Author: billytheskink

The Man Who Slanted Trees

Go see today’s strip
Unless you do not want to
You won’t miss a thing

Day two of this arc
Funky is so out of shape
This is in real time

Be careful Funky
That hillside is full of stones
That can trip you up

Darin trespasses
And finds himself getting shot
Same fate for Funky?

Funky’s four-door car
Back down to two doors just like
All Batiukmobiles

If this turns into
A big rip-off of The Shack…
We have still seen worse

Cuyahoga Nights

Well, now that all that is thankfully over, today’s strip shifts gears (booooooooo!) to Funky, who is testing out his recently-renewed driver’s license while listening to Lesley Gore.

And that’s it.  That’s all there is to it…
TB actually spoiled this week’s story (such as it is) on his blog a few weeks back. In fact, if you haven’t read that blog post, this strip has no context at all. It might even have negative amounts of context.

This does actually remind me of something I enjoy, though- The scene in Hoosiers when Coach Dale drives up to visit Shooter Flatch’s shabby house on a wooded hill. If tomorrow’s strip shows Dennis Hopper firing a shotgun over Funky’s head, that would redeem a few things.

Not Your Stepping Stone

It looks like we get one of this strip’s patented jogging gags in today’s strip. Looks, however, can be decieving.

No, I would not classify today’s gag as a jogging gag. It is haplessness gag, a staple of Act I reconfigured to fit the age of the strip’s main characters. Back in Act I it was Les and Dinkle’s pupils who were most often the butt of such jokes. Now in Act III, Funky has assumed Les’ former role, his pitiful sole can’t keep from stumbling over the same little rock over-and-over as he tries and fails to get some much-needed exercise. Les has kind of assumed Dinkle’s role, lording his perfection over the morons surrounding him. Act I, however, was sometimes self-aware about how irritating Dinkle’s behavior was. Can we say the same about Act III?

It also looks like Les, who gave Durwood “the bum’s rush” yesterday so he could get to work on his new/old Lisa project, is procrastinating again. This look is not deceiving.

Preludicrous

Had I known TB was going to gratuitously shill for his next collection of strips in today’s strip, I wouldn’t have plugged his Amazon pre-order page yesterday. Click the link above to the previous day’s post if you want to see it, I’m not linking it again.

So… Durwood first floated this whole “Prelude” idea to Les over a year-and-a-half ago. Les allegedly began working on it shortly thereafter, with his publisher delaying release of The Last Leaf until he could finish it so that they could be released together.  In fact, just last week Darin explicitly tells Les he wants to see what he has written so that he can start on the “illos” for the book.

But in today’s strip, Les is just NOW given the idea for the Prequel/Prelude book that he claimed to have started in mid-2015, a book it was definitely implied he was procrastinating on just LAST WEEK?!

I… I mean… Just… Just move on to the next story arc, please.

The Last Leaf, by the way, is going to be an actual thing. That means that, combined with Prelude and the already-published The Other Shoe, this trilogy of books that Durwood has proposed is going to be a real (expensive) thing too.

And to think I said I wasn’t gonna plug TB’s books today…