And in classic FW fashion, we don’t see even one second of Dinkle’s massive Thanksgiving feast, as Batiuk opts to focus on the dull, tedious aftermath instead. If this surprises you, please pay more attention. It might have been nice (and sensible) to maybe ask Wally or Cory or even Billy to help the elderly Dinkle carry twenty-five chairs back down to the basement, but then we wouldn’t have this “domestic slice o’ life” gag to savor and amuse us. If the next Dinkle arc involves his rehab and recovery from his unfortunate tumble down the stairs, it’ll all have been totally worth it.
And on that note, I’m pleased to turn things over to our Fearless Leader, TFH! What pre-holiday horrors await us? Stay tuned to find out!
Son of Stuck Funky 
Well, that just figures! When you paint yourself “creatively” into a corner, don’t bother to show your work, just jump over it and pretend you meant to do it that way, logic and reality be darned. I swear, if Battyuk had directed “Titanic” he would have spent the first half introducing characters and the second showing them bobbing in the North Atlantic exclaiming, “Boy, that sure was some big iceberg the ship hit before it sank, huh?”
Tomorrow’s strip: Dinkle folding up chairs?
They’d be sitting on the shoreline, toweling off and exchanging wry banter about the disaster.
“So what did you think about the drinks at the ship’s bar?”
“Too much ice.”
(Knowing smirk)
If I could commission Ayers or Burchett to draw this, I would pay good money. Not a lot of it. But actual cash.
I love the way Dinkle is shooing his own daughter and grandchildren right out the door with the rest of the assorted randoms, with great relief. Did they even have a chance to say boo to each other? They never had a second alone as a family, and we know the Dinkles hadn’t seen their grandkids in at least a couple years.
Doesn’t Batiuk have at least one kid? I recall reading somewhere about his son. How could anyone get this whole scene so wrong?
On the other hand, the Dinkles at least have no occasion to sigh, “They grow up so fast.” On the evidence of the strip, their grandchildren may actually be aging in reverse.
This seems way off-character for Harry, who thrives on social interactions and being the star of the show. The Harry we know would beg folks to say so that he can continue to regale them with his World’s Greatest Band Director hijinks. Is he suddenly an introvert who finds social interactions draining? No, it’s just Batdick being Batdick. Lisa croaks? Skip ahead 10 years to spare the readers the authentic drama of Les and Summer struggling to deal with the devastating loss. That’s just the most obvious example. It’s his modus operandi, and it sucks.
Of course, Harry himself will contribute no effort at all to clean up. Are you kidding? Heck, he’s the World’s Greatest Cancerous Tumor!
He isn’t touched, he isn’t humbled, he doesn’t thank his wife for whipping up dinner for twenty-nine people, he’s just glad it’s finally over so he can relax, something he normally never, ever does.
The unanswered (and probably unanswerable) question about this week’s strips is – What on earth was TomBa’s intent when he imagined this? Did he want to celebrate the return of large post-COVID gatherings combined with the stateroom scene from A Night At The Opera?
I’ll say this: most people would be mad if their wife secretly invited two dozen people to dinner without consulting them, and then expected them to do half the work. But not Dinkle. He’s just surprised that Harriet’s actions have consequences, y’know?
I think it’s “consequences she expects him to help with” that has him taken aback.
Harriet should just call on the same magical elves/brownies that did all her meal prep – they’ve been on hiatus since cleaning up the Home Alone house for Christmas day, after all.
How are the Bedsore Manor residents getting back to the home? For that matter, how did they get to Harry’s in the first place?
Today settles it. Harriet is attempting to kill Dinkle by triggering some kind of cardiac event with a combination of undercooked teenaged turkey and overwork. The huge crowd coming over is just the alibi.
We can only hope. But I think she is losing it too. If you were inviting all of those people, then why didn’t you thaw the turkeys ahead of time?
And if she was inviting all of those people, maybe she could have served something besides 20-year-old frozen band turkeys. Did they even have any side dishes? Nobody brought one.
Pretty sure those turkeys were old enough to drink and vote.
Was. Not. Expecting. This.
Rusty, my friend, you should have expected it. Remember, this is the “writer” who brought us years — YEARS — of nitpicking and whining about getting Lisa’s life just exactly right. Then months of picayune details about producing, casting, and filming. Then a week of looking at golf clubs and sparks, leading to the big fire that burned down LA, about which no more has ever been mentioned.
Ages later, suddenly, a wrap party. No premiere party; no critics’ reactions; no audience reaction; no interactions with cancer advocacy groups eager to be involved; no publicity interviews; no reactions from his friends who grew up with Lisa, or from Lisa’s kids; not a single strip that shows us shots from the movie; no mention of royalty checks or how the movie affected sales of his book.
Just an offhand mention to Caucayla that the movie tanked.
There isn’t really any word in English for this kind of non-resolution. We need to coin a word that is the opposite of denouement. Renouement?
There isn’t any word in English for this kind of storytelling, for the same reason basketball teams don’t practice shooting airballs. It’s not something you should ever want to do, and it’s antithetical to doing your job well.
I wonder if TB learned his narrative lessons from the serials (wait, serial: there is Only One in the TBverse and it is Radio Ranch) that ended each instalment with a cliffhanger, and opened each instalment with a cheating retcon of the peril?
Ending: hero’s car plunges over cliff. Beginning: hero safe on the edge, looking down at crash.
Ending: heroine tied up on railway tracks. Beginning: heroine and hero embracing “thank goodness you found me in time!”
This used to be done in the written serials as well, with one instalment having the hero tied up and hanging over a pit of scorpions or something, and the next opening with the classic line “With one bound, our hero was free!”
In between, of course, the serials also had fistfights, escapes and rescues that were shown, otherwise no one would have watched or read them at all. The cliffhanger was used to bring audiences back, so it usually upped the stakes by portraying an inescapable peril.
TB seems to use the structure of serial ‘narrative’ to avoid showing motivation, conflict, character development, rising action, resolution, …. The strips are just beginnings and denouments.
That’s a great observation.
Very true! And if you read the smirks, snark, shock, and exposition as his own version of a fistfight, escape, and rescue, then he’s following the serial format exactly.
So, to sum up… Nobody brought a dish or a bottle of wine, nobody helped with food prep or serving, and nobody helped with the dishwashing, taking the trash out or moving the furniture despite the fact that one guest is THE BEST KNOWN RESTAURANTEUR IN TOWN and the hosts are a couple of 80-something retirees… Yep, this is the most Batiukian Thanksgiving we ever could have wished for and it was as predictable as the Detroit Lions losing again… Jesus Fucking Christ everything and everyone in Westview is straight up trash…
The only thing missing was Les Moore attending and dropping a bunch of unfunny faux-self-depreciating jokes about his Lisa Movie bombing out at the box office, and then volun-telling everyone that they’ll be burning all those calories at the Lisa’s Legacy 10k Fun Run next week…