Tag: Les

The Thousand Panel Stare

Kids don’t read newspapers or newspaper comics these days… Boo hoo, so sad, this generation is killing the papers and the cartoonists, blah blah blah yackity smackity… Sorry, don’t care. I’ve heard it all before, and in better comic strips to boot.

Today’s strip is bland, rote filler in a dumb, overplayed story arc, but… that second panel. Chuck Ayers artwork since taking over duties in Funky a couple years ago has taken a good step back from the solid work he did for many years in Crankshaft I would argue, but the second panel in today’s strip is a genuinely excellent piece of cartooning. The beady eyes, the nonplussed expressions, the unrealistic density of students packed into every millimeter of the panel… you can practically hear the crickets chirping in background of this non-reaction. It is an extremely rare and truly good thing to see in Funky Winkerbean. What a pity it isn’t in the service of a better joke.

TB does it, why not you, Batton?

Kidz these daze and their cellular doohickeys! Always on ’em. Amirite? Amirite? Eh? Today’s strip knows what I’m talking’ about! Leave ’em alone in a classroom with no direction and they just start tap-tap-tapping away on their smartyphones. It’s nothing like it wuz back in my day when we’d get in fistfights and beat lunch money out of the weird kids.

By the way, Les’ opinion on the value of comics sure has changed over the years…

FW5-27-72

Welcome To The Jumble

If today’s strip is any indication, TB really wants to get on Jeff Knurek’s Christmas card list. Can’t blame him for that, Knurek’s work on Jumble is excellent and his Christmas cards are surely top-notch.

Cayla is now the latest in a long line of women in the Batiukverse who aren’t initially familiar with the comic interests of their significant others, or comics at all. That will change, though, just as it did with Lisa, Holly, Jess, Mindy, Cindy, even Donna… well, everybody but Lefty, really. It’s weird that DSH never indoctrinated Lefty being that he has owned a comic book store since long before they even met. That’s probably why she is always hanging around with Dinkle, in a desperate bid to avoid comics. Anyways, Cayla doesn’t read Three O’Clock High and she’ll be lucky to not be burned at the stake.

Autographic content

The space-time continuum is threatened with destruction by today’s strip, in which one of TB’s author avatars heaps unsolicited praise on another of TB’s author avatars. Not that comic strips cannot involve journalism, but wouldn’t a comic strip creator be a more apt guest speaker in an art class? Oh that’s right, Westview High cut art class in 2013 after failing to pass a school levy in 2012 despite the best efforts of the hairless man we all know and love as Arthur “Art” Teacher. Maybe Rache can bring it back when she gets her teaching certificate…

I guess I’ll take a week of TB patting himself on the back for being born over a week of Buck and Linda, but only because no one offered me a week of stepping on Legos with my bare feet.

Palme d’Bore

Link To Today’s Strip

It took me a minute to decipher Mason’s idiotic babbling. He means palm trees. Get it? It’s so embarrassing when BatNap tries too hard to be clever. It doesn’t really happen that often and it’s easy to see why.

Didn’t they travel to NYC together? Why is Mason leaving without Les? The entirety of Les’ involvement with the cancer movie consisted of giving Mason a general idea of where he scattered Lisa’s ashes then showing him a bench in a city they visited once? That sort of seems, uh, not right. The contents of that cancer book of his become more and more enigmatic all the time, sometimes it’s the story of a dying woman’s courage in the face of death and sometimes it’s the Encyclopedia Lisatannica, complete with extensive footnotes.

Note Les’ incredibly obnoxious pose in panel one. Mason is actually thanking Dick Facey for the privilege of allowing him to stonewall him with his overly sensitive and quite frankly pissy attitude, like Les just granted this major Hollywood celebrity a priceless audience with a true artist. Well, I least that’s what I get out of that image, but Les is capable of enraging me even when he’s very poorly rendered from a distance. History has shown again and again that BatYap is nothing if not lazy, so let’s hope this marks the end of the cancer movie trip down bad memories lane, if for no other reason than a lack of effort.