ComicBookHarriet

The Unfair Penitent.

Yes Funky, you are living proof that your father had intercourse with your mother at least once. That is, in fact, how humans reproduce. Not the asexual budding process that you seemed to have assumed for the first sixty years of your life. I would say we need a paternity test to be sure it was Mort who knocked on heaven’s door to bring to earth your doughy face, but given the the family resemblance, we can safely go with Nasus semper certa est.

This is nearly unbearable. However, let us at least attempt to learn and grow from our pain.

According to Webster’s online: “Lothario comes from The Fair Penitent (1703), a tragedy by Nicholas Rowe. In the play, Lothario is a notorious seducer, extremely attractive but beneath his charming exterior a haughty and unfeeling scoundrel. He seduces Calista, an unfaithful wife and later the fair penitent of the title. After the play was published, the character of Lothario became a stock figure in English literature. For example, Samuel Richardson modeled the character of Lovelace on Lothario in his 1748 novel Clarissa. As the character became well known, his name became progressively more generic, and since the 18th century the word lothario has been used for a foppish, unscrupulous rake.”

[insert barf emoji here]

Link to Today’s Comic.

Comic Book Harriet back again. I stayed up late waiting for this strip to drop.

I am now drinking heavily in an attempt to simultaneously write about and forget it.

So Mort’s regeneration has extended from mind, to body, to virility. And now the nursing staff assume he is completely capable of remembering safe sex instructions from his son… and taking Mort’s ability to consent for granted.

You remember when Mort’s Alzheimers was so bad he was reduced to a blankly staring, practically non-verbal, vegetable in a wheelchair that couldn’t even recognize his own son? I really really REALLY wish he’d stayed that way. Because this week is going to be agony.

At last the collection is complete.

Link to Today’s Comic.

Today we get a wonderfully detailed Sunday strip about an absolutely mundane thing. You’d think that if DSH John was easily annoyed by Crazy Harry’s personality they wouldn’t be able to work together long. I mean, it’s not like they ever have customers in the store to distract them from each other.

I assumed that “Mr. Monster” was a fake comic book, but the Dark Horse logo piqued my curiosity, and sure enough, Mr. Monster is a real comic book. And the art today does a decent job of copying the front cover of issue 2.

Never heard of this comic before, which means it is insufferably obscure. Of course Tom Batiuk would devote an entire Sunday to comic book hipsterism.

https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=263261

Well, it’s certainly been a interesting couple weeks, and an apt time for me to be at the wheel. But I really can’t take it anymore driving the Stuckfunky bus so I’m going to tuck and roll and hope that Epicus Doomus can grab the wheel and get us back on track.

Scintillating Spinthariscope Action

Link to Today’s Comic.

As Stuckfunkian William Thompson pointed out earlier this week: “The ring is safe now; after seventy-one years, the polonium-210 isotope (which would have been a fraction of the commercially-available polonium back then) will all have decayed to lead. Just like this strip.”

Though lead isn’t the ‘safest’ material to have inside a children’s toy, at least it’s not radioactive. But this also means that there won’t be any polonium alpha particles left to strike the zinc sulfide screen and create the light flickering. So I’m guessing tomorrow we’ll be blessed with a Sunday Strip of speech bubbles over black as all three of these guys cram together into a pitch black closet hoping to see the tiny flickers of an atom ‘splitting’.

Which is really false advertising to begin with. Polonium 210 is named because it has an atomic weight of 210, meaning it has 210 protons and neutrons in the nucleus. In order to become lead, it sheds two protons. If a 210 pound man lost two pounds, you really couldn’t say he’d been ‘split’.

What they should be worried about is the ad Chester is holding. That paper is GLOWING with radiation! Darin already takes after his mother in so many ways, he doesn’t need cancer too.

But, then again, maybe he deserves it, because in panel three Darin appears to be stroking his chin with the tiny severed hand of a child .

If you feel like giving me a letter of devotion…a second-hand promotion.

Link to Today’s Comic.

There is almost no better metaphor for the way nostalgia farming is an inherently parasitic enterprise than Chester thinking giving out antique items they didn’t make, manufactured for a completely different product and IP, would be a great promotion for their comic company. They’re not selling to readers based on the quality of the stories being told in Atomik Comics, they’re marketing based solely on their ability to provide a pastiche of an era that they can’t possibly hope to equal or overcome. They’re repackaging someone else’s toys and regifting them to the people that already have them.

When an IP stops growing and changing, it dies, like a massive oak that has fallen in the forest. As it decays from public consciousness it often sprouts the little mushrooms of nostalgia grabs, some delicious and innocuous, like the Brady Bunch movies, some poisonous and nasty, like Ghostbusters 2016. But all of these mushroom reboots will never replace the oak tree, they can never grow that big, and they can never last that long, because they can’t make their own food, they can only feed off the carcass of the original. And if remembered at all it will be as a tiny footnote to a larger story.

And sometimes the oak tree thinks it’s still alive, still growing, when really it’s nothing but a rotting skeleton of an idea sprouting little mushy mushrooms of nostalgia and telling itself they’re leaves, as Tom Batiuk’s universe crumbles away into banality.