Tag: Komix Korner

Heavy Lidded

*yawn*

Sorry about that. Today’s strip is, in fact, a thing. It’s a thing where stuff happens, technically, I think.

Cory continues to sell us on the mystery of why oh why he would sell his mother’s beloved collection of Starbuck Jones comics behind Holly’s back. This is day four of the sales job but I’ll let the redundancy slide because having to half-explain it to DSH serves a minor narrative purpose even if we’re all going “again?!”

Here’s my only real problem with today’s strip: why bring Bob Hope back from the dead if you are just going to give him a silent silhouette cameo in panel 3? I mean, not even he could make this material entertaining, but I’d at least appreciate it if TB let him try.

Like a restless wind inside a comic box

Big guest star get in today’s strip. Playing the role of Cory is Deimos, the potato-shaped second moon of Mars. TB clearly has friends high up in the IAU if he’s getting celestial bodies onto the set.

So… what else is happening?
– In a ringing endorsement of the quality of Starbuck Jones, Cory has never been more sure of anything he has ever done ever, than he is about his desire to sell these comic books.
– We also learn that this is NOT a complete collection, as I and others might have inferred, but that the first few issues are reprints from an archive book.
– Cory also drops the fact that Funky once owned Starbuck Jones #1 on the guy who knows that better than anyone. In fact, we were first introduced to Batom Comics and Starbuck Jones because DSH got behind on his rent during a bad month for Montoni’s back in 2010. Funky had to crack open the Montoni’s safe and sell his non-bagged, non-slabbed copy of issue #1 to save his shop AND DSH’s deadbeat hind parts in the process. It was OK, though, because Funky was never in to Starbuck Jones, only buing the comic because an old guy, who was actually his present self but badly injured in a car accident and hallucinating that he was his present self but in the Act I past, told him to do so.

Anyways, did DSH ever pay Funky back for covering for him? Or does he think helping Holly assemble the very collection Cory is now selling squares them?

In any event, today we have what I believe is the first conversation between two characters who Funky has been far too generous with (remember who covered for Cory’s theft at the Lisa walk). May as well have Les walk in for good measure…

Sorry, I didn’t really mean that.

Hallmark Monitor

Today we’re finally treated to the Sunday strip whose pencilled preview Batiuk teased us with a year in advance. Make that a 53 weeks in advance: this strip would have served as the coda to the “Owen Learns He’s Not Good at Bullying” arc from the week before last, but Batiuk decided we needed to have a week of Les moping about life. I hope that in addition to Senior Lit with Mr. Moore, Owen is taking remedial math: he’s waited three years, not four, to become a senior (he’s entering his fourth year).

Incom-Pete-nce

Fired? Pete’s been fired?

Welcome to CloudFunkyCuckooLand, folks. Batiuk has at long last thrown off the bowlines and sailed away at last from the harbor of continuity and logic.

Sure, the editors tasked him with taking Mister Sponge in a “darker and grittier” direction, but the clone idea was Pete’s own, and he enthusiastically sold it to his bosses. When, as they anticipated, controversy ensues, his editors reassure Pete that his story has “lit up the internet” and put sales of their comic book “over the moon.” They outline a plan (presumably involving Pete) to further boost revenue by spinning the one title into three. When Pete predictably complains about the increased workload (his current output is already enough to trigger Pete’s psychoses), his nerdbosses calmly throw him overboard in favor of the Netbusters guy.

Suddenly jobless and 400 miles from home, Pete is concerned not for himself but for the “poor readers,” represented by Owen in a panel 3 which presumably takes place months hence: the same Owen who was devastated to learn that his absorbent and yellow and porous hero had been “retcloned” has dutifully shelled out for all three of the resulting comics and pronounces them “cool.”

The Clone Bores

Link To Today’s Strip

Well, there isn’t much to say about this one as it’s just a continuation of yesterday’s Owen reaction scene featuring the “geek rage” that Tom Ban finds so very amusing. At least someone does, I guess. I mean sure, “teenager wildly overreacts to relatively trivial development” has been a standard FW trope since day one so bagging on today’s strip for that is like complaining about the way Ban Tom draws noses, it’s more or less a constant.

The only real question is where is he going (if anywhere) with this? My guess is he’ll do five days of this then have Owen say he’ll definitely keep buying Mister Sponge anyway as an astonished John looks on like he’s never seen an irrational comic book dork before. It’s the simplest and thus most likely outcome. I guess he could segue into Owen going online and acting like one of the whackadoos and twit tots he was mocking a few weeks ago, but that seems like an awful lot of activity and plot momentum for FW. He could also cut back to Pete and his reaction to the reaction to his comic book, but again, that’s a lot of activity for a weekly FW arc.

What I don’t get is what he’s trying to say about “comic book fans” with this stuff. Are we supposed to laugh along with them for being the lovable little comic book-obsessed scamps they are? Are we supposed to be laughing AT them for being such moronic gullible losers? It’s all very unclear sometimes.