My Stan Lee Sense Is Tingling

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This one is surprisingly not so bad at all, as Batom takes a good-hearted swipe at Stan Lee’s always gratuitous cameos in the various Marvel films. An actual humorous gag in a FW strip is always so jarring, you can’t help but wonder how it got through lack-of-quality control. I haven’t mildly chuckled like this since the old classic Act II arc where Les got his foot stuck in the lawn mower. Good for YOU Tom, like the old song says: one of out three hundred and sixty five ain’t bad. That’s a .003 average, by the way, down slightly from last year’s .0031.

Coming next week: the interminable Stan Lee cameo continues as the comic book legend helps The Gang unload boxes of comic books from the trunk of Crazy’s car. Meanwhile Pete and Boy Lisa toil over the second “sizzle reel” and wonder aloud about what is must have been like to create sizzle reels back in the 1950s. In Sunday’s strip Stan Lee agrees to appear in the new sizzle reel that will be debuting at Westview-Con later this year, thus completing the comic book circle of life.

The Cure For The Common Qualms

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As regular FW readers know, the only “artist” who ever does anything for the sake of artistic expression is Les Moore, everyone else in the “entertainment business” is an amoral money-grubbing weasel. What the f*ck is Cartoon Conan babbling about here? “Take over” the “large franchise”? What? Who’d he “take it over” from? How can it already be a large franchise when the first one hasn’t even been released yet? Why can’t ANYONE in this stupid f*cking comic strip EVER just ask a normal question?

The funniest thing in this one is Cliff in panel one, inexplicably doddering around for no reason. What is he doing, is he pushing the chair in or pulling it out and if so, why? It’s such a needless-yet-fascinating detail.

The Tank Is Empty

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contentMan, I REALLY hate having to turn my entire computer sideways to read these stupid Sunday “homage” strips. Today we learn that Cliff (who’s in a modern movie RIGHT NOW) feels a little out of step with these newfangled picture shows, which is probably to be expected given that he just emerged from a sixty year hibernation. “You mean people watch movies in their HOUSES now? I…I…I…can’t BELIEVE it! Where does the projector go?”.

“Tank Thompson”??? What THIS has to do with anything is anyone’s guess. I’ll never understand why the Batom Comics covers are never relevant to the (ahem) “stories” they follow, but then again it’s be pretty stupid of me to expect logic to come into play at this point.

Too Much Junk Business

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This is one of those strips it took me a while to figure out, as at first glance I was totally baffled. OK, apparently they’re doing an audience Q&A session and one of the audience members felt the need to lob rather unimaginative insults at the old WHS computer which, out of completely nowhere, has suddenly become a relevant character again. Continue reading “Too Much Junk Business”

Just Holtron To What You’ve Got

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Holtron? What? Are we pretending that the old Act I WHS school computer is sentient again? Why? This is just achingly bad, intelligence-insultingly bad, BAD bad and not in the “good” Michael Jackson way either. What the f*ck is Cliff smirking about and what’s up with Marianne? She looks like she’s about to gnaw on some logs or something there. This whole Comic-Con SJ Q&A panel premise hasn’t just gone off the rails, it’s gone off the rails, plummeted down a steep cliff and landed with a huge splash in a sewage treatment retention pond.