Les Quizérables

Hello SOSFers, billytheskink here to ponder the ponderous ponderings of this comic strip with you all for the next couple weeks.

Why does Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat, he doesn’t have a job. His owner doesn’t have a job that keeps him from making lasagna on Mondays (or a job at all, even… is Jon still supposed to be a cartoonist?). I guess Mondays are when Nermal shows up, but that happens on rare occasions and Nermal always sticks around for at least a week anyways, making whole weeks terrible.

I have just now realized that Garfield hates Mondays because he read today’s strip, and it is hard to blame him. I think I hate Mondays now too.

We have seen Les berate his students before (including just under a month ago, in fact), but this time he has decided to leave the classroom door wide open so passers by can hear him humiliate every single student he has been charged with teaching. You know, maybe this is TB’s attempt to bring a balanced perspective to this strip. He’s done an anti-bullying story arc, why not a pro-bullying one?

Un-A-Track-Tive

Link to today’s strip

Look at that first panel, it just screams “I have nothing here”. And whaddya know…he doesn’t. Unless you consider today’s bit of woeful wordplay to be “something”, which I do not. Still though, after two weeks of marching band gags I’m willing to accept this one even in spite of Dick Facey’s loathsome presence. What a dick.

And that’s it for me, fellow snarkers…stay tuned for the Funk-tastic snark stylings of billytheskink, who hopefully manages to avoid the onslaught of band gags that haunted me this time around!

Garage Turkeys Re-Re-Visited

Link to today’s strip

Uh yeah Becky, they’ll “celebrate” with a “holiday (presumably Memorial Day) meal” consisting of ancient freezer-burned band turkeys…a prospect that apparently amuses Becky to no end based on her deranged wry smirking. Not even a rotting band turkey would land with a thud as leaden as this gag, which was quite clearly a desperate “hail Mary” attempt to fill that last sad and empty word balloon with SOMETHING…anything…no matter how incredibly dumb it was. A silent strip featuring the band parents walking out to the parking lot and starting their cars would have been way, way funnier than this.

Ahhh-Trophy

Link to today’s strip

Someone, please, make it stop. Today we see just how bad a marching band gag can get, as BatNom reaches the bottom of the barrel, plunges his fist straight through it and grabs a handful of slug and worm-riddled soil beneath said barrel…just because he can. See, the horrible marching band full of useless slacker teens wins SO MANY TROPHIES that they actually need an ENTIRE BUILDING to house them. And fortunately for the marching band, WHS JUST HAPPENS to have an entire building to SELL to the perennially-cash strapped band, which is rather fortuitous if I do say so myself. Everyone wins! Well, almost everyone, as regular FW readers might not consider Becky’s truly obnoxious Dinkle-esque cackle as being a “win”. I do like that weird angle in panel two, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her pinned-up sleeve from that perspective before.

Flutophoning It In

Link to today’s strip

Good ol’ FW, always with that smirking contempt for things BanTom likes. So to reiterate, the WHS marching band is a deeply competitive, proud and Ohio-renowned institution full of lazy talent-less slackers whose parents actually receive awards for enduring the shrill horrifying noises their offspring produce when they practice, which according to FW lore is extremely rare. Got that?

And no band parent has it worse than those whose children play the dreaded flutophone. Sandy’s actually handling it better than some other band parents, as overeating is preferable to the alcohol and illegal drugs some band parents need to make it through even one more day of that incessant racket…award-winning racket, I might add. It must be quite an honor to receive an award plaque from Becky. Not because of the award itself which of course is totally meaningless, but because it’s just harder for Becky to hand things to other people, what with the missing arm and all.