Tag: Lisa

Hypermortality.

Link to today’s strip

All Hail! Here is the beloved Holy Ghost of Dead St. Lisa! Once again haunting a charity function in her honor. But this time she has company. Their horrible dialogue in the first two panels is supernaturally banal. The only interesting thing about what they’re saying is that the lines seem all out of order. SEEM.

Until you consider what we’ve seen of Funkyverse’s afterlife. Masky McDeath comes and reaps you, sure; separating spirit from body. But the multiple ghost appearances, by multiple characters, in the strip suggest a soul remains on Earth. Drifting through the physical world, fully conscious of what is going on around it, and tied to objects and family it was close to in life: Dance hall railings, benches, comic covers, bio-sons. It only makes sense that the spirits beyond would introduce themselves to each other by explaining what in the physical world is their current tether.  What goes on in the real world has the power to please or distress them. Like ancient pagan ancestor worship, the memory offerings of their progeny please their departed souls.

Which is why it is HILARIOUS when Phil learns that the precious comic covers he kept framed on his dinky apartment wall all those years, and then willed to someone he thought would treasure them and his memory forever after his death, were instantly liquidated to enrich the memorial of a woman who didn’t give two shits about stupid disposable funny pages. Silly man, you thought you had a LEGACY? The Death Cult of St. Lisa devours all offerings!!!!

Quoth Ghost Lisa…”Forevermore”

Link To Today’s Strip

I want it to go on forever too, or at least until Les Moore finally collapses in dehydrated agony, his body cramping so severely that it eventually implodes into a small green globule that gets washed into the nearest storm drain during the next good autumn soaking. Because that would be great. Barring that, blah, this is downright creepy. I mean who wrote this one, his nine year old niece?

LOL Ghost Lisa. What’s her deal anyway? Is she somehow contractually bound to only appear at Les sanctioned events or is she free to move about as she pleases? She seriously wants to spend all eternity following Les and his new living wife as they jog around that crummy park? What a bore, although it does deviate from the typical Westviewian’s eternal dream, that being eating pizza in a structure made entirely of comic books, of course.

In fact it sounds more like hell to me, but then again I’ve always despised Les Moore and all he stands for thus I’m slightly biased. I liked Ghost Lisa more back when she was detecting structural problems in passenger jets and things like that, you know, really USING her ghostly powers. Now she’s another bland idiot whose only interesting characteristic is being dead. In fact if she wasn’t transparent (indicating ghostliness) she’d be indistinguishable from the rest of these dullards. Who’d even notice anyway?

Just Shut Up And Run

Link To Today’s Strip

God this is making me ill. The only “blister” Dick Facey is going to get is on his wildly flapping gums. Why is he narrating this, the annual cancer fun run been going on for YEARS already and everyone in that town knows every square inch of that crappy park. Unless it’s a different park, as everything is totally unclear and vague as usual.

“And this is Lump Lane, where Lisa found her cancerous tumor.”

“And this is Puke Path, where she got sick after her first cancer treatment.”

“And this is Sorrow Slope, where I cried after Lisa died.”

Enough already. It’s a small town charity cancer fun run, not a Civil War battlefield. At least Ghost Lisa is absent today, perhaps a parks department leaf blower wooshed her away or something. And a single-panel job on a Wednesday? I mean if the story is THAT thin already why even bother?

Adjectives Are Really Good!

Link To Today’s Strip

I thought he wasn’t going to be in the annual cancer fun run? Can’t anything EVER be clear with this comic strip? What a nauseating display, just repellent. Unimaginative and stupid too. “Great”…”amazing”…it’s a charity fun run people, not a pizza app or breakfast pizza or a comic book. “Adequate”…”sufficient”…”serves its purpose”…THOSE are more apt ways to describe it. The fun run, I mean, not the strip itself, which is a totally ghastly piece of crap.

Tuesday, September 26

Today’s strip

And there’s our least favorite guy, sitting there in his earnest earnestness in the Columbus Museum of Art with his latest cancer porn books. And Batiuk decides to do another damn Crankshaft crossover by bringing Lillian into the strip as Les’s lone customer. She’s got to be, what, 137 years old by now?

And then Batiuk flashes us back in what I presume is today’s “hook” that makes the strip seem somewhat less perfunctory. Les is sitting there with his hands similarly cupped, but instead of his earnest earnestness, he has his standard “oh, how jejune” face, no doubt over how debased he was to be appearing at such a crappy venue as Lillian’s attic-turned-used bookstore.

But what intrigues me the most about the throwback panel is how Burchett hasn’t bothered at all to change the appearance of flashback Lillian from today’s Lillian. She’s still the same woman, clutching the same book in all three panels, despite the fact that in panel two she’s supposed to be something like 25 years younger than she is in panels 1 and 3. After all, Lisa died 20 years ago in the Funkyverse and Les’s publication of the book about Jessica’s-father,-John-Darling,-who-was-murdered, was before even that. Hell, Lillian was old when she was first introduced in Crankshaft, which by going by the screwy timelines between the strips, was probably supposed to be around 43 years ago. Way to mail it in, Rick Burchett.

Panel 3, with its underhanded insult of Les, is pretty much par for the course.