Nothing Works Out If You Don’t Let It

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Good ol’ Cayla, always the affable doormat. “Oh, you’re spending the entire summer living large in an all-expenses paid five star Hollywood hotel suite and dining with movie stars? And I’m not invited? OK, whatevs, I’ll keep some lemonade on ice for you honey!”. Married folks everywhere are reading this and thinking, “uh yeah right, Tom, seems plausible”.

And then he returns home to inform her that the whole thing was for nothing. No big TV bucks, no fame, no future in the business, not so much as an autographed Mason Jarr 8×10 glossy. Nothing. But that’s our Cayla, always content with whatever scraps Les deigns to toss her way. She is, after all, a mere substitute who knows her place, which is directly behind the Lisa shrine with feather-duster in hand.

Look at Dickface in that last panel…(urge to kill rising rapidly). Har-dee-har har. Only Tombat could tell a story that takes years to unfold, have absolutely nothing happen then pretend it’s a delightful happy ending. Look at that moronic grin on his stupid face. Look at Cayla purring away in bliss…blech, just nauseating. And does anyone remember the part of the story where Les heroically fought for “credit”? I sure don’t. TB could have skipped this entire arc and just had Les reject the offer and it would have ended exactly the same way. What a sorry display. Thank God it appears to finally be over, hopefully he’s reached his Les quota for 2014.

Le Chat Stupide

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Yeah, that Hollywood sure is crazy all right. This arc was a perfect example. What a wacky place, like how they changed the cancer screenplay so that Lisa lived, the way they wrote an adopted son into the script, the way they go to restaurants…man, the zaniness is just overwhelming in Hollywood, just totally nutty. No wonder Thelma (who, like Mason, only gets to have a personality at the END of the story) is seeing an imaginary cat that Les talks to when he’s agonizing over writing about his dead wife. Very clever, Author Guy, very clever.

And all this time it’s been that damned cat that’s made Les the single most objectionable character in the history of ever. I see. Perhaps Batom needs to slow down with the seasonal craft beers until AFTER he finishes one of these mega-long arcs. What’s another ten minutes, right?

But seriously, if this is indeed the end of the epically annoying screenplay arc, talk about ending with a resounding thud. You can almost hear the sad trombone after panel three….”whaaaa-waaaa”. TB’s the master of the anticlimax, it’s like he wants to just get it over with as much as his readers do. What a dreary display.

Home Is Where The Apathy Is

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After a long, insufferable summer of sitting around doing nothing, Dickface just can’t wait to get home so he can sit THERE doing nothing. The sheer ambition of the man boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Porch swings, gazebos, pizza, his overweight dimwitted pals, comic books, pizza…maybe if he’s lucky his wife will get sick and die so he’ll finally have some new material to work with. Then everything will TRULY be just like it was before!

It’s increasingly clear that Author Guy’s greatest talent is the ability to keep a straight face during those moronic puff-piece interviews of his. I’ve seen better “writing” on cereal boxes. The guy who does “Bazooka Joe” is practically Hemingway next to this joker. This was a complete shambles from top to bottom, obviously the “work” of someone who stopped giving a shit years ago.

The funniest thing about this is how everyone respects Les AFTER he gives up and quits. Welcome to the Batiukverse, where up is down, black is white and apathy is a virtue to be respected and admired.

For Reel??

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I sometimes wonder if Author Guy sits there in Batom Inc. World HQ with felt tip in hand, poring over his little stories and occasionally leaping from his chair and yelling “No! Dammit, this still makes too much sense! I have to dumb it down again and again until it’s JUST RIGHT!!!!”. It’s just difficult for me to accept that someone…anyone…could come up with anything this stupid accidentally. The way he ignores his own continuity, the way he glosses right over plot developments that just happened mere days ago, the way he does it time after time after time with such predictable ease…it has to be a con, it just has to be. No one can be this consistently awful without trying to be.

As far as today’s strip is concerned, uh, yeah. Dumb “insider” lingo, idiotic contrivance out of nowhere, plot details at odds with things that just happened a few days before, Les behaving like a self-centered narcissistic jerk-off, that stupid cat hanging around for no reason…yup, sounds about right. Why even bother with these plodding mega-arcs if you’re just going to give up halfway through and resort to crappy filler and nonsensical garbage to finish them up? Again, it makes no sense unless it’s on purpose. It has to be.

 

Mason, Ajar

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Yikes, by the third panel I was expecting it to start raining pizza. Starbuck Jones, the obscure and unpopular comic book with hundreds of issues that EVERYONE is talking about. Sigh. TB obviously couldn’t help himself here, much like I couldn’t help myself with today’s post title. Had to use it as it might be Mason’s last appearance…unless…no, I don’t even want to think about that possibility right now.

Why is the guy who just quit still hanging around the place he claims to despise? Likewise, why is Mason still lurking around the set? Is Batom ever going to bother to explain the “kill fee” nonsense he spent three days babbling about? Is panel three Les the single most annoying Les drawing ever or is it just me? What is going on here? Did he officially quit? Is the production cancelled? How is it possible for anyone to be this bad at telling a coherent story and furthermore, how is it possible to get paid for it?