It would appear that everything TB knows about California comes from watching the Beverly Hillbillies. Today’s strip, in fact, literally depicts “swimming pools… movie stars”.
It took a week’s worth of strips for Mega Comics to fire Pete and a single classic “tell don’t show” moment for some Hollywood producers to all but hire him? Ugh. If it takes a week of chicken jokes to get the script finished, let’s all hope legendary script doctor Larry Gelboo is involved.
In today’s strip, Pete puts his Starbuck Jones comic down long enough to wistfully look out the window as his plane prepares to land at Van Nuys Airport. He looks remarkably content and fairly happy, how many weeks do you give that?
For SOSF’s resident beady-eyed nitpickers, Pete appears to be reading a copy of Starbuck Jones #115. This is a key issue, as Starbuck’s little blue rabbit-like pal dies in the vacuum of space because Starbuck took him out onto a disintegrating asteroid without a space suit.
I think there is some conversation or something happening in today’s strip, possibly involving former Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich. Sorry, I’ve been marveling at how these relatively small screens continue to capture most of Darin’s legume-like head rather than paying attention to whatever he and Kucinich are on about.
In other news, it’s Throwback Thursday!
What was happening in the Batiukverse 10 years ago today?
Wally, looking far too much like Act III Darin, tells Lefty he has decided to go back to Afghanistan after a single counseling session at the VA Hospital.
The video-conversation continues in today’s strip, with Durwood taking passive-aggressive swipes at his long-time pal. The “sponge clone” that Darin is busting Pete’s chops with, of course, was actually what Pete used to take The Amazing Mr. Sponge “to the top”. Of course, that is “to the top” of an industry whose best-seller nowadays typically moves less than half the volume of a mid-1960s issue of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen with all of its lunacy and bait-and-switch cover art.
Even so, “I came up with an idea that sold more copies of my writing” is pretty much the first thing I would put on my resume if I was an unemployed writer.
Despite his seeming disdain for most internet activity and his unabashed nostalgia for videotapes, compact discs, band boxes, and Space Invaders, TB seems to fully embrace one certain piece of modern technology, as we see again in today’s strip.
That technology, of course, is videoconferencing. TB LOVES to depict the technology of communicating face-to-face via screens that in the pre-Skype world of just a little more than a decade ago was accessible only to wealthy early adopters and Star Trek characters.
Son of Stuck Funky 
