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.
Tag: bricks
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?
Daycarelessness
I so love how Jessica’s gone from zero to sixty on her “documentary” project…Shrimp Sauce can only stand there looking pathetic, cradling their infant son. “So are we going to get daycare…?” As if they could even afford daycare. What’s even more professional than enlisting an unpaid college intern as your production assistant? Why, schlepping along your months-old baby as your “sound man.” WAAAAAA!!
So What If It Never Happens?
So seemingly out of the blue, documentarianne Jessica informs her husband that she’s getting back to work on her long-delayed project about her dad you-know-who…as she packs up her camera and heads out the door. Darin asks her a perfectly legitimate, if clumsily phrased, question: do you really want to do this? And it turns out that she does not, since it requires her to revisit a difficult time in her life (which, having been a baby at the time, she couldn’t possibly remember).
Son of Stuck Funky 