ComicBookHarriet

0.5 POOR (PR)

Batuik, you can’t have it both ways. Chester Hagglemore already came to Westview for the FunkyDick crossover comics auction. And DSH John pointed him out to Dick Tracy there by sight. Then he screamed down John’s fifty dollar bid with fifty thousand. Your reputation can’t proceed you to someplace you’ve already been to someone you’ve already met.

Also, while paying absolutely whatever it takes could be annoying to a person in a comic book bidding war with Mr. Chiseler, it’s pretty great for anyone SELLING them. His rep as a comic collector would be acidsniffingamazeballs for vendors in the komix biz. John and Harry should be slipping around the shop with a red pen, surreptitiously marking up prices. A rich nutter guy willing to outbid anyone anything anywhere anytime really shouldn’t be called Hagglemore.

Lets call him Chester Seemore instead. Since he apparently climbed a completely pitch black stairwell with no trouble at all. Seriously John, Harry…do you even WANT customers?

Krime Scene.

Today’s comic.

Redsnifit had this case half solved yesterday.

“The positioning of the lock knob suggests that the doors are hinged at the back, meaning the car is either very old (’60s or ’70s era) or a very expensive luxury car. The iPad holder appears to be sitting in the back, which suggests he has a driver. My guess is he’s a rich nerd who’s going to enable Pete’s lifestyle for the next few years.”

And the premier rich nerd of the Funkyverse is, of course, Chester the Chiseler.

However, no one could have predicted the vehicular carnage laid before us in panel one today. That swanky luxury car has either been curb-checked all the way up the light pole in front of it or, given how high the driver’s side front tire is, Chester’s chauffeur has parked atop a pedestrian.

I must applaud Batiuk for tackling the dangerous epidemic of fashion-frenzied limo services pairing sunglasses with darkly tinted windshields. Truly a sensitive treatment of important social and educational issues.

But our chauffeur has wisely worn gloves. No fingerprint as he disposes of the underclass wedged in the undercarriage.

And Chester is wearing a bolo tie. Really classing it up Hagglemore. Bravo.

Stairs Going Nowhere.

Comic Book Harriet here! And judging by this strip, I’m a very appropriate commentator for the coming week. I want to give kudos to poor Billy for last week’s run. He was dealt a terrible set of strips, and he was able to provide valuable context into just how freakin’ long Batiuk has been using ‘Dinkle Types His Stupid Book’ as a lazy repository for all bad band puns.

I’m sure that Tommy Boy thinks that he’s cleverly building up suspense here. Ooooooh he’s not letting us see the person who is so excited to be finding the Komix Korner for the first time! Who could it be? What drama will it lead to? Is it the long lost Afghani parents of Becky the One-Armed-Wonder and Dead Skunk Hair’s adopted step-daughter Rana? Who have just tracked the..bwahahahah… I can’t even finish that without laughing. Because Rana was dropped down the memory hole YEARS ago!

We do have to wonder why anyone ever, in the history of time, would have gone on an interet mission looking for Komix Korner.

Debt collectors.

It’s gotta be debt collectors.

Schizo-snoozo-phasia.

Comic Book Harriet here, wanting to say it’s been an awesome week to cut my teeth on guest writing. Thanks for all the laughs and comments. I toss the reins into the very capable Beckoning Chasm, whose vast echoey goodness will see us through whatever hijinks are to come.

But before that. I have to make sense of…of…whatever this strip means.

Guys. I think Becky has kind of lost it. I mean Band Turkeys was always kind of a wacky idea. But it made a certain amount of sense. Most people eat eat, and thus buy, turkeys around the holidays. If a school has a tradition of selling Band Turkeys as a fundraiser, then people will anticipate it and buy their turkeys from the band. They were going to have to buy a turkey after all… and now they won’t have to feel guilty for turning down horrible dextrose based band sweets that have to have every word spelled wrong for legal reasons. I’ll take a marginal mark-up on a frozen brick of bird meat over something called Chocklatey Kandy Shugar Knuggets.

