makeitstop@dickwithears.com

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“After successfully learning to walk, talk and use a spoon, there was only one more young childhood demon for my beloved Lisa to face and slay with her special brand of feminine heroism and courage. On that crisp autumn day, with the dying leaves spiraling to the cold barren earth like so many ugly brown snowflakes, Lisa faced down the latest barrier the cruel universe had placed between her and happiness. In the same stoic unselfish way she’d later use to battle the horrors of cancer, Lisa entered the bathroom as a baby and emerged as a developing young woman. Against all odds she’d done it…she’d successfully gone potty on the toilet like a big girl!

I wasn’t there that day but just thinking about it makes me weep and sob uncontrollably. Why did the universe conspire to take her away from me? Why? WHY??? WHY?!?!?! WHHHHHHHHYYYYYY!!!!!!!!*”

*(I assume every chapter of every Lisa book ends this way)

The fact that his “writing studio” has a computer makes it even funnier how Cayla has to exit the house and visit Les’ creepy workshop to fetch him when one of Lisa’s kids calls. He NEVER would have forced Lisa to do that, in fact he’d have left the studio every five minutes to check on her, which in fairness is somewhat reasonable considering how often she’d get sick or blown up. It’s only a matter of time until that stupid imaginary cat returns to mock Les as he struggles over writing about Lisa’s first day of middle school or that time she skinned her knee. And I guarantee it’ll all be even more downhill from there.

 

Once Upon A Time In A Funny Page Far Far Away

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Once upon a time there was a comic strip. This comic strip centered around daily life at a fictional Ohio high school. It featured a whole cast of zany high school characters, like the nerd, the cool kid, the bully and etc. While it wasn’t the most popular comic strip or anything, most readers found it to be somewhat amusing and perfectly acceptable.

Then the guy who wrote this comic strip got bored and decided to change the tone of the comic strip by centering it around “real life” issues, like the kind you and I face every day. He created a brand new character named Lisa who’d get into all sorts of melodramatic situations all the time. No one really liked this Lisa character but the comic strip writer LOVED her so he plowed ahead undaunted, placing his new character into ever-more implausible situations, like silly superhero weddings and post office terror bombings. The rest of the comic strip followed suit and suddenly ALL the characters were involved in these wild melodramatic situations. Car crashes, illnesses, wars, alcoholism…it was endless.

But it just wasn’t enough for the comic strip writer, so he decided to up the ante and REALLY draw attention to himself by giving the Lisa character cancer. For years and years his readers watched in horror as the Lisa character slowly withered and died in the most drawn-out and agonizing way imaginable. And everyone noticed…briefly…before going back to mostly ignoring the comic strip and the comic strip writer’s daffy antics.

Then after the Lisa character died the comic strip writer didn’t know what to do with himself or his comic strip. So he kept going back to his cancer story, again and again and again and again. The Lisa character appeared as a ghost, her husband began writing a book about her and soon the Lisa character was in the comic strip even more frequently than she was before she died. Everyone became annoyed or just plain bored by the endless contrivances he used to keep featuring the dead Lisa character. It finally reached a point where it became a parody of itself and everyone either started making fun of it or just stopped reading it altogether. The end.

Wow, that was easy. And I’m neither delicate OR a genius. Few things irk me more than LesTom’s incessant whining about the trials and tribulations of being a “writer”, as if either of them would know. No one put a gun to Dick Facey’s head and told him he had to write exclusively about his dead wife just like no one ever forced Batiuk to concoct his dopey little melodramatic piles of crap of in lieu of entertaining people with jokes. If BanTom is really struggling and stressing over “writing” a two week arc about some fat moron going to the DMV perhaps “writing” was a poor career choice. I mean hey, every SoSF guest host (and commenter) manages to find something funny to say about his idiotic comic strip every day and we have way, way less to work with than he does, as he theoretically could write about anything he likes but we’re stuck with FW.

Stall Tac-Dicks

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Yikes, that awkward hug is possibly the most sickening FW sight in quite some time. Nothing like the bond between a bio-step-father and his bio-step-son, you know? Poor, poor Dick Facey, he’s “kind of stalled” on his latest Lisa book, which helps to explain why he’s the least-prolific “writer” of his generation. Perhaps he could lace Cayla’s lemonade with some polonium to, you know, get the ol’ creative juices flowing. Then again, a Cayla book would be pretty goddamned boring…”Cayla’s Story…Where The Other Shoe Steps”. Because she’s a doormat, you see.

So Les just sits in his garage studio day after day after day doing nothing? What a dick. He could be renting that space out to Westviewians who aren’t quite ready to make the leap to the Montoni’s apartment yet, like maybe Alex and Owen or something.

Mentally Illos

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“Illos”???? At first glance I had absolutely NO IDEA what he was saying there. Boy Lisa is like forty years old, there’s no need for the childish slang. Anyhow, sad-sack Dick Facey is all mopey and despondent because he has YET ANOTHER case of “writer’s block” (or in this case, “writo nogo”) even though he’s writing YET ANOTHER book about Lisa…the only topic he’s written about in decades. At some point perhaps it’d be best if Les just dropped the stupid fantasy about being a writer, as he clearly doesn’t have the aptitude for it. If writing is always such a torturous task maybe he should consider writing about something aside from his dead wife, as obviously the two things have merged into one miserable trope he clearly hates. And everyone else hates it too, thus if he quits everyone wins.

Wrapped In Spastic

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Hur HURRRR hur hur…is there anything more pathetic than Boy Lisa trying to engage in wry wordplay? Because if such a thing exists I definitely don’t want to see it. So, after years and years of filming the SJ movie is “wrapped” but fret not, those of you wondering how this news will affect the twenty-seven SJ-related unresolved subplots. For you see, they’re already filming sequel after sequel, because HOLLYWOOD, amirite? Poor BanTom, always so cynical.

So why is he calling Les? Is it about that stupid graphic novel I was hoping Batiuk forgot about? Did Lisa leave a “So Frankie’s Infiltrated Your Movie Set Via A Phony Food Truck Operation…Vol 1.” VHS tape lying around just in case her bio-son ever became a famous Hollywood storyboarder? Because the SJ production could use one of them right about now, unless BanTom forgot about that one too.

Maybe, but it’ll probably be something so fantastically stupid no one could have possibly predicted it. All we really know for sure is that whatever it is it requires Boy Lisa to be “on hiatus” from the Starbuck Jones production for a while, which could mean anything or nothing at all. Odd that BatNom felt compelled to explain that, though. I really hope this isn’t the launch of a “Lisa’s Story” ten year anniversary arc…I mean I REALLY hope it’s not that. And incidentally, the “LS” ten year anniversary is also the fifth anniversary of when TB stopped relentlessly patting himself on the back for “LS”, interestingly enough.