Tag: basketball

Monkey Winkerbean

Making their first appearance since January 2016 are Summer and Keisha. I’m sure the sounds of one-on-one basketball right outside his door do wonders for the terminally distractable Les’ writing process.

If “see you later, alligator” is good enough for Cliff and Vera, I don’t know why Les and Cayla feel the need to “update” it. Let’s not get started on Les calling his black wife a monkey. Instead let’s examine Batiuk’s tendency to take a feeble but acceptable joke and proceed to stretch it ’til it breaks. He could have left it at “they’re working on an update blah blah blah.” But, because it’s Sunday and he still has two panels to fill, he’s gotta drop in the stuff about going “viral” and “beta testing”.

It’s all well and good that Batiuk recruited a couple comic book pros to draw Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean. But the draughtsmanship, maddeningly inconsistent as it is, isn’t the problem with these strips, it’s the writing.

Bushkaball

My fellow bloggers out there are familiar with a WordPress feature called “post tags.” Adding tags to a post “aids in navigation and allows posts and to be grouped with others of similar content.” For example, you might notice the tags for today’s post are listed this post, just before the comments, like so:

posttags

It’s a fun and handy feature, and you can even display the tags in a “tag cloud” (on this page it’s in the right-hand sidebar, under the heading “Most Tagged.” The tag cloud displays your most-used tags, and renders them in larger or smaller font sizes depending how often they are used (note the size of “Les” and “Montoni’s“).

I mention this because I regret never having created a tag called “Last panel in which everyone exchanges puzzled expressions in response to what a main character has just said.” The problem, see, is that post tags should be succinct, and there’s really no way, short of an acronym, to shorten that description. And the “LPIWEEPEIRTWAMCHJS” tag would be used a lot: in pretty much every strip that’s set in Mr. Moore’s or Mr. Kablichnick’s or Mr. Dinkle’s classroom, for starters.

Testing Credibility

★ ★ ★ ★ ★  Happy Independence Day from SoSF! ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

 

Charles
July 2, 2014 at 11:06 pm
…You don’t run a script or treatment past a test audience. That would be absurd…Never mind that no one making a crappy little movie to fill the Tuesday night slot on a basic cable channel would bother running it past test audiences.

This Hollywood arc has veered so far from reality to the point where even Les begins to suspect that it’s all bullshit. And he’s right: the “testing” seems to have been conducted by a succession of random people, each person having even less connection to the industry than the last. And hotshot “script doctor” Ken Casey is totally on board with that.

beckoningchasm
July 2, 2014 at 10:52 pm
…I find it interesting that Tom Batiuk gets worked up into high dudgeon when someone dares alter Lisa’s Story or question the value of comic books, but he simply can’t be bothered to respect the details in any other sphere (making films, as one example in a long list).

Yes, filmmaking ranks on par with or below the ability to make “a wicked tandoori chicken.”

Apparently.

Bazoomba Class

SoSFDavidO here, limping through another blog post!

Riddle me this, Funksters! What took place these past for days that couldn’t have been done with ONE damn panel like the first panel in today’s strip?

I thought I liked comics. Now I’m not so sure any more. It’s like seeing a kid you can’t stand in school wearing a shirt with your favorite band on it. And that word, bazoombas. Somone hit me in the face with a frying pan, it’d be less painful than imagining Donna saying that.

Multi-Failing

Today’s strip

Nope, it’s not TFH, you’re stuck with your faithful old pal Epicus for another fun-filled week! And based on the header pic, it’s going to be one hell of an arc, possibly featuring multiple views of Funky’s enormous freak ass as he hangs Halloween decorations! Trick or treat in-deed!

131027Man, TheAuthor really outdid himself with this drawing. A broken, exhausted Bull is just dripping with shame, fatigue and defeat while Linda doesn’t even try to hide her weary disgust and indifferent disdain while blurting out her usual meaningless platitudes. And not only does it come completely out of left field, but it’s crammed into a completely unrelated comic book cover tribute too, floating there like the proverbial turd in a punchbowl. I guess “sports” was supposed to be the “common theme” here but man, that’s a pretty f*cking tenuous connection.