The part of panel 1 Marianne will be played by a bedraggled young Dustin Hoffman in a black tank top.
That’s right, folks: Marianne Summers— sorry, Winters’ glamorous look doesn’t just happen! She requires a professional to style the dead grackle that sits atop her empty head. In fact, during the height of Covid, Marianne’s hair appointments were the only matter of sufficient urgency to get her to leave her Mom’s bungalow. Of course, this raises questions about where she was going to get her hair done, since the salons were all “shut down” too.
By way of some programming notes: as we head into spring, a few other notable occasions are coming up: least notably, April 11th marks the twelfth anniversary of the blog you are reading. That’s preceded by Tom Batiuk’s 75th birthday on March 14th, and on March 27th, Funky Winkerbean‘s 50th! Your friends here at SoSF will be planning…something, something fun I guess. Stay tuned and stay Funky. –TFH
Son of Stuck Funky 
“Hair-devil”?? That’s just terrible, even by FW standards. And are we to believe that Marianne PAID someone for that haircut? I mean, come on, man. At least have the decency to give her a hairdo befitting her status as an A-list actress. She looks like she just came from basketball practice.
One minute Masone is quoting ancient Chinese philosophy, and the next he’s telling the kind of joke you’d hear from a second grader…
Hair-devil? Right. And Marianne’s face was drawn by special guest artist Pick Asso. There, I can make crappier puns than Batiuk.
So, the only time Mopey Marianne went out “during the shutdown” was to get her hair did…oh, and also at the wrap party for the Dead St. Lisa film last August, and when Wes rescued you from the raging inferno that destroyed L.A., and when you shot the film, and when you took part in a “Lisa’s Legacy” run in Ohio, and when you auditioned for the film, and…
It’s funny how Batiuk continually fails to sync up the COVID timeline in his strips with the pandemic’s real-life chronology. Is it the former 10-year time gap that stops him from keeping things straight, or an innate refusal to make and keep notes?
Also, at what point in this week’s proceedings will the paparazzi show up at the restaurant to snaps photos of Ms. Winters and Mr. Jarre canoodling in their private booth, with the resultant publicity throwing Cindy into a violent, shoe-throwing fit of jealousy and sending Marianne on a nighttime visit to the Hollywood sign for a cord-free bungee jump?
Good point. I guess she’s OK with being seen in public with Cindy’s husband now.
I think he just figures that nobody pays enough attention to his strip that he can just have characters say things happened that never happened and nobody will notice.
Batdick’s dialog and storytelling are at the level we’ve come to expect at SOSF.
But I submit that Ayers’ artwork has reached a new low. The last two strips have been drenched in hideous, hideous mauve. Marianne now sports a self-mutilation haircut, crossed eyes, a dislocated nose, and a preposterously scrawny neck. And our artist finishes off with an enraging Maison Jarrrre smirk.
Does Batdick specify all this shit? Maybe. But Ayers could always say no and just freakin’ quit.
TLDR: I did not enjoy today’s strip.
Masone in panel 2 has a single hair growing from his forehead. It looks like if you pulled on it, he would unravel like a shoddy sweater.
It’s a nerve ending. Like Pim from “Smiling Friends,” which is better than anything Tom Batiuk has done in nearly 50 years.
I want to hire the Smiling Friends to look in on Ayers. They’d take one look at the ‘art’ from the last two weeks and nope on outta there.
“Pim, can I, ugh, can I talk to you for a second? Look, Pim, I know it’s our job to help this guy and everything, but I think this guy is a lost cause. He has obviously given up trying. Why don’t we just cut our losses and get out of here?”
Or reveal the hideous alien creature that he obviously is.
This has to be a super-power: the ability to make any situation as boring as possible. The hero can put the villains to sleep with his inane wanderings.
And they’re supposed to be movie stars! They’re not two Westviewian lackwits sitting around Montoni’s and complaining about the weather, they’re two huge celebrities talking about an Academy Awards nomination. And it’s nothing but ponderous, moronic banter about nothing at all.
“Gee whiz, it sure is nice to be out of the house again.”
“Yes, it sure is nice to be out of the house again. My wife left the house the other day.”
Why even bother with movie stars and Hollywood at all if that’s all you have? Then there’s that gag, which gets exponentially worse every time I see it. So I’m going to stop looking at it now. “Hair-devil”…come on, Tom. That’s not a “groaner” gag, that’s an acute abdominal pain gag.
And on top of all that, Marianne is actually getting even frumpier as this thing lurches along. Is the artist just more or less admitting he can’t do women here, or what? I have grown to INTENSELY dislike Marianne 2.0 and her drab, plain, alleged charm.
I can relate to this strip! During the shutdown I too only went out for one reason… usually returning with canned tamales and disappointment, and maybe some single-ply toilet paper on a good day.
1. Do A-list actors seriously go to beauty salons and barber shops? I thought they had personal hair stylists who came to their home?
