Tag: Atomik Komix

Legion of Dume

ComicBookHarriet
February 27, 2022 at 11:00 pm
You just introduced the Strong Force. Four villains that need to be fleshed out and differentiated. That can get you through an entire 12 issue year, if not more.

Suicide Squirrel
February 28, 2022 at 4:56 pm
New villains for the Elementals Force? Already?…Has the mighty ‘Strong Force’ already been dispatched? Were they defeated on that comic book cover before the story even started?

Pete’s eyebags threaten to engulf his prominent nose.

One of the “contemporary issues affecting young adults” that Batiuk depicts “in a thought-provoking and sensitive manner” is climate change. Jim Kablichnick has long been Batty’s go-to mouthpiece, while more recently, Funky and Les each have held forth on this important topic. Now barely three weeks after they’ved developed a personal, subatomic foe for each of their four elemental heroes, Pete hijacks the newly created franchise with a climate change angle, even leveraging his wildfire survivor cred to make his point.

Time to Play Besides

Your genial host weighed in yesterday about snarkers who suggest that Tom Batiuk, who will turn 75 in two weeks, is experiencing cognitive decline. They point to the countless inconsistencies in character, plot, and overall quality of his two franchise strips. My take is that Batty works for a syndicate that’s happy just to have a fifty year old comic title to offer its paying customers, while providing minimal if any editorial oversight.

I give you today’s strip as evidence that TB has still got it, whatever “it” in his case means. Pete chimes in with the same remark he uttered three weeks ago, and naturally we hate-readers and everyone else is supposed to exclaim “got the reference!” Meanwhile, Pete really needs a new joke.

In Fact, Terrible

Link To The Sunday Strip

Four generic superheroes battling four generic super villains in front of a plain background…THIS is what they toiled over all week? And look at Flash in the reality bubble, all smug and self-satisfied, like he actually accomplished something. I wish he’d do an arc where Chester shits himself over the astoundingly terrible work these imbeciles keep cranking out. “Wayback Wendy”, “Pion”, “Scorch”…I mean come on. Chester has to be losing money hand over fist on this horseshit.

I really, really need for this arc to be over. I mean yes, it’ll take way more than that to truly break me, but this one really tested my patience. Fortunately, it would appear that Mason Jarre is on deck, to take us in a “different direction”, hopefully a direction that has nothing to do with comic books or marching bands. If it turns out he wants to do an animated film about a marching band composed entirely of superheroes, that might be all for me.

It’s All About The He Said He Said Comic Book Bullshit

Link To Saturday

A dumb premise, centered around two characters no one cares about, executed poorly…this one truly had it all. My goal is to forget about Phil, Flash and their imbecilic comic book drivel as quickly as possible, which should be really, really easy. I’ve seen plenty of stupefying, tedious FW arcs in my day, but man oh man, this one was right up (or down) there with ANY of them. Hopefully tomorrow’s comic book cover shovels dirt on this thing, because it’s definitely time to move the f*ck on from whatever this was supposed to be.

He Blinded Me With Word Balloons Pertaining To Science. Blinded Me, With Word Balloons Pertaining To Science!

Link To Today’s

Wow, what an ugly, ungainly mess this one is. The vertical single-paneler is possibly the most annoying FW gimmick of them all, but cramming it full of TWENTY word balloons takes this debacle to a whole new level of stupid. As usual, the gag here (“it’s all already been done”) is fine in and of itself, but the execution is botched, bungled and mangled beyond belief to the point where only hardcore FW readers will “get” it and even then it’s iffy. Thus far in 2022 there’s been a noticeable decline in the quality of the strip’s wry banter, to a point where you have to seriously wonder if perhaps there’s some sort of legitimate cognitive impairment involved. Or maybe it’s just the shittiness of the premise, it’s tough to tell one way or the other.