A Spoooky Search.

Hello all! Hope you had a delightfully spooky week. I was forced to listen to the most tragic World Series games of all time, and dealt with my grief at a cruel world where either the Dodgers (BOO) or the Yankees (HISS) had to win. I ate my feelings in mini sized Halloween candy bar sizes and dreamed of a better place. A bright and beautiful utopia where both could lose it all.

To spare all your necks further strain, and for my own amusement, let’s play a little game with this week’s sideways comics covers.

My questions to you out there in Beady-Eyed Nitpickerville:

1.) Which of these covers is the most tolerable?

2.) Which of these covers is the biggest insult to comics, literature, and the human race as an intelligent species?

3.) Did Tom steal this idea from this blog, and our Time Mop covers of the early months of 2023?

4.) How many copy pasta references can you find?

For example:

Weekday Comic Book Covers!

Yep, they’re a thing now. How long until Crankshaft is nothing but comic book covers? And how many years will that go on before the strip is cancelled?

Last week was the final full week of October, which means it was the Pizza Box Monster’s time to shine! He showed up on cue and… existed. Pete, Mindy, Darrin, and the PBM talked about decorating and telling ghost stories, but didn’t do either of those things. They also didn’t deal with the power outage, which seems like a serious problem for Montoni’s. Spoiled product cuts into a restaurant’s “thin crust profit margins.” But they sat in the dark and played make-believe like the overgrown nine-year-olds they are. It’s been a year since Pete and Mindy bought the restaurant, and they’ve done nothing but decorate it for holidays (and that’s if you count last week). What was the point of closing Montoni’s or re-opening it?

Then on Sunday, the Burnings story… well, I don’t want to say it “ended”, but I guess it’s done smirking at itself. What is Lillian so pleased about? She did absolutely nothing. Telling people they’re on camera is of no value if you’re not going to do anything with the evidence. Such as, give it to the police so they can identify and arrest the arsonist. The arson footage must exist, because there’s no way someone mounted that camera after the fire but before the protestors, which were implied to happen on the same night. Or, investigate them yourself, something an award-winning mystery writer should know a thing or two about.

Unlike what Tom Batiuk thinks, there’s nothing courageous about reading a book to people you know will never attack you. This is what happens when a story starts with “let my preferred character be the hero of a controversial issue so I can win an award” and then tries to back-form a narrative that leads up to that. The whole story makes zero sense. All the “protestors” had to was report the book to the school board, or maybe just to principal Nate (who was depicted as wanting to obey the school board). All Lillian or Booksmellers had to do was call the police, because nothing about this justifies an arson attack. Again, why is this treated so casually?

At the peak of the stupidity, there were almost 20 people total on Lillian’s lawn, protesting for something that already exists, or counter-protesting for… something, I guess. You sure wouldn’t know what the counter-protestors wanted from their signs. Ban bans! Ban gensor! Words have power! It’s like they were all told to assemble and make signs but weren’t told why. Look at their faces. They all say “I don’t know why I’m here, but I’m really, really angry at you!”

And finally, there’s the small matter of “The Burnings” somehow being a major phenomenon that shut down literacy for two generations. The Village Booksmith “survived the Burnings” by virtue of the fire being too small to cook marshmallows.

Testimony Of Skip Rawlings

(My retelling of The Burnings continues.)

PROSECUTION: Can you please state your name and profession?

SKIP: Skip Rawlings, Publisher-editor-reporter of the Centerville Sentinel.

PROSECUTION: And which of those roles did you perform in the newspaper’s story about the Booksmellers fire?

SKIP: Well, all of them.

PROSECUTION: This story said, quote, “Booksmellers came under attack because students were going to get a book for their school literature course that the school board had banned” and “the protestors said there were things in the book they didn’t want their kids to see.” Is that an accurate description?

SKIP: Yes.

Continue reading “Testimony Of Skip Rawlings”

Further Testimony Of Blaise Ashcomb

(My retelling of The Burnings continues. All episodes of the retelling appear under the “Burnings” tag.)

(Blaise Ashcomb, having sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, testifies as follows:)

PROSECUTION: Let us now move to the Village Booksmith fire. Can you briefly describe your investigation of that fire?