2. Is conversation between A-listers really this dull? I’d have thought they’d be talking about their new movie projects or gossip about other celebrities or Marianne’s complete absence of a love life, or politics or the environment or Cliffe and Vera’s talent agency or the goddamn Super Bowl in their own city or the Dodgers or fact that the Lakers suck or the vacations they took to Tahiti or New Zealand or Madagascar or sailing to Hawaii or some shit…
3. As an aside, Masone is the first boat owner I’ve seen who doesn’t constantly find an excuse to talk about his boat or his adventures in deep-sea fishing…
4. Okay since nobody ever talks about it, I’m going to assume that the Great Wildfire of 2020 was retconned and never happened — It was just Les daydreaming again. The same with Marianne’s breast cancer…
5. Marianne Winterse clearly has the “male generic face template” in panel 1, and the less said about the punchline, the better….
6. And exactly where the hell is Cindye anyways? It’s not like she has some kind of job or anything else to do all day besides suntanning until the afternoon, spending Masone’s money in the evening, and screwing his brains out at night…
“During the shutdown”? How delightfully vague. We already covered the theme of “isn’t it great that we can go out in public again” in last April’s Crankshaft strips, but I guess Batiuk decided to revisit it while he still had the chance.
Why is Marianne blankly staring at the camera like that? She’s clearly talking to Mason, and she has a fear of being confronted by the “Hollywood press.” So this is a strange artistic choice.
I’ve also noticed that the more Marianne gets talked up for this award, the uglier she gets. She practically looks like Linda now. She used to be attractive and confident. Apparently Batiuk has to reinvent her as a pathetic schlub before he can give her the Oscar for playing Lisa. In his mind, it’s not enough for her to portray Lisa; she has to actually be Lisa. Complete with real breast cancer. Good lord.
Re: Marianne’s Oscar nom – I wonder if the impulse behind it is related to Les carrying her out of the fire? That was spun as Les getting to rescue Lisa ‘again’ (since he didn’t actually carry her out). So maybe this is Les’s ‘creative power’ giving Lisa’s stand-in massive public adulation, so that it’s as if he were giving it to Lisa.
Does anyone else feel there’s a horror vibe to the way other women get identified with Lisa? Cayla’s had a Poe-level makeover into Beige Lisa, (heck, Cindy looks like Blonde Lisa, though perhaps more due to artistic limitations) Marianne became Lisa so successfully that she had breast cancer, a nice neighbour lady was framed as Lisa’s ghost. It’s as if Les’s focus on Lisa is so strong it morphs other women in his range into her image.
Except for Summer and Keisha, because they wisely spend most of their time the heck out of Westview. I imagine Cayla warning them “It’s too late for me, save yourselves!”
Les would make a great horror movie villain. I imagine a story like Tusk or Crawlspace. Les is obsessed with recruiting women into his life, so he can turn them into Lisa. The plot twist is that, unknown to anyone in Westview, he is really a former surgeon. And he’s growing cancer cells in his basement for this purpose. In what’s left of Susan Smith.
He doesn’t even have to be a villain, just something interesting for a change, like Jimmy Stewart gradually turning the obsessive creepiness dial up to 11 in “Vertigo”…
FWIW, I would have bet the house that during the Lisa’s Movie Project, we were going to see Lester personally turn Marianne into a perfect Lisa “copy” the same way Stewart did Kim Novak…
Les didn’t even care enough to bother with that. Once Les realized he couldn’t pout the movie out of existence, he didn’t have any real interest in how Lisa was portrayed.
I have wondered on occasion why Lester doesn’t start dropping hints to Summer that she’d look **SO** much better if she dyed her hair reddish-brown…
Relatedly, the profile of Marianne smiling looks a heck of a lot like some of the better-drawn images of Summer….
Again, yeah, artistic limitations must be considered.
I have no idea what story TomBa thinks he is telling here. The shutdown of personal care providers ended in 2020.
And restaurants reopened a while ago as well.
So, we’re into the second week of an arc that basically petered out last Wednesday, which went directly from “OMG, I’m up for an Oscar!” to “Oh fuck, I have to talk to the press”, followed by random non-punchlines. Seeing as it appears that a few days have passed since Masone and Marianne’s phone call/zoom session, I wonder if the news has travelled to Westview yet? Or are they waiting for Masone to fly his private jet out and deliver the news personally on the front porch of the Taj-Moore-Hall. But yeah, I’m fully expecting that the end game here is for Marianne will win the award on the 50th anniversary and channel Lisa for a tearful, inspirational, acceptance speech in which she gives all the credit to Les for saving her life from cancer, since without this movie the thought would never have occurred to her to get checked out.
It does seem awfully obvious, but then again with this Batom weirdo, you never know. He might take some random, unfathomably lame detour that no sane person could have possibly seen coming. And it wouldn’t be the first time.
And of course, during the acceptance speech, Lisa’s ghost will be hovering over Marianne, smirking
“Ha ha, hair-devil… Don’t mind me, I just thought I’d remind us both that I’m married!”
Ooh! Ooh! Maybe Mason will give Marianne the bent nail that Les gave him, to give her confidence to face the press!
Only if TB can remember that far back, though.