Greetings, dear snarkers, hate-readers, and beady-eyed nitpickers. Please allow me to share with you my horrifying realization: with Cody, Owen, Wedgeman, et al, having finally graduated from Westview High, Tom Batiuk no longer needs to depict “contemporary issues affecting young adults”. After forty-four years, Batty’s decided to ditch the high school madness plotlines and focus full-time on what he really wants to write about: the Starbuck Jones universe. Brace yourself for strip after strip about how TB imagines Hollywood movies are made. At least he used to take the trouble of lurking around his old high school to glean details of “real” high school life (and he’d still get it wrong).
With such thin material from which to spin the Starbuck saga, Batiuk’s going to need to pad and plod even more than he typically does, which brings us to today’s strip, which starts out promisingly with a cameo from Pat Sajak. Turns out to be more of Batty’s bait-and-switch, and not to spoil it for you but I feel I must: this whole week revolves around Mason considering adding an “e” to his last name.
Scouring “Fleabay” for a decoder ring. Buying advertising space “in papers around the country” to run an encrypted invitation to fans. Booking an Art Deco palace for a reception and bringing in enough Ovaltine to float a spaceship. The lengths that a major studio will go to in promoting a movie, right? Albeit a movie that’s still in production (and hell, we never even saw them delivering the finished script). Nope! Turns out this whole shindig was staged by Pete Regenbogen 
Son of Stuck Funky 