ComicBookHarriet

Aberrations of Aerators.

I said it yesterday, and it was reinforced by our crack cadre of commentators: THOUGHT BUBBLES, TOM. Your characters already act twice as robotic as the Futurama reject threatening to lap your doughy, eponymous, supposed ‘protagonist’. Having them also loudly narrate the world around them is as jarring, messy, and unnecessary as a watermelon speedbump on the autobahn.

I have no idea what that thing in panel one is supposed to be. I know what an aerator is, I’ve seen several up close, and that is like no aerator I recognize. Please, in the comments, let me know if you’ve ever seen anything like this being used for turfgrass management. Because it looks to me like a corkscrew mated with Johnny Five.

Apparently it’s not like any aerator that Google images has ever seen either. Heaven only knows what forensic specialists would make of my search terms from the last several hours.

“Aerator”
“Field Aerator”
“Football Field Aerator”
“Handheld Football Field Aerator”
“Handheld Mechanic Football Field Plug Aerator.”
“Bender Futurama”

I did, however, find a very nice pair of shoes that I’d like someone to wear while kicking Les Moore in the face.

Bam! Pow! Right in the kisser!

Senseless Sisyphean Soliloquy.

Link to today’s strip

Comic Book Harriet here; stretching out her snarking muscles to warm up for this marathon of nonsense.

A long long time ago, when the world was young and Bush was president, I decided to join the Cross Country team. I wouldn’t call what I did on that team ‘running’, because that is an gross insult to the vital skill set that allowed our ancestors to chase down game and flee sabertooth tigers. If we are being extremely generous, we could call my half-hearted efforts ‘jogging’. Just like you could be generous and call the multicolored scribbles of a toddler ‘art’.

As my oxygen deprived brain would send gasping signals to my leaden legs to shuffle forward in a jerky shamble, my entire torso was consumed in the effort of sucking in air and huffing it out like I had swallowed a miniature iron lung.

Sometimes, when one of the more naturally athletic teammates would approach from behind to lap me, (again), they would attempt to engage me in conversation; but a few painfully wheezed one word replies were all I could ever manage.

Never in a million years would I have taken the effort and energy and oxygen to laboriously explain to myself, on an empty track, self-evident and pointless facts OUT LOUD.

Thought bubbles, Tom. They’re a thing.

And On The Seventh Day, The Joke Rested.

Link to today’s strip, when it drops.

As usual, Sunday’s strip wasn’t available for preview. Which is just as well since I was getting tired of making lemonade out of absolutely nothing.

I will admit. I had a private, personal, chuckle at yesterday’s strip. Not because it was good AT ALL. But because I was a percussionist in high school. And at the time there were waaaay too many percussionists at our school. During marching season we had enough drums and cymbals and pit instruments to go around, but once concert season rolled in there would only be three or four musicians needed for every song. So the rest of the percussion section was left sitting on the floor in the back of the band room chatting quietly, texting on our primitive stupid phones, doing homework for other classes, or flat out taking a nap.

Our director, while very good in almost every other way, just let us decide who got what part, and the few who were passionate about percussion would by mutual agreement take the difficult stuff like timpani or bells every time. It got to the point where the scrubs were drawing straws and playing rock paper scissors to see who didn’t have to get up and count rests for half a song to ring a triangle or smack a wood block. The rest of us would just rather lay around doing algebra homework.

So yeah. If anyone wasn’t going to sprout into a mighty musical oak tree, it was CBH on her tiptoes trying to play one of the four chime notes in the entire 20 minute medley of music from Lord of the Rings, and missing.

Beckoning Chasm takes over on Monday, and I’m looking forward to it! I’m sure his deep thoughts and penetrating insights will entice us to dig ever deeper into this bland yet somehow fascinating universe built from the existential dread of a white bread Ohio septuagenarian scraping for meaning as he nears the end of his career and life.

Stay Funky Everyone!

Don’t wanna work, (just want to bang on the drum all day.)

Link to today’s strip

And here we finally have the point. Delivered with all the beauty and grace of a newborn giraffe with inner ear problems trying to stand. He’s trying to pander to his band teacher ‘fans’, with Hallmark card greetings, but the message is first muddled, and then outright destroyed.

1.) Squirrels bury nuts to eat them later. Some squirrels even bite off the tiny seed leaves if they find sprouted acorns in order to preserve their food supply for longer. So I guess teachers plant ‘seeds’ in their students hoping to profit off of them later, and it is only an accident if some of those students grow from the experience.

2.) Becky’s percussion section this year is so stupid they will never amount to anything. She expects nothing from them, and so nothing will grow from them later. After saying teachers renew the world by growing the mighty forest of young minds, we are shown teachers joking about dum-dum kids they’ve deemed beyond their help.

3.) Becky blames the sun for stupid drummers.

4.) Batiuk thanks Scott Lang, Ant Man, for this entire nightmare.

Zeno’s Janitor.

Link to today’s strip

We come closer and closer and closer to the point, and yet we never arrive. Because there’s always one more lame rodent pun to make. At least I have a faint, unenthusiastic, hope that this week we’ll actually have a dull dud of a conclusion. Though last week watching Funky panic over nothing like a deer on meth was more fun to look at. It was stupid, but it was weirdly energetic.

This week makes a little more sense, but all for the worse. We only have Becky, and Dinkle, and Mr. Janitor Man. Mr. Janitor, who stares at the floor with a soul crushing grimace, somewhere between pain and boredom. Inching his way past the band room one agonizing day at a time, sweeping up the trash.

This week, we are all the janitor.