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.
