Hark! Saint Les has revealed his halo in today’s strip. He doesn’t want to miss teaching school to deal with the affairs that arise from being a professional writer. How noble!
Here is a list of strips where Les unremorsefully left his students with a substitute teacher:
January 9, 2011
January 31, 2011
September 25, 2017
October 5, 2017
October 30, 2017
November 14, 1997
May 7, 2018
And these are just the ones I could find in 15 minutes!
But this time… how noble!
I’m billytheskink and this is 2020’s first Les Moore story arc. There, you’ve been warned.
I tagged today’s strip with “first world problems”… but even that is far far far too broad a description of any problem that could result from “my friend the movie star is giving us both a free trip to Los Angeles next week.” Cayla seems to have some self-awareness about this, but this is the Act III Funky Winkerbean where Les is a saint, even when he’s whining. We’ll just have to wait a few days to find out what his “righteous” reasoning is.
Also, we will probably add this storyline to the long list of times people in this strip have flown across the country to conduct a meeting that could have been held over the telephone or a videoconference. This seems to happen multiple times a year.
Did Thomas T. BatBore just suddenly forget that Summer is twenty-five years old? If he wanted to do childish Summer gags he shouldn’t have skipped over her childhood. But he did and it’s way too f*cking late now. Whether it’s intentional (ha) or not, Summer is suddenly the biggest loser in the strip. Totally rudderless, sleeping til noon, shoveling candy into her face like some sort of dimwitted feral cave-dweller…Bull Bushka donated tens of thousands of dollars worth of physical therapy for THIS? He really DID die in vain.
Consider this: at one time Summer and Cory were at the forefront of the (then) new Act III generation. Summer was the twee goody-two-shoes with a side of grit and a hell of a jump shot, while Cory was the slacker sleazebag with the bad attitude and the haircut to match. Summer was going places, Cory was going to prison. But now, only (sigh) seven short years later, Cory is a ramrod-straight soon-to-be-wed decorated Army veteran with strong ties to both the comic book and pizza industries, while Summer is an immature lazy slob with immense student loan debt and a dad who keeps writing the same book about her dead mom over and over. It just goes to show you how little high school really matters, even in a comic strip where it means absolutely everything.
“The girls” are like twenty-five now and should, you know, have jobs and stuff by this point. They obviously (still) have no social lives to speak of so why they need to sleep til noon is anyone’s guess. The whole thing is sort of creepy if you ask me, mostly due to BatJerk’s bizarre “suspended animation”-type character arcs where characters remain in a sort of stasis for years and even decades at a time. He can’t bang out a Sunday “college graduation” strip followed by a two week arc where Summer gets hired as Montoni’s official pizza athletic director (with sidekick) or something? WHS is still short a gym teacher, you know.
Anyhow, get a load of Beardo and his stupid sweatshirt, standing there all smug and mute. I just want to stuff him down a chimney with no care at all then light an enormous fire. What a dick.
Wow, it’s an EXTREMELY RARE and wildly abrupt mid-week arc shift, as suddenly the seldom-seen Women Of Les make an EXTREMELY RARE guest holiday appearance. Good ol’ Summer hasn’t changed a bit, still slobbing around in her trademark hoodie like it’s 2011 all over again. For those both of you keeping score at home, Summer and Keisha are in their EIGHTH year of college. I don’t know what they’re majoring in but it must be pretty grueling stuff.
Once again, Summer left for college eight years ago so Les needs to get the f*ck over it already. Don’t they have DVRs in Ohio? Les is one of the few FW characters who’s annoying even when the other characters are just talking about him. What a dick.
Son of Stuck Funky 
