Son of Stuck Funky – Page 691 – Son of Stuck Funky

Very Bad Things

Blech. This weird detour into the darkest recesses of Batiuk’s mind is getting more repugnant by the day. I have felt this queasy since Susan flung herself at Les with (gak) wanton abandon a few years back. At least he pulled back on the 40’s lingo today (King Movie Entertainment…that’s a good one), which I suppose counts for something. You gotta take the little victories where you find them, you know?

Isn’t it amazing that even his fantasies are padded with lots of filler? “Lisa The Lioness”…oh dear, the deification never, ever stops. “We got the test results back, Ms. Lioness and all is well…er, I mean feline leukemia, sorry bout that goofy mix-up!”. Too bad Lisa The Lioness wasn’t one of those jungle cats that ate her young, it’d have spared us years worth of Darin and Summer.

Man, a week of Les talking about nails and now a week of this, Batom’s on a roll. A terrible, terrible roll. He’s actually telling little “sub-stories” within his main story which isn’t even a story at all yet! Think about that for a second, it’s remarkable. I mean who does that? How is it even possible?

Paperhack “Writer”

Link To Today’s Strip

Well, TheAuthor’s gone and lost himself in one of his weird boring fantasies again and this one’s a real doozy. (I figured 40’s slang was apropos here). TomLes, lacking the ability or “real life” movie-making experience to make this “Lisa’s Story” screenplay the least bit coherent, really goes off the deep end here with his bizarre fixation on 1940s popular culture and things that makes sense only to him. I mean there are maybe ten living people who might relate to this and I guarantee you that none of them are regular FW readers because, well, duh. This might be one of the single stupidest FW strips ever and I don’t throw around statements like that lightly. Only like a hundred times a year, I’ve really cut back.

1940’s Leslie is every bit as annoying as 2014 Les is. When I read “Les” and “pulp” in the same sentence I’m not thinking about fiction, I can tell you that. More like huge industrial grinders and pulverizing machinery and such. Pulp magazines and comic books, Saturday afternoon serials at the movie house..how old IS this guy anyway? Seriously though, although this might have seemed like a great idea after a few cold low-alcohol craft beers and a Trazadone, this little fantasy probably should have been deposited in the studio wastebasket once he saw it in the harsh light of day. I mean gad-zooks, man, get on the trolley. What a maroon.

Pulp Dick-tion

Link To Today’s Strip

Epicus here, ready to snark away on Batiuk’s latest galling display of mindless self-indulgence. It took me a few seconds to figure out what this piece of crap was supposed to be. Apparently Les is making a little game out of his horribly butchered cancer book by pretending that he’s writing some sort of 1940’s (what a surprise) trashy pulp jungle comic. Which makes no sense whatsoever, but it did give Batom a chance to draw that snazzy comic book cover featuring (sigh) Lisa as some sort of jungle girl and Les (aaarrgh) as a chain-smoking 1940’s (sigh) hack writer. At this point it’s anyone’s guess as to what’s running through TheAuthor’s mind, although “not that much” would be a decent investigative starting point IMO. What a sad and nauseating display.

Saturday Night Blights

In an apparent nod to the fact there are other actors in this teledrama than Mason Jarr, today’s strip introduces us to Tawny Peaks, who, until this point, hasn’t said word one to Les (or vice versa) so I have no idea where she’s getting the idea she’s wrong for the part.

White woman in her 30s, somewhat attractive, decently built? Check. It’s not like they’ve cast an American Eskimo for the role. I can only wonder how Lisa was depicted in Lisa’s Story the book but in the comic she kind of moped around and complained about her job or the fact she has cancer. I’m not knocking that, but I don’t think it’s going to take a Jessica Lange-caliber actress to pull that off.

Meanwhile, what’s with Ms. Stalky lately? Don’t tell me she’s into sarcastic goatee’d writers!

Pavarotti Is Italian For Tetanus

So I did it; I tried to shoehorn Les’s incredibly boring story about Pavarotti using bent nails as good luck charms into a conversation at work.

It went about as well as you’d think.

Finding the segway into a story like that was the hard part. For my first attempt, I acted like I was reading a webpage of random facts and made the bent nail story the third item I read. I shouldn’t of had that story follow the tale of how King Adolf Frederick of Sweden ate himself to death because in comparison it was pretty dull. I looked over at my coworker after I mentioned the nail story but he was reading Ninja Turtle reviews on RottenTomatoes and didn’t react.

My second attempt started with me telling a coworker about a local theater near me that puts on some pretty good shows from time to time.

“Sometimes the kids get stage fright, but that’s normal,” I commented to my disinterested coworker. “That used to happen to Pavarotti until he would find like a bent nail or something and he sewed it into his shirt and it helped him not have stage fright.”

And that was that. My coworker didn’t even say “Really?” or “Interesting.” like Mason did. Instead, she just kind of wandered off, wondering if I was developing schizophrenia or something.

All of this leads us to today’s strip. The Nail Tale isn’t over; in fact it’s far from it. At that rate things are going, the damn thing is going to show up in Crankshaft or maybe get a spin-off comic of it’s own.

Mason is an *actor* for crying out loud. If he can’t do a table read in front of people he knows then how is he not going to freeze up like Cindy Brady on a quiz show when an actual camera turns on him?