Batiukmobile® – Page 2 – Son of Stuck Funky

Bowling for Soup

Link to multiple weird continuity errors.

Aaaaaand just like that, the teeter tooter pivots and suddenly I’m annoyed again. All the Holly relatability of the last three days evaporates in a puff of smoke because REALLY?

This drivel should be coming out of Les’ mouth. Not only is he a self-important sad-sack always eagerly searching for a way to inject pathos into the most mundane situations, but he also was actually bullied and teased in high school. And the fact that he took a job at the same school district so that he could constantly re-traumatize himself is perfectly in character for Les Moore. He’s just the kind of insufferable pseudo-intellectual that thinks pain is somehow more real than joy, and so seeks it out.

But Holly? Holly, you were a popular and well liked HOMECOMING QUEEN who seemed to take being regularly set on fire with carefree joy. You were so self-confident (and dumb) you didn’t even realize when you were being teased.

*She is just gleeful at the prospect of self-immolation.*

Maybe I’m missing a subtle turn in her characterization somewhere between where Vintage FW has gotten to on CK and the end of Act I. But while I’ll buy that a plump middle-aged Holly might be a little daunted tonight, wondering who she hasn’t seen in 40 years might have jetted to Westview to judge her weight gain and dough slinging husband, I don’t buy for A SECOND that she was nervous every day she showed up at High School in full majorette attire.

And, news alert Holly. THAT ISN’T THE SAME BUILDING.

Crazy Harry seemed to remember and reference it earlier this year, when he made sure to take a walk down to ‘the old high school’ during his off-gassing time travel adventure.

I think it’s symbolic of this strip as a whole that Batiuk tried to move on by tearing down the old building 15 years ago, and obviously regrets it now. He wishes he still had the thematic through line. My parents attended the same High School building I did. I remember at a brother’s wrestling meet my mom walking me down to her old locker and her combination still worked. Batiuk would fume in jealousy that such an opportunity is gone. He tried to ‘kill the past’ but somehow Palpatine returned.

He started Act III with big dreams of merging all three acts thematically together. You’ve got the old Act I crew being middle-aged adults, you’ve got the grown up Act II kids in Darin, Pete, and Jessica being the new young adults just starting out, and you’ve got the Muppet Babies kids to keep the High School hijinks flowing.

But now its a gerontocracy of the impossibly old taking over everything. Even poor Pete, Darin, and Mindy have been supplanted by octogenarians.

You’ve all said it below. This shouldn’t be the 50th class reunion. Their 30th class reunion was in 2008. This pretty much confirmed that the time skip from Act II to Act III moved their graduation date from 1988 back to 1978. Summer Moore was established as turning 16 a few months prior. So is she 36 now? Seriously?

I would be perfectly fine with Batiuk having his strip officially enter Comic Book Time. It didn’t bother me at all that it took Bernie Silver six years to graduate. In a medium where a single five minute conversation can take two weeks if a comic year equals a calendar year then you’re leaving a lot of these characters’ lives out. It’s a comic strip, we understand that Christmas comes in December, school starts in September, and it takes eight years for a toddler to turn four. It’s FINE.

But the sudden, inexplicable, fast-forwarding of random characters we’ve gotten recently is just baffling. Why is Crankshaft’s great-grandson suddenly eight, when he was born less than three years ago, but Emily and Amelia haven’t aged? Why is Funky suddenly over 65 and Skyler, born in 2013, is still sitting on Santa’s lap and baby talking?

The time pool reunion arc of 2015 DIDN’T have a date or year attached. And that was a much smarter take in my humble but correct opinion. Because it wasn’t clear an entire seven years had passed since the last one. (And a 37 year reunion seems really weird)

But Batiuk couldn’t resist slapping a big fat 50 on this one. Despite only MONTHS before presenting them as all in high school in 1980!

And you know what. I’m here for it. I’m here for all of it. I’m cracking open a cold one, kicking back, and watching this train wreck. Because I have such a great bunch of people to do it with. Because it genuinely brings me joy.

Don’t let Batty get you down guys. Just enjoy the screeching, burning, twisted mess. Are you ready for a 50th reunion of “Senior Discoveries” ? Are you ready for “exploring the honesty beneath such a gathering’s initial artifice”?

Are you ready?

Skipping Out

Link to today’s strip.

This week has been a real see-saw for me. Because while Funky himself has been insufferable, and Batiuk deciding to fast track his Act I cast to their late 60’s is just infuriating, Holly has been so darn relatable.

I can’t help it, guys. She just reminds me so much of my mom. There’s not been a single thing she’s said or suggested these past three days that would be out of character for Momma Harriet. From wishing she’d lost weight for a major event, to scoffing at too much nostalgia from high school, to wanting to avoid hours and hours of vaguely remembered former acquaintances pasting on smiles while silently gauging which of them had the most loveless marriage, messiest divorce, or the most messed up grandkids.

I don’t remember the context enough for specifics, but I KNOW my mom has suggested escaping to me while driving to some dreaded social event.

“What if we just kept on going?” She smiles, desperately, trying to psych herself up for a family reunion or wedding of a third cousin’s cousin. “Drive all the way down to your sister’s, and just…hid out?”

Is the choice of the word ‘disillusioned’ weird? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve seen the way my mom’s face falls when talking about a friend’s divorce, or the profligacy of a young adult she’d nurtured as a child. She’d rather not know that the marriage she’d been a bridesmaid for fell apart after infidelity, or the sweet little girl she taught in Sunday School had to get a restraining order on her meth-ed out baby daddy.

