Epicus Doomus

To Greet The Man, You’ve Got To Meet The Man

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Happy Thanksgiving From Your Pals at SoSF!!!

Dashiell Hammett makes his first actual appearance today and it’s everything you imagined it’d be, even minus the band turkeys. Yep, nothing leaps off the funny page like a drawing of a man while he writes…but as a regular FW reader YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT!!! This Hammett guy was a political activist during the “Red Scare” era which is without a doubt where BanTom is going with this, although I can tell you with 100% certainty he’ll dance around the particulars and the details and keep things as vague as he possibly can to ensure there’s absolutely no possibility of offending anyone whatsoever, like he always does. Yep, 1950s commie paranoia…issues, today’s youth and so forth. Sigh.

“Starbuck Jones”…an obscure, short-lived comic book title that eventually grew to span decades and captured the very imagination of a nation. The old SJ movie serials of the fifties…low-budget and mostly forgotten matinee fare that was actually the brilliant work of a group of idealistic young Hollywood subversives. Cliff Anger…not really a weird old recluse but an American hero forced into seclusion by Cold War paranoia. Montoni’s…lousy indifferently-made food that Westviewians would kill for. Nothing is ever what it appears to be in the Funkyverse, like how it’s always on the page titled “Comics” for some reason.

And Even Fewer Care, Cliff

Link to today’s strip

History lesson time…who knew? Anyhow, the entire SJ mythology veers wildly off-course today as the old serials we assumed were based upon the “Starbuck Jones” comic book series were actually written by Dashiell Hammett, a renowned mystery writer and political activist from “back in the day” (guess which day, bet you’re not surprised). Few people knew this, as generations of obsessive SJ fanboys somehow completely overlooked the old SJ serial films because comic book fan communities rarely deal in the arcane or trivial and would have no interest at all in something like that.

Anyhow that’s a real swerve into left field completely out of nowhere, eh? Obviously none of this shameless, haphazard retconning makes even a little sense but hey, it’s his comic strip and if he wants to use it as some sort of half-assed platform to create magical boring fantasy worlds where his real-life interests and preferences get shoehorned into the narrative regardless of logic or continuity, that’s his business.

Briefly checking out the Dashiell Hammett page gives me an idea of where this is going…ugh. Cliff Anger…Political Prisoner? I guess it does beat band turkeys, though.

Those Four Dreaded Words

Link to today’s strip

No, not “I love you Spanky”….”it’s a long story”…(shudder). Long like two-week arc long or LONG, like this SJ movie mega arc that’s spawning all these spinoff arcs? I like how Cindy, the veteran journalist doing a documentary on an old movie star, is shocked to learn that her subject was in prison, as if it’s the first she’s hearing of it. I also love the little dig at her own work, like all true Westviewians she takes a perverse pleasure in knowing she’s churning out crap, like it’s OK because she’s in on the gag. And I think it’s safe to say that if you’re reading this you probably know the deal there.

Blathering Heights

Link to today’s strip

Huh? Cliff was in prison? What was he convicted of, impersonating an interesting comic strip character? Comic book theft? Counterfeiting pizzas? Violating the super-strict NYC lampshade statutes? And no one knew anything about this until right now? Well, that’s just fascinating and by “fascinating” I of course mean “duh”. I can’t wait to see where this latest twist takes us and of course by that I mean “please kill me now”.

So Cindy is only finding out about Cliff’s prison past right now? There’s no documentarian like a Westviewian documentarian, like no documentarian I know as a matter of fact. Once her crack team figures out The Google thing this project is really going to take off, mark my words. And correct me if I’m mistaken here but wasn’t Vera supposed to be “long lost” when they dredged her up to appear at Starbuck-Con? So she was long lost AND ardently following Anger’s life at the same time? Hey, it’s the Batiukverse…why the hell not?

A Peck Before Lying

Link to today’s strip

Wow, talk about a pathetic waste of time, even more so than the usual Sunday strip. Apparently TomBan had a bunch of extra “Ominously Smirking Frankie” drawings lying around that he felt he needed to re-purpose, or perhaps he once again assumes his readers will forget the plot unless he drives it home over and over again for days on end. Either way the hackery just leaps off the page as the “story” (as it were) continues its inexorable death spiral into nothingness. What a sad-sack-sorry display.