Why, oh why should Nate be incredulous to learn that two über-geeks like Cody and Owen are in the Technology Club? Does he reckon that they (or at least Owen) are just too stupid? What extracurricular activities would Nate expect them to sign up for (unless Westview High has a comic book club)?
27 thoughts on “Owencredulous”
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Son of Stuck Funky 
The big question here is: when did Owen suddenly develop a vocabulary? I never thought HE was the “smart one”, that’s for sure. Lately he’s stringing together actual, grammatically correct sentences with alarming regularity. Did his parents put hm on Adderall or lithium or something?
“That’s the best name you could come up with, ‘technology club’? Why not something more specific or appealing, like Future Engineers of America or Tech-Heads or something?”
(You know what, don’t answer that. I don’t think I want a week long diatribe from Batiuk discussing the etymology of the term “technology club.”)
Geeks are usually smart in comic strip stereotypes. What’s strange with Batiuk is he never really depicts any students as being particularly gifted. After years of monitoring high school classes his contempt for the students leaks out in the strip. Author avatar Les practically spits on his students during class.
Now late Act III will feature these two clowns. Who wants to identify with these storylines?
Don’t mind Nate. The blood drains from his brain into his penis when he’s near Crayola. They’ve been f**king like bunnies since Goatee Boy’s mountain climbing trip.
this week off to roaring start 😦
Ever notice with this strip how often a storyline is boring and pointless, and the following week we look back at it fondly and think “you know, that was actually pretty good compared to this week”?
If a “robotic competition” judges contestants by how much they resemble a robot, Cayla would be a shoo-in for first prize.
So these guys are going to be the high school stars of Act III? Really?
These are the New Generation students to base the rest of Act III upon?
Those crazy antics could keep me from winning the election.
Nerds in the technology club? *gasp* What could be next?
Students who are good athletes playing for the football team?
An English teacher who teaches instead of belittling his students?
A band director with TWO arms?
It’s a slippery slope…
I don’t know–Owen and Cody have already been ruined by years of bad writing, so it’s too late to salvage. Meanwhile, Nate has already been damaged by his two-pronged incompetence: not saying a thing when Roberta was criticizing him, then finally defending the gay students by stating that it’s okay since the student handbook doesn’t say anything on the matter.
Reader submission time: more fun mashups from snarker Rembrandt36: involves planting Les’ trademark goatee on his younger self…
…and “youthening” pals Les and Funky to look closer to their ostensible ages. Nice work!
Here’s some alternate dialog for the “youth-ening” strip above:
“Hey Funky, I just flew in from Kilimanjaro to help you name your car.”
“Really? That’s probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re an idiot.”
“Why can’t you EVER say anything positive?”
“F*ck you, Les.”
I teach “new media” at a university and decided to use last week’s strips in lecture this week. I have a vague memory of a similar storyline from a year or so ago and so looked in my files.
It turns out that a similar storyline ran from October 30 through November 5 in 2011. When I looked at the two stories from almost exactly a year apart I noticed that the same customer (wearing a different t-shirt) is talking to John both times.
Y’know, if I were Nate, I’d be credulous too. Those two geeks have never had an interest in science before.
@Epicus Doomus: I really couldn’t tell you which of these two is supposed to be the smart one. Neither Cody nor Owen [those are their names, right?] seem particularly smart, or dumb, or anything. Other than being scared freshmen last year, I can’t really come up with any characteristics for either of them. Not good, considering they’re supposed to be major characters now.
Hey, whatever happened to the “we’re both in love with Summer” storyline? Is the anonymous, mooning girl ever going to make a reappearance for their affections?
Sourbelly: it’s simple; think of Owen as Maynard G. Krebs to Cody’s Dobie Gillis. or Crazy Harry to his Funky. Owen has always been portrayed as more of a “free spirt”, and less of an intellect, than Cody.
Minerva (good to see you posting here BTW): Yep, that customer is our Cody, and it was just over a year ago when John took up another week of strip time preaching about those uptight, moral grownups and their war on comics (and video games). I just can’t stop thinking about the 2009 strip I posted yesterday, where John is telling Harry that he’s providing “a safe place to hang out” for kids who are “kind of out of the loop socially”…sounds like Jerry Sandusky’s mission statement for his Second Mile charity.
Minerva’s right; the one copy of the strip i could find (Nov. 3) had Owen and DSH John playing with their joysticks and talking (“…they attack the weakest and most vulnerable members of society,” said the unconvicted pedophile), with Owen wearing a black version of the “Flash” symbol that…. Cody is wearing today.
Jimmy, Summer’s off to college. These guys have the combined attention span of the average goldfish.
If T.B. grew a pair and wanted to still do a “serious storyline” without looking like someone who wasn’t quite sure on their position, he could have C.B. John arrested for child pornography. It would be quite a shock, it will rid of us of a hated character, and T.B. could still have his ego stroked.
Nate: “So, um, what kind of robots are involved in the contest?”
Owen: “The regular kind.”
Cody: “Yup.”
Nate: “The regular kind.”
Owen: “What other kinds are there, really?”
Nate: “…you know nothing about actual robotics, I’m guessing.”
Owen: “Not true! I read an article on on them once. Well, skimmed an article. Well, I -thought- about robots really hard, once.”
Cody: “I sometimes read comics with robots in them. And everyone knows comics are important! Why, John just the other d-”
Nate: “Forget it. FORGET I SAID ANYTHING.”
*Nate bolts off*
Owen: “Whew! I thought he’d never leave! Ready to head off the Furoticon IV?”
Cody: “You’d better believe it!”
Owen and Cody remind me of this dynamic duo.
Off topic, but… After seeing all this mindless, go-nowhere filler in the weeks following the Wedding Of The Century, and after seeing the wedding storyline appear to have been awkwardly sliced and diced, I’m 100% convinced there was some major Les/Lisa interaction, written a year ago with all the other dreck, but it was cut after every snarker alive predicted a Lisa visitation in conjunction with the wedding, and panned it in advance. Bet anything BatDick cut it all and whipped up all this hastily written filler to plug the gap.
Make sense?
I would eagerly await a week’s worth of strips wherein John explains the misunderstood history of child porn as an art form.
I would think that John would go with a broader explanation that pornography is merely art harshly condemned by moralists. They hate it because it challenges them! But I don’t think Batiuk is so free-spirited that he feels that way about porn. He seems to like his women lukewarm and without personality.
And so far, with the semester half over, Batiuk has chosen to go with the high schoolers rather than follow his graduates to college. That means more Cody and more Owen, since there’s apparently no one else. It is kind of amazing how the main cast is all past the age of 40 but the thing that seems to hold them together is the damn high school. Some people just never get past that.
I think Tom Batiuk just writes about his life, using his characters in the mistaken belief that anyone besides himself really cares. In his recent blog post, he mentioned how he drove by his old apartment and took pictures. Then, voila, his characters drive by their old apartments and reminisce. It was a storyline that went nowhere and had nothing of interest, but it was something Tom Batiuk did so by God his readers must be clamoring for it.
Same with the Comic Book Lecture, I would assume, and I guess this week’s bilgewater clambake is about the time he noticed an article about a high school course.
Heaven forbid he should ever take an interesting crap, I’m not sure the comics page could take a week of that.