If I’m being nicer to Holly and this strip than it deserves, just know that it’s because all it would take is a brunette wash and a pair of glasses, and Holly morphs into my mom. And I love my mom. And if you knew her, you would love her too. And if you didn’t it would be a clear sign that you are a garbage human forever beyond hope of redemption.

I want to thank BJ6K and anneki for bringing the Washington Post article to our attention yesterday. It was the puffiest of puff pieces. It reminded me of those puff balls in the timber around here. You whack it and release a giant yellow cloud of nonsense.

Everyone had their favorite quotes, but mine had to be when he compared the first time skip to a ‘Road to Damascus’ moment. Because yeah, I’d believe that Batiuk has been struck blind on his creative journey. And now he’s sitting there at home, his eyes covered in scales, with no Ananias of an editor to come and peel his blindness away.

FYI: Cows got out again on Monday morning. They thought our neighbors’ corn looked tastier than the dry grass left in our drought stricken pasture. Fixed the fence AGAIN, gave them some big round bales of hay, and they STILL were all standing by the fence this morning, staring longingly at the green stalks on the other side of the woven wire.

Maybe if we could get some REAL RAIN, and not mother nature spitting in contempt on the dusty cracked ground…

Y’all have been amazing in the comments lately! Love all of you!

Q: Is He Best Man? A: He’s Boy Lisa

Link To The Strip

Earlier in the week, I touched on how utterly bizarre and insane it is that Boy Lisa, of all people, is Cory’s best man. Nothing could possibly explain this, as there’s just no way it could be possible, but there he is, waving goodbye to his dear ol’ chum Cory and that girl he married. Interesting how Boy Lisa, Licensed Cartoonist, made the poster all about Cory and not the bride, but given what we know about Boy Lisa’s marriage, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Way back before he became Boy Lisa, Darin was a fairly major Act II character, more or less the WHS “new generation” male lead. Along with his girlfriend Jessica and his best pal Pete, Darin was involved in all sorts of zany WHS hi jinx and shenanigans. I can’t remember any of them now, but trust me, something happened. Then we discovered he was adopted as an infant and everyone immediately knew he’d end up being Lisa’s surrendered love baby from THAT whole thing. And sure enough, five or ten years later, Darin met Lisa, his birth mother, not long before she died. And when they met, Lisa grabbed Darin by the forehead and transferred some of her superpowers to her long-lost bio-son, including bland geniality, and, well, bland geniality. And henceforth he was known as Boy Lisa.

Right after that, Boy Lisa and Jessica got married, went to college, and became Big City MBAs. Or at least he did, as Jessica’s backstory is less important, what with her being a girl and all. So that went on for five or seven or fourteen years or thereabouts, at which point This Economy f*cked Boy Lisa over, pretty hard in fact. So he packed up his robin’s egg blue car and returned to Olde Westview Towne, where he showed up unannounced at the door of his long-lost bio-step dad and bio-half-sister (avoiding his adoptive parents for reasons unclear), asking for a place to stay.

Les agreed, then got Boy Lisa a job at (surprise) Montoni’s, where he became some sort of pizza app developer and breakfast pizza pioneer. Then he discovered he had an adoptive half-sister, did the illustrations for Les’ cancer graphic novel and knocked-up his wife, although I’m not sure in what order that all was. Then Pete offered him a cushy storyboarder gig on the “Starbuck Jones” movie and he took off for Hollywood, minus Jessica, who stayed home and attended to her various womanly duties. Then he came back and ended up riding Pete’s coattails again, this time snagging a job at Atomik Komix, where he toils to this very day.

And this brief recap of his entire character arc makes it seem WAY more eventful and interesting than it actually was. In my opinion, his number one strip highlight was when he sneezed all over Summer right before the Big Game, as the illness somehow activated her natural grit and brought home the basketball title to WHS for the very first time. Or it might have been when he threatened Frankie and Lenny that time, although that was more Jessica. Anyway, it’s a really, really bland legacy when you look at it objectively, or even if you don’t. If Boy Lisa was Halloween candy, he’d be those terrible Necco wafers no one likes.

A Smother’s Love

Link

So maybe you thought that whole Keisha/Maddie/Summer thing might be going somewhere…well, guess again, snarker. Rule Number One: if it seems too involved, complicated and/or interesting for FW, it definitely is.

Obviously he was going for “cute” here, but, as usual, he landed squarely on “icky”, again. We’ve seen nothing in the past that would indicate that Holly is a psychotically overbearing mother, but she is today, because it’s funny, at least to one person. Now, in fairness, someone who doesn’t read the strip every day might (I said “might”) softly chuckle at this hackneyed premise, but when a regular character acts completely insane like this without any warning, it’s mostly just confusing.

And lest we forget, Cory is around twenty-eight years old, he was engaged for like seven years, AND he was a bomb disposal technician in Iraqistan, so I’d be willing to bet he’ll have no problem with navigating his wedding night without his mom’s help. And there’s the icky part, right there. This is yet another one he should have chucked into the “no” pile.

What Weekend Is It?

As always, it’s impossible to follow up the amazing posts of CBH, but here I go.

I’m guessing Rocky is carrying on Crankshaft’s illiteracy? Because I don’t know why Cory is reading that sign out loud if she can read it for herself. It’s also weird because it’s easily legible for anyone reading the strip, so there’s nothing at all added by him reading it. Of course the joke is “Cory’s mom is excited for him to get married” which I don’t think is a joke or really worth spending a day of a strip on, but that’s Batiuk for you.