But mattresses? Why? I mean, the shipping alone has to be a fortune! And people don’t use a mattress up every year. I spent 20 years sleeping on a mattress as old as my parents… Are these disposable holiday mattresses for people who shopped and ate too much? Will they be burned on New Year’s even in a huge toxic bonfire of latex foam and polyfill? I can see the teetering mountain of blackened rusting springs looming over the Westview landfill for years.

What I’m saying is that a good use for those mattresses would be to build a padded cell for Becky. Heck it looks like you could build an entire padded maze. That would keep her occupied for days. Long enough to get a judge to sign papers to have her committed.

Darrin has two moms. Sort of.

Link to today’s strip

Everyone else can bring the funny in the comments. I’m going to be talking Srs Bidness.

I wanted to take Saturday to comment on the often noticed elephant in the room: Darrin replacing Ann Fairgood with Dead St. Lisa as ‘Mom’. Because we all know Jess in today’s strip is referring to the Dead St. Lisa looming in the background and not poor Ann Fairgood.

First things first, I don’t think it’s entirely unheard of for adopted people who reconnected in a positive way with birth-parents to go on to call them ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’, even while they also still call their adoptive parents ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’. I know Darrin only knew Lisa as his birth-mother for a few weeks or months, but perhaps the ticking clock intensified their re-connection relationship, like some kind of summer camp ending in death. I can buy that they loved each other, and as mother and son. And I don’t think Batiuk really intended to indicate that he loved the Fairgoods less because of it.

So the problem really isn’t that Darrin calls Lisa ‘Mom.’ The problem is that the elder Fairgoods have disappeared into the very background of Funkyverse over the last couple years, while Darrin, Ghost Lisa, and Les have remained center stage. The last mention of the Fairgoods was all the way back in March, when Darrin calls Les up telling him that he’s coming out to visit, “mom and dad.” But we don’t get to see that visit. Instead we get to see Darrin visit his bio-mom’s husband and reminisce about his dead bio-mom, all to set up for the Lisa Trilogy Boxset Special Extended Edition product placement.

Mr. Fred Fairgood had his stroke in January of 2013, and at the time I thought they were setting up for a copy of a FOOB storyline. Anyone remember when Grandpa Jim had a stroke? It was handled with pathos and humor, and his long, incomplete, recovery was shown in detail, and affected the rest of the strip. And when I am comparing a strip negatively to late-run For Better Or For Worse, you know it done messed up.

Batiuk failed to follow through. A close perusal of the archives here and on Comics Curmudgeon sees the Fairgoods taking a very active part in the investigation of Scumbag Bio-Dad in 2013, and being there for some Baby Skyler stuff, and that’s about it. He petered out involving the Fairgoods in anything by 2014. And you know what else happened around 2014? Holly Winkerbean’s Starbuck Jones Collecting Mania.

Now the strip more or less revolves around six or seven characters. Les, Bull, Funky, Dead St. Lisa, Darrin, Pete, Masone, Cindy, and Mutha Fukkin Starbuck Jones. Darrin is important because Starbuck Jones, and Lisa is important because Lisa’s Legacy is Batiuk’s Legacy, and his cash cow. And for Tom pointing out the biological connection between the two characters is easy and obvious. Probably compulsive at this point too. Lisa consumes all.

And it’s why Frankie the evil Bio-Dad showed up, twice, once even in reference to Starbuck Jones. And, most importantly, why he had to be evil in the first place. Making Lisa’s pregnancy the result of date-rape not only allows her to maintain her moral purity, (making Darrin an emotionally ‘virgin’ birth,) but makes it almost obligatory that Darrin and everyone else reject Frankie. There is no simpler way to negate his fatherhood. As a bonus it gives Batty an easy total monster in a strip rather devoid of them. But above all it tosses Frankie out of the equation, keeping the Darrin and Lisa and Breast Cancer connection strong.

If Batty simply wanted Lisa to live on in her children, then he would involve Summer more. But the last few years even Summer has been very intermittent, because she has nothing to do with Starbuck Jones and is stuck in college, which Batiuk couldn’t care less about. He likes Darrin. Darrin is a bland, generally happy, everyman who could hypothetically do anything Tom Batiuk would want story-wise, comicsfanboy-wise. There’s a reason we call him Boy Lisa after all.