Tag: Jessica

The Stupid! It Burns!

So at long last, here we go into the “Butter” Brinkel arc. Those readers of the dead tree editions, the ones who run only the truncated, bottom-panels-only version of the Sunday strips, are missing out on a classic bit lifted from Buster Keaton’s 1928 silent comedy Steamboat Bill, Jr. Now that they’re finally ready to start work on the documentary, Jessica is literally throwing up her hands saying she doesn’t know where to begin. What does Cindy even need her videographer for, if they have a ton of archival footage?

His Motto’s Always Been “When It’s Right, It’s Right.”

Link To Today’s Thing

You know, this whole “young lovebirds just starting out” arc would have made more sense if a) Boy Lisa and Jessica were fifteen years younger and, you know, young lovebirds just starting out and b) Jessica had moved back to Ohio with Boy Lisa THEN went out to California to film the Buckner Brigatoni documentary. BatGak STILL never bothered to explain what Jessica was doing out there, but at this point it doesn’t really matter anyway. They’ll be perpetually “getting their burgeoning careers on track” for the rest of FW’s run, whether that’s three years or three hundred (don’t put it past him). The truly scary part is that the Bucket Briquette arc HASN’T EVEN STARTED YET which means he’ll be flogging the Boy Lisa & Jess thing for months, if not years. Sigh.

And on that note allow me to step aside and turn the microphone over to TFH, our SoSF king of kings!

Like A Ring-Tailed Lemur On A Swedish Meatball

Link To Today’s Thing

OK, now this mess is reading like a really shitty G-rated “Married With Children” knock-off type thing, the only thing missing is canned laughter and audience hooting. After a week of zany gags about children’s behinds, hot sex, Skyler’s aberrant attention-seeking behavior and potty jokes, it’s time for some sitcom-style gender role reversal. Boy Lisa expresses his feelings and his desire to “just talk” to his BFF Pete while the gals get together to exchange crude sexually suggestive similes involving primates and food. See, it’s funny because MEN are typically the over-sexed slobs and…ah, you know. At least Jessica finally got to bond with someone, although unfortunately for little baby Skyler it wasn’t him.

Check out that last word balloon and note the big empty space between “a” and “monkey”. My “inside sources” tell me it was edited. The original dialog was “…on me like Les Moore turning a tragedy into a masterpiece…”Lisa’s Trilogy”, available wherever books are sold!” but Comics Kingdom thought it was a little too blatant, so they went with his second choice, “monkey on a cupcake” instead. “Funky on a cupcake” would have been funnier.

Your Aim Will Help

Link To Today’s Strip

Not only does this one have absolutely nothing to do with anything that came before it in this arc, it also creates some really disgusting mental imagery I really could have done without. What kind of person would visit their spouse’s job and say something like this? I think he tries to aim for “quirky and adorable” with Jessica but honestly, she seems more troubled and deranged than anything else, at least to me.

Weren’t Ann and Skyler involved in this arc for a while there? Where’d they go? Is Jessica really suggesting that without a woman around her husband, Pete and that weirdo Chester would wantonly urinate all over the bathroom floor? Are we to believe that no one cleans the AK building? Who spends time worrying about the restrooms at their significant other’s job? If this kind of thing is indicative of what BatHack has left in his already bone-dry tank, he should consider writing the rest of FW’s run now, before it devolves even more, if that’s even possible.

His Wordplay Is His Bond

Link To Today’s Strip

Because glue “bonds”…wow, that’s a real reach even by Boy Lisa standards. This could be one of the worst FW gags I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen plenty, believe you me. “Bonding…together…hmmm, what sticks things together? Welds? Rivets? No, that’s no good…heyyyy, I think I’ve got it! GLUE! Yes! Now what could Boy Boy Lisa have glued together…let me take a look around the room…a COUCH! Eureka!”. I mean yikes, that’s a totally alien thought process to me. Then again, I’m not medically or contractually obliged to end every interaction with wry wordplay, so perhaps I’m just naive or something.