Epicus Doomus

Frankie The Quitter

So it comes to this: the huge Frankie Date Rape Mega Retcon arc dies a limp, soggy death. Frankie stomps away sneeringly, defeated by Saint Lisa’s magical powers and unimpeachable veracity, while his sidekick/accomplice/henchman/back-up White Lenny off-handedly offers Jessica a possible paying gig. Which she of course sarcastically mocks in the Westviewian way these obnoxious people have. What a debacle this turned out to be. Good riddance to bad garbage, I say re: Frankie…the last thing that town needs is more sneering. Such a disappointment.

So, where does this one rank with Act III’s most epic disasters? I have it a close third, right behind Funky’s car crash/time travel arc and Les’ book-tour-launch, still the gold standard in annoyingly long, ponderous irritating mega-arcs. Although they all kind of suck equally when you really stop to think about it.

Threat Level Lisa

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YouTube (registered trademark, BTW) better upgrade their servers, pronto, before Boy Lisa follows through on his “threat” and crashes them with the tens of hits that video would certainly generate. Some arch-villian Frankie turned out to be. Ditto for his doughy henchman White Lenny, who is a real wuss compared to Black Lenny, who at least knew how to lean menacingly. Derin would have probably gotten the same results by simply throwing “Lisa’s secret journal” at them. Those corners do hurt, you know.

OK, so who had “they make a video of Summer reading random pages from her dead mother’s thirty-something year old journal that just happened to be discovered exactly when it fit into the story which forces Frankie and Lenny to give up when they threaten to air it on YouTube” in the “how does this arc end?” pool? Once again TheMaster finds the least-interesting, most random, nonsensical and totally balls-out stupid way of “crafting” a story that took what seems like a hundred weeks to tell. No one can predict what he’ll do and quite frankly I don’t think he even knows until he pens it. This whole story reads like he jotted it all down on a napkin while heading to the bathroom at 5am after a big craft beer, Seroquel and Nyquil bender. Like every other FW story does. It’s amazing, uncanny and totally inexplicable.

Prayer For The Sneering

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I’m admittedly as beady-eyed and nit-picky as anyone here at SoSF, so maybe my opinion is somewhat skewed. That said, Lisa’s silly little “prayer” comes across as being rather selfish and short-sighted to me. After all, how did she know back then what would become of Frankie? Perhaps he would have changed his ways and become, oh I don’t know, an ordained minister or a first responder hero or a devoted family man or whatever. Typical Lisa…me me me, always self-absorbed in that annoyingly cloying way she had (and still has despite being dead). In any event, as Nelson Muntz might say, “Haw haw! Your prayer went unanswered!”.

So what did Frankie do, exactly, to merit this non-stop sneering and eyebrow-cocking? His attempt to “cash in” on one of Lisa’s many tragedies? Les did it a few times. Cayla was practically boinging off the walls when the movie check arrived. Summer even went as far as to suggest a 3-D version of “Lisa’s Story”. What makes that any different? I get the feeling that any “outsiders” who dare to enter Westview get chased to the city limits by a group of pitchfork-toting sneering fat guys wearing pizza shop smocks in an old-fashioned car as “Dueling Banjos” plays in the background. What a bunch of hostile pricks.

But forget all that nonsense, as none of it matters anyway. The big news today is that Montoni’s appears to be selling T-shirts! I simply MUST have one, although because I’m not a XXXXL I doubt they’d be carrying my size. If Batom doesn’t start hawking these on his site he’s both lazy and stupid, because he’s sitting on a gold mine with those.

Soaked In Stupidity

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“Drenched in irony”…not exactly, unless “irony” is now synonymous with horse doot. So Lisa was either “trying to fit in” or she was trapped in a violent, abusive relationship…which one is it? I also have to assume that Summer is skipping over entire months of this journal, as Lisa now knows she’s pregnant, but whatever. It’s not all going to suddenly start making sense at this point, you know? I just wish Cayla had “drenched” this idiotic journal with gasoline before tossing it into the nearest bonfire.

So, it appears that the big “plan” to foil Frankie’s demented scheme somehow involves putting Jessica’s oft-mentioned camera-pointing and tripod assembly skills to work…finally. Too bad for Boy Lisa that she’s not this ambitious where actual paying gigs are concerned. I haven’t a clue as to how filming Summer reading random diary passages will stop Frankie’s nefarious plot (so to speak), but hey, I guess Batom has to start wrapping this disaster up sooner or later, regardless of whether it makes any sense at all or not. Nor do I know what’s going on with the trippy purple background or the wild scribbling and the less said about Summer’s painfully bony and angular legs, the better. What a fiasco.

(S)Hit Parade

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So when Pm & Jff interrupted Frankie during his wind-up, it turns out he was about to pummel Lisa because she was breaking up with him, not because of her pregnancy or whatever. Perhaps I’m just way too cynical but to me this one reads as if BatTom felt he really needed to give the reader a reason to hate Frankie even more. So he used the diary contrivance to inform us that his assaults were an ongoing thing, without elaborating, the same way he always dances around and skates the “issue” at hand while pretending to “address” it. Now he can add “teen domestic violence/underage drinking” to the ever-growing list of “relevant topics” FW has “tackled” and he can get back to his real “plot” which involves a reality TV show or something.

Panel three features some of the corniest dialog he’s ever put to paper. Good thing Lisa grew out of her “eye-reading” phase because quite frankly she really, really sucked at it. Also of note today is the bizarre shading in panel two (shadows??) and that horrific squiggle-haired chair which honestly makes me nauseous, as does Summer’s “concerned/sad” face.