Tag: Brown Derby

Let Us Now Praise Famous Ninnies

Link to today’s strip.

Wow, everyone is sure full of praise for themselves!  Even waiter Barrithuh Hatchetface is smirking to beat the band.   Too bad their praise is so misplaced.

Director:  We’ll sit in chairs and chat, and I’ll only ask you questions you can preen about.  Thus, later, I’ll be surprised by very basic career information about you.

Videographer:   I’ll shoot this chair-bound set with a hand-held camera!

Subject:  I threw away over seventy years of my life so I could have a snit-fit.

BuddyBlog:  What kind of crap is this?  Damn, it’s a good thing my dad is rich…I think.

Emmy awards committee person A:  Oh my God, this is so terrible.  I think we finally have a winner for the “Most Pathetic, Pitifully Bad Production – Documentary” award someone added as a joke.

Emmy awards committee person B:  You mean the “Please Just Stop, or At Least Try Next Time” award?  Won’t that make the ceremony longer?

It was already Thursday

But his Lordship’s artificial limb had still not been found.

Therefor, having directed the servants to fill the baths,

He seized the tongs,

And set out at once for the edge of the lake

Where the Throbblefooted Spectre still loitered in a distraught manner.

He presented it with a length of string

And passed on to the statue of Corrupted Endeavor

To await the arrival of autumn.

(As you might have gathered, today’s strip was not available for preview.  So please enjoy chapter one of Edward Gorey’s “The Object Lesson,” written from memory.)

Let’s all sing along!

Link to today’s strip.

So, the last two strips were entirely superfluous–weirdly superfluous, as if Batiuk did have some purpose–“Say, no one’s mentioned Lisa lately, how can I fix that?  I know, I’ll just push Monday’s strip to Wednesday, that gives me two whole strips to shoehorn her in.   Now, where’s my thinking crap?”

Now, credit where it’s due, I guess–Batiuk just straight out has Cindy outline her entire purpose, when he could have stretched this out for days.  (“Oh, you knew someone named Lisa, too?”)  Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’ll still stretch the whole premise out for days, but at least we get the preliminary bit right out, center stage.   So we’re at least somewhat on track.

Of course, I would not put it past him to run the following script in tomorrow’s episode–

Panel One:  Cliff:  So let me get this straight–

Panel Two:  Cliff:  You want to make a documentary about Butter Brinkel, the biggest screen comedian of his day,

Panel Three:  Cliff:  And how he went to prison for the murder of actress Valerie Pond, despite protesting his innocence?

Panel Four:  Cindy:  Well, let me put it another way–

And the next day, Cindy restates it all again.  Repetition, it’s what all the cool kids are doing, and it’s a surefire way to make it to that fiftieth!  Less than three years to go!

Dine ‘n’ Slapdash

Link to today’s strip.

Many thanks to Comic Book Harriet for her recent hosting of the Ongoing Mess.  As usual, her posts were more interesting than the strip before us.

As for the strip before us, a cursory glance at today’s strip left me really puzzled.  I thought, How in the heck could Crazy Harry be close to Butter Brinkel, someone who had probably died before he was born?  Is this like his Tarzan fixation, where his obsession with the character led to said character coloring his world?  Just because he owns all the DVDs?  And how could he afford to fly out to Los Angeles?

A more careful reading then revealed that this was Cliff Anger, and not Crazy Harry.   Frankly, this strip is too worthless to inspire careful readings, so I was a bit put off.

Then there’s the word “kemosabe.”  I’m of the generation who associates the term with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, being Tonto’s term for the Ranger.  A quick search says that it means something like “faithful companion,” which is how I always took it.  The fact that it’s an odd word, not likely to used in common parlance, leads me to believe we’re going to get some kind of awful wordplay down the road.  Oh…joy.

(Unless Batiuk is going to pick up on the Urban Legend that “kemosabe” means “horse’s ass,” but I don’t see how he can get Les to Los Angeles in time….)

And Spending Her Time So Foolishly Too, No Doubt

Link To Today’s Demoralizing Developments

Working that goddamned f*cking decoder ring in there was like dropping a cherry-shaped wad of maggots onto a garbage sundae, it’s the kind of sickening overkill BanTom does better than any other sub-mediocre comic strip author in the business. It’s finally official, after five days of absolutely painful dilly-dallying these two horrible old snores are engaged (as are Cindy and Mason…(shudder)) and a more pathetic spectacle I cannot recall.

“Waiting a lifetime”, yeah, sixty years is indeed nearly a “lifetime” but not necessarily in the Funkyverse, where middle-aged men creak, groan and collapse regularly and couples in their nineties eat solid foods and get frisky in restaurants. Still though, it seems kind of incredible that they just completely lost touch for sixty years. No phone calls, no letters, no emails, no Classmates or HotBot or Google searches, just nothing at all until two comic book-obsessed weirdos took it upon themselves to do everything for them.

In fact when you look at them that way you realize that there’s nothing “happy” about these two imbeciles getting back together, as they’re both awful, stupid, lazy people who literally wasted their entire lives for no reason whatsoever aside from sheer sloth. They’re only together now because of outside meddling, completely happenstance impulsive meddling, by the way. What kind of human being wouldn’t be utterly destroyed by the realization that the great lost love of your life who you feebly pined over for sixty freaking years was likewise just sitting there like an idiot wondering and waiting to hear from you while you sat there doing literally nothing? It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard, yet in the Funkyverse it passes for lite, cute and breezy.

Hopefully this is the last of these two until Frankie crashes the big Starbuck Jones-themed double wedding ceremony and forces Marianne to attempt suicide again. You know that when he finally gets around to re-visiting this in August or whatever he’ll spend five full days on the characters talking about that f*cking decoder ring, just to refresh everyone’s decoder ring memory.