Hey You Two, Get A Room

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There’s been an awful lot of very peculiar hand action going on in this strip lately, hasn’t there? Now I’m not going to speculate too much on what’s going on here. Perhaps the infamous Centerville Groper has finally been paroled. Perhaps they’re just very much in love. Or perhaps the tall guy is a new pickpocket who’s just starting out. It’s, uh…quite awkward though.

Then we have that other guy’s wildly uneven legs. Was his gym built on a steep hill? Shark bite? It’s not just strange how one’s way bigger than the other, it’s that the one on the right goes straight down with no curvature at all. And that neck on the person in front of him…gak, what the hell happened there?

So the entire mid-central Ohio area solved the stupid SJ puzzle and are now excitedly queuing up to finally get a glimpse of the guy who was sitting around doing nothing for the last sixty years. Suddenly the SJ serials of the 1950s have become more than just some forgotten old crappy movies, they’re the literal cornerstone of the nostalgic childhood memories of people who weren’t even born when they were released. Incredible.

Señor Offal

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“Senior officer”….oh, I get it. Because he’s OLD, right? Har-dee-f*cking-har har. With gags like that no wonder dozens of people all over the world love FW. You can see how Mason would have been a great Les Moore in “Lust For Lisa” given the way those horrible wordplay-based jokes just flow right out of his obnoxiously smirking mouth. The guy is grating on my nerves more and more with each appearance.

I like how the guy who remained an angry recluse for sixty years is suddenly strutting around in his SJ costume like he’s Adam West or something. SJ totally ruined his entire life but now he’s happily embracing it, all because a fifty year old blonde woman in tight pants lured her way into his apartment via the fire escape. Oh well, it’s not like it’s any more inconsistent than anything else going on in this thing. The SJ timeline is even more convoluted than the FW timeline is.

And consider this: we know nothing about Cliff Anger at all other than: he’s old, he lives in NYC and he played Starbuck Jones back in the 1950s. We don’t know a thing about his personality, his career, his life, nothing whatsoever. He exists solely so BanTom can wallow in more self-indulgent nostalgic comic book memories, the character might as well be a cardboard cut-out. He COULD have fleshed him out more, but in he opted to spend weeks on his favorite Crankshaft character, decoder rings and secret spaceman messages instead.

The point being that once again that big phony BanTom allows a perfectly fine premise to sift through his fingers like a handful of beach sand, preferring to take the nice, easy, lazy, hacky way out instead of spending twenty minutes cooking up a reasonable back story and some plausible dialog. IMO it just comes across as incredibly self-indulgent, he’s not even pretending to be writing this drivel for anyone but himself.

Maybe I’m Amazed…Then Again Maybe I’m Not

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Not much to see here today, folks. Yet another Starbuck Jones cover (is this the first real look at Jupiter Moon?) and an utterly pointless reality bubble featuring those two Crankshaft jerks everyone hates. Even in the middle of an arc about a modern SJ movie he’s managed to find a way to wallow in 1950s pop culture nostalgia. Makes you wonder why he bothered or what the point is, doesn’t it?

That really is quite a, uh, “provocative” cover for a child’s coloring book though, isn’t it? No wonder Jeff is still obsessed with it, I would imagine it led to some, uh, “interesting” moments during puberty. And on that note…..

Decode Blue

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And I immediately recognized this piece of crap from all those shitty Funky Winkerbean comics I used to read as a kid. So, that Anger asshole is doing an appearance at some stupid nostalgia-themed restaurant now, is he? Why that sounds just swell! Everyone can greet him and talk about how great his old movies were and how great the old theaters were and how great old Hollywood was and how great those old Starbuck Jones comic books were and what they were doing for the last sixty years while Cliff sat broken and alone in a squalid apartment with faulty lampshades.

Of course the most objectionable thing about this totally worthless arc was how he insisted on dragging this Jeff character into the fray in a painfully transparent attempt to lure FW readers into checking out his intensely dreary “mommy didn’t love me” arc he’s been doing over there. FW is loaded to the rafters with boring aging morons who play with comic books all day, yet he had to ram Jeff down our throats just to cross-promote that remorselessly shitty other comic strip he’s trying to pimp again. What, someone like DSH John or Crazy Harry can’t spend a week looking through the attic and jabbering about comic books?

 

Hand Of Plod

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Yep, the only thing this whirlwind of an arc was missing was a good old fashioned time-killing silent strip. This is almost as suspenseful as wondering when the highway department is going to pick up that deer carcass you pass every day on your morning commute. It’s all in the details today…Jeff’s steam line-free coffee mug (indicating he’s been at this for some time), his tongue sticking out as he works diligently on a puzzle based on a child’s toy (indicating his complete idiocy), the legal pad helpfully labeled “legal pad” (to avoid any confusion) and, last but not least, Jeff’s pencil-holding hand, which indicates he is writing. At least someone involved with FW is.