefits…and not saying they don’t deserve that…just that you have no room to complain.
Does TomBa actually think this week’s offering is somehow deep or meaningful? Having a teacher (or principal) exhibit “I don’t want to go to school today” behavior is a long-standing cliche. And randomly throwing in a mention about COVID and school violence doesn’t make it timely or topical.
Over at the Batty blog, he’s likening himself to Albert Einstein.
What he talking about with a four-year time skip? I thought it was ten. And I thought there was only one such skip.
There were two time-skips. The first was only four years and skipped the original characters’ college years. It accompanied TomBa’s decision to move from the gag-a-day format to his “quarter-inch from reality” stance, what is referred to as Act 2. The death of Lisa brought down the curtain on that, spawning the present mess, which is either a ten-year time jump or the result of a transporter malfunction that aged everybody ten years (I think at this point even TomBa doesn’t know).
Oh, that’s what he meant? Crankshaft only started in 1987, and the 4-year time skip in Funky Winkerbean was in 1992. So it hardly made much of a difference to a world full of nonagenarians. I always thought of the difference between the two worlds as 10 years, but you reminded me that it’s actually 14 years.
My head canon for the second time skip is that both strips happen in the present, but the past was moved back. Instead of graduating high school in 1988, the FW cast now graduated in 1978. Which puts them in their early 60s instead of their early 50s. This is also consistent with how the first time skip was handled: in 1992, their graduation was explicitly moved back from the current year to four years prior. It’s not perfect but I think it’s the best explanation that can exist.
“It was a clear breach of temporal law, but I figured that if Einstein can have a ‘fudge factor’ for his Grand Unified Theory, then I can have a fudge factor for my crossovers.”
Of course this fudge factor has become completely untenable with the post-Lisa ten year time jump.
He uses a lot of words to say “I had no idea what I was doing, but I did it anyway.”
He should run for president!
Well, why not? Einstein never won a Pulitzer, either, and his Nobel Prize wasn’t given in 1905 for the Theory of Relativity but in 1921 “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
“I knew Albert Einstein. I played violin duets with Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was a friend of mine. You, Mister Whole Note Takes a Walk, are no Albert Einstein, though you are as detestable as Claude Barlow…”
Les hates wherever he is and whatever he’s doing right now. Last week he was at a Hollywood wrap party, where famous people were falling all over themselves to praise him, and all he did was mope around uncomfortably. Now he’s back in his hometown and his regular job, and he’s complaining about that too.
Every word that comes out of that man’s mouth is a constant stream of attempts to make other people feel sorry for him. He’s an abusive, manipulative bastard.
I kind of like the vaporwave album cover vibe of Panel 1, but I’m certain that it was a complete accident.
Does this mean we can look forward to a rant from Jim Kablichnik, Batiuk mouthpiece #23? Perhaps something “timely” about “COVID deniers” or “anti-maskers” or whoever Batiuk’s NPR affiliate was demonizing 10 or 11 months ago? Or perhaps a good old-fashioned anti-gun tirade?
Or perhaps just a “kids these days”/”the world’s going down the tubes” extended mopefest from Les?
Ooh, I can’t wait!
[Mods: I don’t intend this to be a political post at all. Just a FW prediction. When Batiuk has a hair up his ass, he often gets Kablichnik to bloviate hysterically about it.]
I’ve seen tomorrow’s strip. It will be a good answer to your question.
“good” in this instance being a relative term, I’m sure.
It’s a good answer to DoD’s question. It’s not a good strip.
No matter your political affiliation, I think it’s okay to point and laugh when Batiuk climbs up his rickety soapbox to spout nonsense. It isn’t the positions he holds, it’s the ridiculous and hackneyed way he presents them.
Tom Batiuk’s only real political opinions are “global warming is bad” and “pass the school levy.”
He generally seems to have the bog-standard, mainstream-approved “all right-thinking people believe ____” opinions. Which is fine, except that he seems to feel that he should be congratulated for them. He also lacks the balls to commit to them, extremely uncontroversial though they may be.
For example, what was the point of the ICE/Adeela arc? Even the most rock-ribbed foe of illegal immigration would agree that deporting the wrong person is the wrong thing to do. He almost tiptoed out on a limb, by portraying the ICE agents as sinister ambushers — but then they all shared a pizza and a laugh with the gang at the end of the arc.
It’s an incoherent mishmosh with no conviction of any kind, and he seems to believe that it’s brave and groundbreaking.
Curious that Cayla and Les’s wedding occurred at about the same time Keisha left for college. It’s like Cayla traded one child for another.
Les needs his binky.
About yesterday’s strip – young Bull reportedly told young Les that he would get him on the first day of school.
But don’t they live in the same town? Like, really close to one another, since adult Les could drive past adult Bull’s house? Did young Les somehow avoid seeing young Bull _anywhere_ over the whole summer break?
Do school bullies only operate during the school year and within the school?
One of my high school bullies: “You better watch out walking home today!”
Me (blankly): “I take the bus.”
Bully (after momentary pause): “You better watch out getting to the bus, then!”
Since the buses all gathered in the central yard, and it was maybe a 20 metre dash to reach them, this threat failed to fill me with the desired level of dread.