Link to today’s childish whim.
“Okay, so like there’s this guy, Les Moore, who’s like totally awesome and cool, but he’s like real sensitive and stuff, and he wrote a book that, like, didn’t have any explosions in it but was still like the best book ever, and everyone thought it was great. And a bunch of people wanted to make a movie of it, but they didn’t do it right and Les got sad and stopped them. But then this good guy named Mason, he was a super cool actor and stuff, and he wanted to make the movie, and Les was like, I don’t like this. But Mason said he’d make sure it was, like, all done the way Les wanted, and he would let Les double make sure so it was all fine, but Les was like, it’s a perfect book, a movie won’t be good at all. But they let Mason try it, and he made sure it was all just like Les said it should be, and Les would be there the whole time so he could make sure it was done right and there wouldn’t be any mistakes ever. And everyone like applauded–all the moms, and the dads, the grandpas and mas, all the rotten older brothers and all of the babies and pets, too.”
I’ve said on a number of occasions that this strip is childish. Well, it’s more than that. It’s childish in the extreme, but it is plowing headfirst into infantile territory.
Yesterday, Charles said this (excerpted)
[Batiuk is] so desperate for affirmation, for praise, that he devotes strip after strip pleading with his audience to accept his assessment of his own genius.
I agree completely. Which is why Batiuk has given us panel three, here–it’s an attempt at deflection. Oh, gee, I’m so humble and I’m really not worthy of all this attention. I’m…I’m…I’m flawed just like a regular human. It rings just as falsely now as it did years ago, when Les asked the CME staff for a “cup of hemlock.”
Would that they had given it to him. What might have been.
Son of Stuck Funky 
