Tag: Buck Bedlow

El Toro Loco

And you thought Batiuk’s handling of PTSD was bad. This is appalling. Not only is the “punchline” offensive, Batiuk has to reverse-engineer the setup, which typically would be “If anyone told me blah blah blah, I’d tell him he was crazy!” You’d think that having to go to such lengths for a gag would make TB pause to think it over. Instead, he doubles down. Buck: “You’re crazy!” Bull: “And forgetful, too! Ha! Ha! Ha!“

Enfee-Bull-ment

Let us address Bull’s “CTE diagnosis:” From Wikipedia:

Currently, [Chronic traumatic encephalopathy] can only be definitively diagnosed by direct tissue examination after death…

…though according to my light research, this past fall it was reported that a diagnosis had been made in the case of a still-living, since deceased, unidentified “old baller.” Naturally, Batiuk couldn’t have known this when he wrote this strip a year ago, so we still get to call “Bull” -shit.

Gentleman Baller

“So, how’s Bull doing?” How rude to have Bull’s wife discuss his condition with Buck literally right behind his back. And how cruel of Batiuk to go through the trouble of rehabilitating bully Bull’s Act I persona, only to set him on a track to a sad, addled existence: first suggesting that Bull’s high school abuse of Les was staged (it wasn’t), and having him serve as trainer to Summer following her knee injury, and to Les as he prepared to climb Kilimanjaro. Thankfully his health is still good, so he’ll have plenty of time to sit in the basement and savor his “victory.”

Dewey Defeats Truman

Yours truly is fighting a nasty cold, and by the time I dragged myself to the computer to update the placeholder post for today’s strip, y’all had done my work for me.

spacemanspiff85: “…I know, I can have a frame taken out of that decades old video tape someone shot from the stands of a high school football game and have it printed on a giant fake newspaper for him!”

I’ll just add my 2¢ here to point out a retcon of a retcon: the picture on the fake sports page has Bull reaching to extend the ball over the goal line; it’s debatable, whether or not his knees were down, if this counts as a TD. In panel 1, his head, shoulders, and the football are over the line as he is tackled. Hard to see how this is not a score, even if the defenders subsequently dragged him back out of the endzone.

Oh no he DIDnt

Finally, after wasting a week of everyone’s time, we finally find out in today’s strip an inkling of what Buck’s Guilt over winning games no one remembers but these two losers from over 30 years ago. Linda, in the meantime has made herself useful by bringing him some sort of unidentifiable artifact that I assume is cyanide-laced coffee.