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!“
Tag: Bull
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.
HomeDumbing Charade
I like the “I” on the front of Bull’s jacket, like the artist just couldn’t be bothered to draw a proper half a “W”. Nicely done there, new guy. What a totally pointless waste of time this piece of garbage was, it was pretty much the same thing as the first Buck arc except even less eventful. At least that one involved thinking and walking. I don’t get what he’s trying to “do” with Bull at all. He gave him a debilitating brain condition in order to force him into an early retirement (Bull is the same age as the rest of the Act I gang, remember) but all he’s done since then is sit around remembering things, which is kind of at odds with the whole point of it.
Earlier in Act III he did an arc about Funky having to put his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father in a nursing home, which led to all sorts of hilarious ramifications, but now Morty is a goofy peppy old coot, improbably enough. Lisa took a hundred years to finally agonizingly die from cancer, then she was hanging around in Les’ car like a month later. Now he’s doing an arc about Bull suffering from brain damage, yet his memory appears to be sharper than ever. There’s a definite pattern of sorts here, one I’d prefer not to analyze very deeply at the moment.
Son of Stuck Funky 
