Tag: Mason Jarr

Double Shot of My Batty’s Love

I suppose we can’t blame Tom Batiuk for taking Fathers Day off and yielding the floor to a “real” comic artist. But we’re left with so many unanswered questions.

Mason Jarr casually  informs Cliff, on-set and in costume, that they are concurrently “shooting” Starbuck Jones and its sequel? Did Cliff not read and sign a contract? Or is he so delighted to have been rescued from obscurity that anything is fine with him? “I can’t believe they’re shooting two at once!” This from a man who became (obstensibly) famous as an actor in serial films. Do you suppose these were shot episode by episode, totally in sequence?

Let’s move on to the content that’s not drawn by Batiuk: a fucking Western? Because “shooting two at once”? Maybe this one of Batty’s obscure, beloved old comic covers that he tries to to bend the narrative in order to make it fit? We Google “comic book ‘arizona ranger‘”  to find the source…there’s Lone Ranger comics…Texas Ranger comics…there’s, um, this…

Turns out it’s not a vintage comic after all, but is instead another title from TB’s imaginary Batom Comics: he mentioned The Arizona Ranger in his blog two years ago (along with Charlie and Chuck and Mr. Sponge). So TB commissioned this “tribute” (from an artist who is old enough to be a contemporary of Cliff Anger’s) and really doesn’t care if it makes any sense.

Thank You Vera Much

TheDiva
June 16, 2016 at 1:02 am
Cliff Anger gets a huge tribute in his honor, while his costar is just trotted out and expected to fawn on him the way everyone else does. Yep, sounds about right for this strip.

Eww! Old people flirting! Hard to find much else to say about today’s installment…Mason’s expression in panel one is not so much “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone” but rather more like he’s just lit a stinkbomb and is off to watch the ensuing hilarity from a safe distance. “I always wondered what…” And we’ll always wonder what Cliff was about to say before Vera cut him off mid-sentence.

Boys Go to Jupiter, to Get More Stupider

$$$WESTVIEW ONCOLOGIST$$$
June 13, 2016 at 9:09 am
It should be pointed out that much ballyhooed Marianne Winters STILL has not shown up. I’m leaning to the side that we will never see her in these strips.

“All right George, now you remember all those loveable, stupid Peorgie and Mudhead movies you were responsible for?”
“My goodness, I haven’t, uh, seen any of those in years…”
“Well, Georgie, what are you going to do when the original “Bottles”, Mudhead’s crazy, hopped up girlfriend, drops right through that celebrity trap door?”
“My…God…Oh, no, that woman’s trying to kill me!”

Starbuck 2016? The movie written and storyboarded by a couple of Westview losers? Filmed on location in Cleveland, Ohio? We couldn’t care less. “Classic” Starbuck? You mean that rollicking, life-altering, black and white serial film from the thirties forties fifties early sixties? Now we’re talkin’! If locating the leading man involved following the weakest of clues to track him down and invade his ratty New York City apartment, can you imagine the lengths Team Starbuck went to in order to dig up  Cliff’s leading lady, Vera…Vera Nash?

Baby I’m a Star(buck)

billytheskink
June 8, 2016 at 1:05 am
Mason shooting for Les Moore levels of schmuck-ery here…He provides Cliff with no schedule or itinerary and then makes him get into full costume on set, Cliff surely assuming he would be shooting his scenes for the film. Nope, Mason springs the news of an immediate photo shoot at some restaurant with zero relevance to anything on a wholly unsuspecting Cliff and then shoves him through a dingy Cleveland alleyway into a decades-old limousine.

…which would have been undignified enough if all this was just to surprise ol’ Cliff with an Ovaltine toast. But today Cliff is pressed into service autographing pictures or posters or some crap, and he approaches this task with the same disdain for his admirers that book-signing Les Moore has for his. No doubt book-signing Tom Batiuk at some point encountered one of his own fans who, overcome with excitement in the presence of greatness, forgot his own name.

Cliff: “Some things haven’t changed in fifty years, have they?” So now this 1950’s style Starbuck Jones serial film dates back to 1966. Help me out here, boomers: maybe Saturday matinees were still a thing in the midwest, but here in Jersey, we were getting our superhero kicks watching Batman. On TV.

OverTwee

Link to today’s strip

Playing with decoder rings

And Starbuck Jones related things,

Ovaltine and front porch swings…

Those were the days.

And you knew where you were then

The matinee began at ten

Mister we could use a man like Clifford Anger again.

Didn’t need no cell phone flicks

With comic books we got our kicks,

Although it sure repelled the chicks…

Those were the days!!!!!!

I really like how everyone in FW has the exact same childhood memories, regardless of when they were actually born. What, was Ovaltine running that SJ promotion for three or four decades? Honestly though, wading through week after week of BanTom’s plodding nonsensical SJ mythology and annoyingly uninteresting childhood nostalgia has me feeling like I’ve been beaten with a pillowcase full of padlocks. Batiuk has spent WAY more time on his old comic book memories than he spent reading the damn things in the first place, unless he hung out in that attic until he was thirty-five or so, that is.

And on that note I happily turn over the wheel to our fearless leader TFH, who’s courageously tacking the rest of this decoder ring arc and whatever else BanTom manages to dredge up from the musty old depths of his comic book-addled mind. Shudder.