gun violence – Page 2 – Son of Stuck Funky

Marshal Arts

Wow. That is one unwieldy sentence in panel one. Look, I get it, writing is really hard. I always find some real nasty clunkers anytime I go back and reread something I’ve written. But panel one’s sentence is atrocious.

“So you want to marshal our students to walk out of school on the anniversary of last year’s national walkout urging action to stop gun violence?”

The worst part of the sentence is the ‘urging action’ ending, because it adds a new verb into the sentence. It functions as a new ‘clause’ and my brain did a little hiccup trying to tie that verb to any of the previous nouns. Also ‘verb-noun verbing verbtion to verb noun noun-with-implied-action’ has no less than five ‘active’ words in it: (walk, urge, action, stop violence,)yet comes across limp and passive. I am years and years away from the single high school grammar class I took, so I can’t completely diagram this sentence and it’s awfulness. But it does not scan.

I get that the anemic attempt at a ‘joke’ is dependent on Les restating the plan in order to build up the expectation that he will not go along with it, but that doesn’t make the sentence any better. And the ‘joke’ is a trope so tired that Dawn of the Dead 2004 used it.

CJ: Not to s**t on anyone’s riff here, but lemme just see if I grasp this concept, OK? You’re suggesting that we take some f**king parking shuttles, and reinforce them with some aluminum siding, and then just head on over to the gun store and watch our good friend Andy play some cowboy movie jump-on-the-covered-wagon bulls**t. Then, we’re gonna drive across a ruined city, through a welcome committee of a few hundred thousand dead cannibals, all so that we can sail off into the sunset on this f**king a**hole’s boat? And head for some island that for all we know doesn’t even exist?

Kenneth: Yeah.

Tucker: Pretty much, yeah.

CJ: OK. …I’m in.

Gorilla Marketing

Hi all! SosfDavidO here with a pain in my neck from trying to read today’s strip sideways.

Hey, hey, it’s a monkey! A gorilla to be more accurate, drawn by a man who ape-parently only has a basic understanding of what a gorilla looks like.

It’s true, though, gorilla covers on comics sold a lot of issues back in the day. TomBat isn’t the first to notice the phenomenon of course, but I have to wonder, Tom, if you’re going to do a throw-back gorilla cover, why not the simian golden age equivalent of Freebird by revamping the infamous Jimmy Olson marries a gorilla” cover?

olsen_gorilla

This is what Gramps was reading, kids.

Weapon of Mass Deception

SoSfDavidO here! Puns are supposed to make you groan. Is there even a pun in today’s strip?

This is just awful writing. This, what you’re reading, and today’s Winkerbean. How many story arcs are still being juggled and we get a throw-away strip like this? Funky looks bored as hell but he’s probably long-since fused with the couch and couldn’t leave if he wanted to.

Holy Corpses Batman

Aw, come on, Tombat! You referenced the 1960s Batman in yesterday’s strip, at least bring it home in today’s strip with a cartoony blam.

blam

I joke around about this but it’s really all rather sobering. Darin is either dead or has suffered a life-altering wound. Pete could be charged with his murder as an accomplice if Darin *is* dead, and that’s assuming Captain Boomstick doesn’t plan on unloading on Pete next.

This means Jessica is now likely either a widower who will now have to raise her child on her own or her hubby is now in prison for piracy. Pete, well, does it matter? Their careers are over. It’s done. All for some pens he couldn’t wait 8 hours for.

Was it worth it, Darin?

Lost In Lingo

Link To Today’s Strip

“The kill fee is a negotiated payment on a magazine or newspaper article that is given to the freelancer if their assigned article is “killed” or cancelled. This is generally expressed as a percentage of the total payment, and is used to give the freelancer confidence in putting their efforts into an assignment which may not make it to the final magazine edition, in the case of, for example, space issues or other change of plans.”

That’s the first definition I found but I assume it could apply to any sort of similar project. Now how can you not love a comic strip that requires you to look stuff up in order to understand what in the hell is going on? At first I assumed that a “kill fee” was a bonus that The Syndicate awarded to Batiuk whenever he rubbed-out a “beloved” character for some easy media attention. But I was wrong, it’s actually PROFESSIONAL WRITER’S lingo, you know, deep “insider” stuff. Fascinating, isn’t it? Les is SO INTELLIGENT that he immediately wakes up and begins thinking about things regular folk have to look up to understand, as tens of said folk will no doubt do upon reading today’s bit of stupid claptrap. Although that estimate does seem a tad high.

Les has a dream about a hot old-timey Hollywood actress trying to seduce him and, of course, he dies. Even his fantasies end with someone dying, it’s uncanny and pretty sick too. Anyhow, I guess Dickface’s sudden and quite stupid realization means he’s found a loophole, with which he’ll be able to escape the drudgery of his five-star hotel suite and the hellish agony of being paid to bitch, sneer, sleep and spin ponderous yarns about opera singers and hardware. AND he’ll still get paid! What a lucky break! It’s high time that the hero of the strip tells these no-good Hollywood phonies where they can stick their patience and generosity, you know? Asking Les to re-write the script so Lisa doesn’t die at the end? That’s the biggest insult you can hurl at Lestom, short of telling him that Lisa was a crappy character who no one liked.

So where do we go from here? Your guess is as good as mine. Is Les going to “throw” the script and “write” something un-useable or will he simply simper back home to Westview and pontificate to the losers about how awful “Hollywood” was for him? It figures that he’d hang around for weeks being a whiny putz, then befriend the cast and crew, THEN dick them all over by quitting out of nowhere thanks to a moronic dream he had. In “real life” someone would have blown his head off years ago. And no jury in the land would convict anyone for that as it’d obviously be totally justifiable, regardless of the circumstances. What. A. Dick.