Tag: Cliff Anger

Decode Blue

Link to today’s strip

And I immediately recognized this piece of crap from all those shitty Funky Winkerbean comics I used to read as a kid. So, that Anger asshole is doing an appearance at some stupid nostalgia-themed restaurant now, is he? Why that sounds just swell! Everyone can greet him and talk about how great his old movies were and how great the old theaters were and how great old Hollywood was and how great those old Starbuck Jones comic books were and what they were doing for the last sixty years while Cliff sat broken and alone in a squalid apartment with faulty lampshades.

Of course the most objectionable thing about this totally worthless arc was how he insisted on dragging this Jeff character into the fray in a painfully transparent attempt to lure FW readers into checking out his intensely dreary “mommy didn’t love me” arc he’s been doing over there. FW is loaded to the rafters with boring aging morons who play with comic books all day, yet he had to ram Jeff down our throats just to cross-promote that remorselessly shitty other comic strip he’s trying to pimp again. What, someone like DSH John or Crazy Harry can’t spend a week looking through the attic and jabbering about comic books?

 

The Fault in Cindy’s Stars

So where in the hell is Cindy? She’s never far away from Mason… Isn’t about time for Mason’s co-star to show up and we get a month of Cindy’s jealousy, self-loathing and depression about her looks despite being a 54-year-old in a 28-year-old’s body?

— hitorque

Good ol’ T-Bats. Such a clichéd and formulaic writer that SoSF readers can see what’s coming a mile away…

Link to today’s strip

She’s on the far side of fifty-five with the looks of a twenty-something. She had a successful career as a television news anchor, and is now becoming a familiar online personality through her work with start-up webcaster BuddyBlog. She’s engaged to an up-and-coming action film star. What more could Cindy want?

Peace of mind, that’s what. Somehow, she knows that every time a shred of happiness is glimpsed or grasped at in the Funkyverse she calls home, The Creator will snatch it cruelly away. The burden of this threat gnaws at her constantly but she is helpless against it, because The Creator has deemed that no satisfaction in life may be had without cost – even if that cost is as simple as constant anxiety.

That Old Familiar Ring

Since Batiuk went dialogue free in today’s strip (the better to further pad out this dreary story arc), I’ll be only slightly less lazy than he and just contribute a few lines of my own.

“Consarn it, here’s my joy buzzer! Wanted to use it on that actor feller!”

“Hope to God the cyanide table hidden inside will still do the job after all these years…”

“My-y-y-y-y-y-y…precious-s-s-s-s-s-s!”

“A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!”

Brick. Mason.

beckoningchasm
April 10, 2016 at 10:49 pm
Wow, Tom Batiuk has absolutely no idea how the real world works. This is far more amazing and unbelievable than any Starbuck Jones adventure.

It’s times like these, gentle reader, when Batiuk’s “quarter inch from reality” stretches into light years, where it’s fun to imagine that the author is actually setting up a nuanced and compelling plot, instead of the usual flimsily constructed, implausible farce. Yesterday Mason was talking the producers into putting Cliff Anger in the picture and paying his (New York City!) rent for a year. Today Mason’s continues to overstep his authority, assigning Pete to write Anger into the script “as soon as we get back to Hollywood.”

What if Mason doesn’t have enough clout to recast and rewrite Starbuck Jones on the fly (c’mon, a guy whose signature role to date was in something called Dino Deer)? Perhaps Jarr’s come as unmoored from reality as the comic strip in which he’s a character, and he just thinks he’s pulling all these strings. I don’t have any better understanding of bipolar disorder than does Tom Batiuk, who labeled Mason as such merely to set up a cheap gag, but maybe he’s having one of what you call your manic episodes. In his head, anyway.