ComicBookHarriet

Whatever Keeps it Hard…

Yesterday Epicus wondered “Is this some sort of cancer trilogy-con…Is there any Lisa cosplay going on?”

We have our answer today. The lady in the purple overcoat is a pretty decent Lisa, and there appears to be another in the background of panel two. That one might be more accurate since a pre-chemo Lisa cosplay should have an coppery to strawberry blond rather than a Barbie blond.

Also, ideally, the Lisa cosplayer should try to keep her lips around half an inch below the bottom of her nose at all times, rather than having it slip to the bottom of her chin at random.

So…both Les and his fan had Lisa’s Story get hard for them. That is a very specific fetish. If Les wasn’t already married, I would suggest a love connection here. But then again, what happens at the Cuyahoga Falls’ Annual Book-fair stays at the Best Western where this tiny conference room is located.

A Raid on The Inarticulate

Link to Today’s Comic.

So begins a new arc. Or rather a different arc. Because Les Moore is shilling his book again.

We’ve finally escaped from an endless arc of nonsense, to find ourselves repeating an arc we’ve been through dozens of times. Words have escaped me. So instead an excerpt from TS. Elliot’s ‘East Coker’, a beautiful poem and death, futility, writing, and the cyclical nature of the universe.

” You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.”

…

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying.”

By Your Powers Combined!

Today’s strip

What powers would ‘soggy superhero comics’ give? I don’t get it.

On Friday, commentator Erdmann made the guess: “Anyone else suspect there’s a comic book cover Sunday strip headed our way?”

To which Bobanero replied: “It would be the longest lead up to a Sunday Comic Book Cover strip in history.”

Kudos for both the prediction and the comment. Indeed this entire meandering, yet linear, arc over the past three months seems to have been building to this end.

And by ‘this end’ I mean Batiuk establishing some of his protagonists in a new comics related field so he can keep getting his precious commissioned covers whenever the mood strikes. He obviously had gotten all the Starbuck Jones covers he wanted, and is preparing to branch out.

Interesting that we don’t get a tip of the Funky Feltpen directly on the strip. The name on the bottom of the line art says Fairgood. Honestly interested in who drew this.

Infinity Bore.

Today’s strip

So sorry for the late post today. Finally went to go see Infinity War, which despite juggling dozens of characters and plotlines, and having plotholes big enough to drive a Hulk truck through, was infinitely better than this because the emotions of individual characters were both believable and dynamic.

This is going for dynamic, since it can’t manage believable, but it falls right on its face at the climax. The worst comic character name since Matter Eater Lad.

My cat sometimes presents me with an inedible pulp on the rug…and it usually takes hours of elbow work to get the stink out.

Tarps for everyone.

Today’s strip reminds me of a story I once heard.

There was an old farmer, set in his ways. His son went to college and came back with all kinds of new-fangled ways to ‘maximize profits.’ He no longer wanted to hear his dad’s old advice, about snakes on the road or frogs chirping, relying instead on science or innovation.

He upgraded all their equipment, used his smart phone to run their irrigation system, bought drones to guard the sheep from wolves instead of the old donkey. But most contentious between father and son was changing the way they handled the manure from their feedlot and pig sheds. The old farmer had always dry composted it for fertilizer, but his son badgered him to build huge wet lagoons covered in plastic tarps to collect all the methane to generate electricity.

Everything went fine. Until one May, it rained and rained and rained and rained, until the lagoons were full to the brim with a fecal slurry. It was on a May day, during the heart of tornado season that a dark funnel cloud formed south of their farm. Touching down over the hog buildings and their very new, very full lagoons, and then headed straight toward the farm house.

“Dad! Dad! We gotta get to the cellar!” The son shouted over the howling wind.

“I got one thing I have to do!” The dad shouted back, as he ran out to the stock barns.

The son followed him at a sprint. His dad grabbed an dusty oil cloth and threw it over the old guard donkey in it’s stall.

“Dad! What the hell are you doing!” His son yelled!

“Son.” the old farmer said, solemnly, “Every old farmer knows, when a shitstorm is coming, you gotta cover your ass.”

Now look at that pile of ‘comic-books’ and tell me that Rusty’s store, (and us by extension) didn’t just get overwhelmed by a massive shitstorm.