Take Your Kids to Work Day

While his wife confronts her father’s killer, Darin schleps Skyler down those rickety stairs to visit Holly and Funky. Naturally, the grandchild St. Lisa never knew is good at everything, which for a five-month old consists of sleeping and eating. Of course Cory (whose seems to be mentioned in every Sunday strip) was like that too as a baby; in fact, Funky opines that Cory was that way through his teens. While we know little about teenage Cory’s eating habits (surely he has nothing on Jeremy from Zits), we do know that he made quite a fuss, and in fact was a regular visitor to Principal Nate’s office:

April 2008:

Young Mr. Winkerbean would go from disrupting class to cheating on tests, vandalizing the school and stealing from a charity.

A very Happy Easter to you all! Epicus Doomus steps in
for a couple beginning tomorrow!

Lockup: Westview

And you thought the only businesses in town were Montoni’s and the Komix Korner? Welcome to the redundantly named WESTVIEW PRISON. Like all the signage in Westview, the prison sign looks like it’s hand drawn on oak tag with Magic Markers…I’m surprised it’s not Scotch taped to the fence. This drawn-out sequence which adds nothing to the narrative (we didn’t see Jessica driving to her other interviews) reminds me of Dean’s Comic Booth’s great parody of Darin’s birth mother quest.

Moss Def

Batiuk would have us remember a character he killed off 23 years ago, yet he doesn’t trust us to recall Jessica’s name from one day to the next. “How goes the documentary, JESS?” “Who’s next on stage for the documentary, JESS?” And to the list of things about which Batiuk has no idea how they work, add documentaries. It’s one thing to have her use cheap home video equipment, but any halfway serious filmmaker would undertake a project, especially one as deeply personal as this, with some kind of outline. We’ve had a week of Jessica running around gathering unflattering anecdotes about her late father. Now she finds herself forced (“I didn’t want to have to do this…”) to finally get serious.

Grate Expectations

 

Today’s strip is just chock-full of dialogue, all of it loopy and stilted. At least someone uses a little tact when speaking about the late John Darling: his daughter. “A great self-appreciator” sounds much kinder that “egomaniacal jerk.” And it’s easier to accept that he used to “grate on people” versus “making their workplace a living hell.”

But…Darling’s murder “still a mystery”? Les wrote (and somehow published, despite losing the manuscript) a goddam book about it. Did he leave the last chapter out?