TB pivots from an industry about which he clearly knows little, to one that he professes to understand well…and still gets it wrong. Anyone who’s worked in or around the print industry knows that if a printer fucks up the job , he eats it; he re-runs the whole job at his own expense, not charging the client for a “correction run.” Meanwhile TB amuses himself, if no one else, by name-dropping himself, and (mis-)quoting his Crankshaft strip from a month ago.
Tag: Dead Skunk Head
Do They? Do They Really?
Today’s strip portrays the exchange of “I dos” at Montoni’s, because of course they ended up at Montoni’s, the only reliable social venue in the wretched town of Westview.
I promised you a non-sequitur, and Funky delivers it. His bad Winkerbean vibes having dissipated, and with a smirk that shifts his mouth half way to his left temple, Funky opines: “They don’t call Montoni’s ‘the wedding chapel of love’ for nothing!”
Never mind that he just subverted Wally’s wedding to do a promo for his business. They don’t call Montoni’s “the wedding chapel of love” at all. Also, how does that not dislocate his jaw?
Meanwhile, the weeping chef in the background is playing the old “I’m crushing your head” game.

Meanwhile, some random boy has been hanging around with Funky during the entire sequence.

Who is this kid? It hardly matters, as I expect Batominc will send him to the Corn Field of Discarded Characters, just like all these others that Epicus Doomus so kindly enumerated for us recently:
Frankie, Lennie, the gay prom dudes, Art Teacher, Jarod Posey, Dr. Patella, Radio Ron, Closeted Gay Prom Rock, Mallory the Perfect Human Genome, Rachel’s kid, Kili the cat and that annoying Dan guy, Cell Phone Girl, that tall blonde girl that was always on whatever team Summer was playing against, Travel Agency Woman, Plantman…
For Make Glorious Post of 10 June 2014
Because today’s strip wasn’t available at editing time, I’ll go all meta and describe my SOSF workflow. If you don’t care about such geekery, feel free to skip to the comments and snark away! Cheers!
I don’t like editing posts directly in a web browser, because I don’t like rich web editors or plain text fields for writing, and I really don’t like losing a bunch of work due to a silly web error or browser crash. Also, I like working in Markdown.
I made a little template (just a simple markdown file with all the relevant bits of a SOSF post), so when I start a stint as guest-snarker, I copy that into a folder and modify it for the first strip in my series. On each subsequent day, I duplicate the previous day’s file to make a starting point for the new post.
I put the title and tags up in the markdown metadata headers so that I don’t forget them. Because they’re in the metadata, when I export to HTML, they don’t mess up the actual body of the post. Looks like this:
Title: No One Mourns the Comics
Tags: Holly, Chester the Chiseler, Comics
Because
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.nj.com/comics-kingdom/?…
I then separately paste the title, tags, and body into the corresponding fields in WordPress.
I’m on a Mac, and use Byword to edit my markdown and Marked to preview and export it to HTML. Because Byword is also on iOS, I often start a post in Byword on an iPad.

Mr Sponge Worthy
Back to Starbuck’s Jones’ arc! For those of you just joining by popping in on today’s strip, Holly is the mother of a US Army Solider that’s currently deployed in the Gulf and retconned into collecting Starbucks Jones comic books. Despite coming out in the 1970s, apparently these comics are so rate getting the last 6 key issues is about impossible, or would be, for most collectors. More than a few times collectors that had the issues Holly needed just rolled over and gave it to her for free, or for “a buck” because her son is in the military.
It looks like the favor well has run dry. The last issue she got by winning it on eBay (A 6 day arc, seriously) and now she’s about to trade a piece of original comic art for the chance to buy the uber-rare Starbucks Jones issue.
Original comic art sold at Heritage is serious business, way out of Holly’s league. Would Cory even get $9,000 worth of enjoyment out of it? I’m sure the thing is slabbed in a tomb, never mean to be read. A single crease on the cover from a carelessly turned page could cut the comic’s grade (and value in half).
Me, I just look forward to seeing yet another maniacal comic collector depicted in Westview.
Comical Tragedy
Back to Starbuck’s Jones’ arc in today’s strip! The good news is, there is only two more comics to go, and both appear to be owned by Chester Hagglemore, who apparently needs a moniker despite the fact his last name is a pun.
Holly looks a bit green around the gills at the news, and considering she just took out a second mortgage on the house to pay for the last issue of Starbucks Jones I can’t blame her. She’s probably already wondering what Funky’s spleens would go for, or if her womanly charms could persuade Chester out of these last two issues.