Author: spacemanspiff85

It’s been said before, but wow, Old Harry is abysmally bad at the whole not screwing up the timeline thing.

SOON, IN THE NEAR FUTURE/DISTANT PAST:
Crazy Harry: Hey, you’re the Eliminator! My future self told me to be nice to you, right after he told me about comic book stores and that I would some day marry a woman and have physical relations with her! Hey, where are you going? (Donna begs her parents to move out of Westview and is never seen again, and never comes near video games, comics, or anything remotely nerdy again).
I like that Old Harry has to tell Young Harry to be nice to someone. Was he just a raging jerk to everyone he met?

“Give me some stock tips” is kind of an abrupt shift from “tell me about my wife and our love life”. And honestly, given that the concept of a store that sells comics practically shut down his brain, I find it really hard to believe that Young Harry would know what stocks are, let alone think to ask about them.
I also think that selection of companies is an odd one to tell someone in 1980 to invest in, given that Google was founded in 1998, Yahoo in 1994, and Twitter in 2006. But the joke is supposed to be “those don’t sound like company names” (although some of the Fortune 500 companies in 1980 were Textron, Bendix, National Intergroup, Unisys, Teledyne, and GenCorp, which I don’t think sound any less weird to someone not familiar with them).
“Let me tell you about your fabulous future where you marry a girl and get to work in a comic store when you’re old! Also, change your life and don’t do what I did.” seems extremely contradictory to me. Honestly, if he skipped school more, then he’d possibly never work for the postal service and could’ve lived the dream of working part-time at a comic store much much earlier.
I wonder if Old Harry paid for this meal with his credit card, or cash from the 2020s.

After reading today’s strip, in five seconds of Googling, I found this: “By the late 1970s, the “spoiler” term began to catch on in the subculture of science-fiction fandom.” Yes, it’s possible Young Harry himself never heard it for some reason (but not very funny), but the gag here is supposed to be Old Harry using a future term and confusing his listener, so this really doesn’t work at all.  It took so little research to confirm that’s really not a new term, I really don’t get why Batiuk couldn’t do that himself.  Honestly, I would be kind of shocked if he hadn’t used the term in one of his own strips from the seventies.
On the subject of things that don’t seem to work, I’m really wondering who else is in Montoni’s, and what Young Harry’s explanation was for the old stranger he’s eating alone with when he should be at school. I’m also confused as to why Old Harry’s okay with spoiling everything related to his career, but draws the line at discussion about his wife.  Other than comic book talk being more important than relationships, obviously.