And I Lost Interest, Again

Link To It

Ha! That f*cking internet sure does suck balls, amirite? Boy, society sure has gone to hell in a handbasket, I’ll tell you what. Even a humongous Hollywood mega-star can’t get reliable internet service, shows you just how useless and limited it really is. I can’t wait til this fad dies down and we go back to landlines and good ol’ AM radio again.

“Oh for pity’s sake”…and it’s official. Marianne is the least cool twenty-something Hollywood actress of all-time. No one could possibly be this twee in real life, you wouldn’t even be able to breathe. The hair, the hapless naivete, the wholesome homespun exclamations…it just gets worse and worse with every panel. Just look at her today, all dreary and disheveled, she’s pitiful to the point where it’s tough to not feel sorry for her. At first glance I really did think it said “lost interest again” and really, who could blame him? No wonder she’s not in a relationship and has no friends, she’s a total drip.

COVIDiot

Link To The New One

When I first saw this one I just stared at it for minutes on end, unable to decipher or make sense of it at all. For the first time ever, I seriously considered asking my fellow SoSF hosts for help with figuring out what the hell this is supposed to be. Was Mason saying “COVID 15” or was he saying “COVID is”? I had no clue.

But eventually I figured it out. “COVID 15” is one of those clever little turns of phrase BatYam makes up when he’s trying to capture the way people talk in “real life” and, as usual, it fails spectacularly on every conceivable level. What Mason needs to do now is to pack on another COVID-75 so he can play Funky in the movie adaptation of “Singed Hair”. After that, all he needs to do is play Crazy Harry, at which point his life’s work will be complete.

Obligatory artwork critique: check out that photo on Marianne’s wall. My, such attention to detail. I mean, why even bother drawing it at all?

A Nice Solid Number Two

Link To Today’s Strip

Oh dear, sweet, innocent, frumpy Marianne, totally unconcerned with shallow Hollywood things like her appearance and how her career is going. One has to wonder how someone so hopelessly naive and frumpy stumbled into a film career in the first place. Fortunately for her, she has Mason Jarre to mentor her and explain how movies and showbiz works, so at least she’s in very capable male hands. After all, Mason has played Les Moore TWICE, thus his veracity and integrity is obviously beyond reproach.

That Marianne drawing in panel two is just awful. She looks like Rocky’s harried, weather beaten mother, a far cry from the sexy sex vixen who played the vivacious Jupiter Moon just a few short years ago. She might as well just move to Westview and take a job teaching drama at the high school or slinging pies at Montoni’s, as she’d fit right in. And it’d only really be confusing when Summer was in town, but that rarely happens anyhow.

NEWS FLASH: You’ve got to check out the official BatBlog, which has been updated with an absolutely epic “Lisa’s Story” retrospective victory lap of truly Batiukian proportions. It’s the REAL “Never-Ending Story”.

Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee Any Smug Bearded Image

Link To The Strip

“Galoot”??? Les Moore is not a “galoot”. Bull was a galoot, Buck was a galoot, even Funky could be a galoot. But Les is a somewhat effete bearded dick with ears and there’s nothing even remotely galootish about him. And Cayla is like what, forty-five or so? Why would she be using slang that fell out of fashion thirty years before she was born? Sigh.

So Les, courtesy of his great artistic gifts and his wife’s untimely death, saved a life and not just any life, mind you, but a FAMOUS PERSON’S life, which is worth like five or six regular lives, at least. This is so mawkish it’s hard to believe an adult wrote it, and it’s so self-reverential it could have only sprung from the pen of one man. Then, on top of everything else, he actually has Les’ current, still-living wife grant him permission to hug other women, as long as Lisa is somehow involved, which is just too distressing and too disturbing for words. Les isn’t merely the most detestable character in the entire history of fiction, he’s a deeply twisted psychological disaster area too, trapped as he is in a bizarre relationship amalgam with Lisa, Calya and the stupid book of his.

It’s all too much, which is what we all say after a few days of Dick Facey’s irritating shenanigans. As far as “Lisa’s Story” stories go, this one was a real corker all right. Women getting breast cancer, women starring in movies about women getting breast cancer, women who secretly lusted after Les in high school, women thanking Les Moore for saving their lives, other women looking on approvingly, this one really had it all. It’s a wild wish-fulfillment fantasy and an obnoxious victory lap all in one.

Please Re-Leese Me

Link To The Next One

Marianne Winters, the sexy young Hollywood starlet with the small-town morals and a heart of gold, was stricken with breast cancer. But, because she just happened to be starring in a movie about a young woman (with small-town morals and a heart of gold) who was stricken with breast cancer, she understood the importance of early detection and successfully detected the breast cancer she’d been stricken with. What luck!

And, even more fortunately for Marianne, hundreds of thousands of people got sick and died from a horrible virus that pretty much shut the entire country, including Hollywood, down. And even MORE fortunately, a gigantic wildfire roared through the Hollywood area, leaving untold destruction and billions of dollars worth of damage in its wake, thus enabling Marianne to set aside the time to seek the very best medical attention for herself.

So it all really worked out well for her and, even more importantly, it all worked out for the deeply-conflicted Delicate Genius too. Because you see, Les was very deeply conflicted about sharing his innermost pain (that he painstakingly documented in a best-selling book then talked about non-stop for over a decade) with the world, at least until he discovered that his personal courage, fortitude and tremendous artistic gifts were responsible for literally saving Marianne’s life. So like with Marianne, the pandemic and the conflagration, the whole wife dying of cancer and sending him into a twenty-four-year-long cycle of depression and misery thing all worked out great for him in the end. Heartwarming, ain’t it?

BatYam could probably save all kinds of time if he just nailed Les and that f*cking book of his to a big cross, then had the various other characters pass by and genuflect before him, but there probably wouldn’t be as many opportunities for dumb puns and stupid wordplay that way. The fact that he spent years on this story only to have it end up here just boggles the mind. We all should have seen it coming, too, but once again Batty somehow managed to surprise and bore us all at the same time, which is quite a trick when you think about it.