ASHCOMB: The fire was put out before I got there, and no one was injured. So my first task was to identify and interview witnesses. But when I got there, everybody was already in a huge conversation about book burning. I thought this was very strange. 

PROSECUTION: Why was this strange?

ASHCOMB: When I was walking up to the scene, it looked like a minor cigarette butt fire or something like that. It was way too early to establish if the fire was even intentional, much less a specific motive for it. But they were right in the middle of it. I thought maybe they saw something, or knew more than the newspaper did about this supposed protest. But they didn’t.

PROSECUTION: Who was there? 

ASHCOMB: The neighbors, their adult daughter, the grandfather Ed Crankshaft, and a darker-skinned couple.

PROSECUTION: What did they tell you?

ASHCOMB: Well, the dark-skinned couple didn’t say anything relevant, and didn’t stay long. But the rest of them all bought that newspaper story about the Booksmellers fire. This fire was lit on the 16th, and the Booksmellers fire was on the 5th. And I just said we had ruled the Booksmellers fire accidental by then.

PROSECUTION: Did the witnesses say anything else?

ASHCOMB: Ed Crankshaft started telling me this absurd story about how being unable to read cost him a shot at the major leagues. I remember thinking “yeah, buddy, I’d be quarterback of the Browns if I didn’t tweak my knee in high school.”

PROSECUTION: To be fair, you’d probably be better than DeShaun Watson.

ASHCOMB: Heh. That’s probably true.

PROSECUTION: Anything else?

ASHCOMB: Ed Crankshaft vehemently denied having anything to do with the fire.

PROSECUTION: Did you believe him?

ASHCOMB: Yes, because it quickly became apparent that he had no involvement.

PROSECUTION: Why did you believe Mr. Crankshaft had no involvement in this fire when his, uh, propensity for starting fires is well-known?

ASHCOMB: This fire was clearly the work of an amateur, and Ed Crankshaft is no amateur. He’s actually kind of a genius. Do you know how much energy it takes to launch a 35-pound backyard grill into orbit? Escape velocity is 25,000 miles an hour. And that’s at the equator. Imagine being almost halfway up the globe, and getting a non-aerodynamic object moving that fast, using only store brand lighter fluid. And he’s done this many, many, many times. The laws of thermodynamics don’t seem to exist around Ed Crankshaft. NASA should hire him to build rocket engines. It’s crazy.

PROSECUTION: Why did you think this fire was the work of an amateur?

ASHCOMB: The huge puddles of unignited accelerant at the scene, for starters. That’s a smoking gun for arson. Also, the failure to ignite all the accelerants kept the fire small, almost as if the firestarter didn’t want to do too much damage. They also used a particular accelerant, one that was very easy to track down.

PROSECUTION: And what was that?

ASHCOMB: Creosote oil. It’s a yellowish-brown liquid. There were also traces of gasoline, maybe because they stored it in a container that previously held gasoline. Or maybe they thought it would fool someone. Like I said, amateur. By the way, creosote oil can cause cancer.

PROSECUTION: So this was definitely an arson attack?

ASHCOMB: 100 percent.

PROSECUTION: Did you rule out any other possibilities?

ASHCOMB: It was also quickly apparent that Lillian McKenzie did not start the fire.

PROSECUTION: Why is that?

ASHCOMB: She was inside her house when the fire started, and when I interviewed her, she was pretty shaken up by the attack. But mainly, she had no motive.

PROSECUTION: Why not?

ASHCOMB: Insurance fraud is a major motive for arson, so it’s something I always have to consider. But Lillian’s business was completely uninsurable. She basically hung a plank outside her house and declared her attic “The Village Booksmith.” It doesn’t have any kind of business licensing, much less business insurance. And the fire was so small she wouldn’t have met her deductible anyway. It made no sense from an insurance fraud perspective. And she wouldn’t start an insurance fire at the most fire-resistant point of the house.

PROSECUTION: Can you explain what you mean by that?

ASHCOMB: Much of the McKenzie house, including the stairs, was made out of fire-resistant wood. Clearly Lillian took some extra precautions after a few Crankshaft grill incidents. She wouldn’t have started the fire on the bottom steps, unless she wanted it to fail right away. Which makes no sense in an insurance fraud scenario, or other rational motives like concealment of something. But it does make sense in terms of what we later learned about the firestarter.