Tag: Cliff Anger

Boys Go to Jupiter, to Get More Stupider

$$$WESTVIEW ONCOLOGIST$$$
June 13, 2016 at 9:09 am
It should be pointed out that much ballyhooed Marianne Winters STILL has not shown up. I’m leaning to the side that we will never see her in these strips.

“All right George, now you remember all those loveable, stupid Peorgie and Mudhead movies you were responsible for?”
“My goodness, I haven’t, uh, seen any of those in years…”
“Well, Georgie, what are you going to do when the original “Bottles”, Mudhead’s crazy, hopped up girlfriend, drops right through that celebrity trap door?”
“My…God…Oh, no, that woman’s trying to kill me!”

Starbuck 2016? The movie written and storyboarded by a couple of Westview losers? Filmed on location in Cleveland, Ohio? We couldn’t care less. “Classic” Starbuck? You mean that rollicking, life-altering, black and white serial film from the thirties forties fifties early sixties? Now we’re talkin’! If locating the leading man involved following the weakest of clues to track him down and invade his ratty New York City apartment, can you imagine the lengths Team Starbuck went to in order to dig up  Cliff’s leading lady, Vera…Vera Nash?

Ham Handed

The ass-lathering continues today as Kablichnick steps up to the plate. The normally dour and cranky science teacher positively gushes about how Starbuck Jones inspired him: “Follow our hearts”? “Do what we love”? “Succeed“? Teacher, please. When it comes to unbridled contempt  for one’s students, Jim Kablichnick makes Les Moore look like Mr. Chips. The only thing he loves about his job is the opportunity it provides for him to spout his views on climate change, interspersed with painfully unfunny “jokes.”  Cliff expresses his surprise at meeting someone gullible enough to have bought his line of hokum. And we all know about the Ovaltine, but do the Junior (hah!) Spacemen of America employ some kind of secret handshake? It looks like the ol’ Commodore greets his fans by grasping their clenched fists.

In Soviet Russia, the Buck Saves You!

Pity the readers of Funky Winkerbean whose newspapers do not also run Crankshaft (okay, go ahead and pity all FW readers, regardless). Of course beady-eyed, nitpicking hate-readers understand that the rapt little kid is the same one whose ghost we saw peering creepily back at Jeff from the attic window of his childhood home a couple weeks ago. And we know that the old geezer awkwardly shaking Cliff Anger’s hand is not Funky with glasses but is that same kid, now grown old. So Jeff finally achieves closure for his mommy issues, albeit in a different comic strip and ten or twenty (and one or two weeks) later. And if his gushing pronouncement sounds familiar, peep this 2011 Batiuk interview:

Interviewer: Some of the memorable storylines of that [first time jump] era, at least for me, were Lisa’s cancer and the comic book store obscenity trial that was mirroring the Jesus Castillo case. I still have Crazy’s witness stand testimony of how, when he was in high school, “…superheroes did what they did best… they saved me.” tacked up on my wall.

While he understands fuck-all about how modern motion pictures are made, and has long since abandoned any notion of continuity and character development, Batiuk maintains his laser focus on spreading the gospel of old comic books and movie serials.

Baby I’m a Star(buck)

billytheskink
June 8, 2016 at 1:05 am
Mason shooting for Les Moore levels of schmuck-ery here…He provides Cliff with no schedule or itinerary and then makes him get into full costume on set, Cliff surely assuming he would be shooting his scenes for the film. Nope, Mason springs the news of an immediate photo shoot at some restaurant with zero relevance to anything on a wholly unsuspecting Cliff and then shoves him through a dingy Cleveland alleyway into a decades-old limousine.

…which would have been undignified enough if all this was just to surprise ol’ Cliff with an Ovaltine toast. But today Cliff is pressed into service autographing pictures or posters or some crap, and he approaches this task with the same disdain for his admirers that book-signing Les Moore has for his. No doubt book-signing Tom Batiuk at some point encountered one of his own fans who, overcome with excitement in the presence of greatness, forgot his own name.

Cliff: “Some things haven’t changed in fifty years, have they?” So now this 1950’s style Starbuck Jones serial film dates back to 1966. Help me out here, boomers: maybe Saturday matinees were still a thing in the midwest, but here in Jersey, we were getting our superhero kicks watching Batman. On TV.

OverTwee

Link to today’s strip

Playing with decoder rings

And Starbuck Jones related things,

Ovaltine and front porch swings…

Those were the days.

And you knew where you were then

The matinee began at ten

Mister we could use a man like Clifford Anger again.

Didn’t need no cell phone flicks

With comic books we got our kicks,

Although it sure repelled the chicks…

Those were the days!!!!!!

I really like how everyone in FW has the exact same childhood memories, regardless of when they were actually born. What, was Ovaltine running that SJ promotion for three or four decades? Honestly though, wading through week after week of BanTom’s plodding nonsensical SJ mythology and annoyingly uninteresting childhood nostalgia has me feeling like I’ve been beaten with a pillowcase full of padlocks. Batiuk has spent WAY more time on his old comic book memories than he spent reading the damn things in the first place, unless he hung out in that attic until he was thirty-five or so, that is.

And on that note I happily turn over the wheel to our fearless leader TFH, who’s courageously tacking the rest of this decoder ring arc and whatever else BanTom manages to dredge up from the musty old depths of his comic book-addled mind. Shudder.