A Bizarre, Pointless Interlude on the Road to Nowhere

Their Conradian quest to locate Cliff Anger complete, the Starbuck Jones dream team rush back to… Montoni’s? Th’ hell? A month ago they were tasked with scripting and storyboarding a sequel, to be shot concurrently with the feature they were already working on. Did this development lead to the boys working even harder and longer? Nope: Pete proceeded to have another of his Batom flashbacks, which was followed by a road trip to Ohio, not to Cleveland to scout locations for the story’s origin scenes, but to Centerville for a screening of the obscure SJ serial. They followed this with another trip yet further east to locate the serial’s obscure leading man. Anyway, the upside here is that mopey Pete is looking and acting positively chipper!

That Old Familiar Ring

Since Batiuk went dialogue free in today’s strip (the better to further pad out this dreary story arc), I’ll be only slightly less lazy than he and just contribute a few lines of my own.

“Consarn it, here’s my joy buzzer! Wanted to use it on that actor feller!”

“Hope to God the cyanide table hidden inside will still do the job after all these years…”

“My-y-y-y-y-y-y…precious-s-s-s-s-s-s!”

“A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!”

Father of Son of Stuck Funky

SF

Hey folks it’s the author posting as Stuck Funky here. Some of you may remember the blog ‘Stuck Funky.’ I started it when Lisa was diagnosed with cancer for a second time and carried it on for about three years. Life demands eventually caught up and I lost the fire (and the time) to post on a regular basis. It didn’t help that I also received a few threatening letters from lawyers. Since then, I’ve been checking in only once in a while. I’m continually impressed with how much the SoSF community has grown. Why, back in my day, I would post and wait to see what OB Dan and a small handful of others had to say (well, mostly OB Dan), but I digress…

When Tfhackett posted on twitter about the guest-author contest and the anniversary, I emailed WP and asked if I could have access as long as I deleted any material I don’t own rights to. I wanted to add the archive to this existing blog and make it a cool 9 years of FW snark. They actually un-suspended the blog with all of the images intact! After it was restored, I realized that I deleted the blog from my user account so I technically can’t access the blog to edit anything – so it’s out there and I can’t do anything about it right now. The other lesson here? even if you think you deleted your embarrassing livejournal from ten years ago, the published files could be sitting on a server somewhere.

My point is, if you have any time to kill this week check out Stuck Funky and you may find that nothing (or everything) has changed. My recommendation would be to start at the beginning to get my realtime analysis of what became L’s story. I have no idea how long it will be up, but I’m going to wait another week or so before contacting WP about either getting access or deleting the site altogether before lawyers resurface.

Thanks again for letting me post last week and happy snarking!

Stuck Funky

Brick. Mason.

beckoningchasm
April 10, 2016 at 10:49 pm
Wow, Tom Batiuk has absolutely no idea how the real world works. This is far more amazing and unbelievable than any Starbuck Jones adventure.

It’s times like these, gentle reader, when Batiuk’s “quarter inch from reality” stretches into light years, where it’s fun to imagine that the author is actually setting up a nuanced and compelling plot, instead of the usual flimsily constructed, implausible farce. Yesterday Mason was talking the producers into putting Cliff Anger in the picture and paying his (New York City!) rent for a year. Today Mason’s continues to overstep his authority, assigning Pete to write Anger into the script “as soon as we get back to Hollywood.”

What if Mason doesn’t have enough clout to recast and rewrite Starbuck Jones on the fly (c’mon, a guy whose signature role to date was in something called Dino Deer)? Perhaps Jarr’s come as unmoored from reality as the comic strip in which he’s a character, and he just thinks he’s pulling all these strings. I don’t have any better understanding of bipolar disorder than does Tom Batiuk, who labeled Mason as such merely to set up a cheap gag, but maybe he’s having one of what you call your manic episodes. In his head, anyway.