Cayla – Page 86 – Son of Stuck Funky

You Can't Go Back If You Never Leave…

I don’t know about you all but today’s strip left me feeling a little wistful– whoops, nope, that was just gas. I have to say, with all of the retconning going on lately and TB’s freedom to claim *whatever* bulls*** he wants, I’m left a bit disappointed that from the looks of things, the most exciting thing that happened to Les during one of those mysterious time jumps is that he sulked around a college campus with his nose in a book of bad poetry he’d written. How much more interesting would it have been if Les had said: “Failing that class was rough, but it was nothing compared to when I thought I could enlist in the Marines…”

Um, a zillion times more interesting.

Just for the record, here’s the distance he’d have to travel for his “big escape” from Kent, Ohio, back to Medina, Ohio.

36 miles.

I know this was in the days before Google maps but didn’t he at least have a car!? Escaping talk aside, as an ex-Ohioan I can tell you that most kids dream of getting the hell out of the state, not moving back to the small town they grew up in.

This begs a question I actually have *no* idea about. Does Les have parents?

"Zzz–onk umm…sorry, did you say something?

It just occurred to me; has Summer been sitting on the other side of the porch since Sunday, listening to her dad blather on instead of cooking dinner? It looks like Cayla has nodded off; can we blame her? I nearly fell asleep just trying to think of a snark for today! The selection of man-meat in Westview must be dreadful if Cayla sees this Walking Snorefest as marryin’ material.

Heart-Les

Oh, if only he had gone! Because nothing impresses an ex-writing professor like a overly-wrought 700 page vanity press turkey about someone dying of cancer. Move over, Morrie; there’s a new dying person in town and her name is Lisa! She was a lawyer and she… liked leaves and sitting on a bench and…umm…

How is this a sensational book-soon-to-be-movie again?

Flunky Winkerbean

Les continues to unload like a dumptruck full of despair onto poor Cayla, who just stopped by the house to get her cell phone charger she’d accidentally left there. Get comfortable on that porch-swing, Cayla; Les is on a roll and you’re not going *anywhere*

It's summer, and the smell of bullshit is wafting in the air…

For a comic that treats its readers to dirigible-sized word balloons with entire short stories in them some days, this strip certainly is lacking some details. I know we needed room for that sideways smirk close up but Backache, please! Unless Les was smoking massive amounts of pot and turning in pages of writing journals full of nothing but AC/DC RULES!!! scrawled all over it I fail to see how this dreaming warrior-poet could fail creative writing and be told he’d never be a writer.

I pity the poor Prof that actually did teach Tom Batiuk creative writing back at Kent State– he’s now drawn the ire of a Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist-writer!