Tag: jerkwads

Not Your Stepping Stone

It looks like we get one of this strip’s patented jogging gags in today’s strip. Looks, however, can be decieving.

No, I would not classify today’s gag as a jogging gag. It is haplessness gag, a staple of Act I reconfigured to fit the age of the strip’s main characters. Back in Act I it was Les and Dinkle’s pupils who were most often the butt of such jokes. Now in Act III, Funky has assumed Les’ former role, his pitiful sole can’t keep from stumbling over the same little rock over-and-over as he tries and fails to get some much-needed exercise. Les has kind of assumed Dinkle’s role, lording his perfection over the morons surrounding him. Act I, however, was sometimes self-aware about how irritating Dinkle’s behavior was. Can we say the same about Act III?

It also looks like Les, who gave Durwood “the bum’s rush” yesterday so he could get to work on his new/old Lisa project, is procrastinating again. This look is not deceiving.

Friday, September 30

Alas, today’s strip was not available for preview, so I’ve once again fired up the WABAC Machine and gone back 30 years. Here’s what was happening on September 30, 1986:

A band plot, really? It seems like every time I fish an old FW strip out of the archives it is in the middle of yet another story arc about Dinkle’s megalomania…

In this installment, the Westview High School Marching Band is performing at halftime during a Monday Night Football game in Cincinnati. In order to force ABC to televise the performance, Dinkle sabotages the broadcast. He cuts the ABC network feed so that highlights of the weekend games can’t be shown, kidnaps a coach so that there will be no one to interview, and has the president of the Band booster club hijack the Goodyear blimp to make sure that the aerial cameras stay trained on the band. The only fallout from these felonious acts? The booster club president is jailed and the band members have to sell extra candy to bail him out.

Still more realistically portrayed than this whole Starbuck Jones movie thing.

Deuce-bag

Les Moore’s tour of temerity continues in today’s strip. I think we’re seeing why it has been so long since Bull played tennis with Les.

The man is a monster. An individual devoid of any redeeming value. The reason alien invaders will cite for killing every last member of the human race. The image of him smirking, poised to serve, has soured me on the sport of tennis entirely. The revenge fantasies of 90s pop punk bands were kinder to their one-time high school bullies than Les. Donald Trump is appalled by his lack of tact and Bill Laimbeer cannot fathom his level of sportsmanship.

The craziest thing, to me, is that we have known the above to be true for years. We expected this kind of behavior, we know it is coming. It’s terrifying to think about.

Backhanded Compliment

Les finally pries open that smirk in today’s strip. Does he continue to live up to his well-earned reputation as the biggest schmuck on the comics page? Boy, does he ever!

This is, perhaps, the perfect test to see if the jerk store called and is running out of you:
Your friend has a panicked expression on his face and is admittedly struggling to breathe, beyond being typically “winded”, what do you do?

– A – Make a joke about his possibly health-threatening condition being an improvement for the environment.
– B – Do pretty much anything else.

Bonus Haiku:
“I don’t know what it
Is… but I just can’t seem to
Exhale completely”

Even when potentially in need of medical attention, Bull puts forth his second haiku in as many panels. This is notable because it is more than the last three years’ worth of writing from Les and Mopey Pete combined.

The Buck Stops Her

Link to today’s strip. 

At long last, Starbuck Jones himself appears in the strip, and proves to be just as much a dick as everyone else.  Of course, this behavior was entirely expected.

Also expected: contact with Westviewians turns Monday’s happy, sleepy-eyed merchant into a bitter scowler.  And readers into head-scratchers.

The thing is, you cannot have issue #115 of Starbuck Jones so rare that it is snatched up instantly when it makes a rare appearance, while simultaneously making it nothing special, a comic you throw into a box to be thumbed at.   Which is it?  “These comics have been going like hot cakes.  Notice I said going like hot cakes, not selling like hot cakes.  They were getting all gooey and rancid, so I threw them into this box because I hate hot cakes!”

I know it’s hard for ordinary, non-Pulitzer-nominated people to remember long, long ago, back to Monday’s strip–that’s almost, like, caveman days, right?  But you’ll recall Holly had a list.  On Tuesday she was pawing through a box.  What happened in between?  “Oh, you’ve got a list?  Let me see.  Starbuck Jones #115.  Since the Starbuck Jones comics have been selling like crazy, you might try looking through these bargain-bin comics.  I always keep my rare stuff in there, because I’m a maverick who thinks outside the (long) box.”

A lazy answer is that the Starbuck Jones series has a rabid cult of fans (enough so that some studio has an interest in making a movie), but the general comic-book public never warmed to it.   So the fans look for issues, but no one else does.  Might as well put it in the box, one of those idiots will buy it.  Again, it’s a lazy answer.  And I guess we’re all used to lazy answers here.

But the inconsistency is ridiculous.  For anyone trying to tell a story, this is not the way to do it.  This is the way a five-year-old tells stories.  “But werewolves aren’t affected by crosses!”  “Wait, did I say he was a werewolf?  I meant he was a vampire werewolf!”

Speaking of lazy answers, whatever happened to the Funky Winkerbean blurb at Comic Kingdom, telling us it was a strip that detailed the sensitive problems of contemporary young adults in a detailed manner?  I guess they just figured, “If you have to know what Funky Winkerbean is, well, abandon all hope…”