Mason – Page 13 – Son of Stuck Funky

To Bespectacled Or Not To Bespectacled

Way to pad the strip out with oversized dialog-free panels where nothing happens, Pulitzer (nominee) Boy. “This is what a real casting session looks like!”…big f*cking deal. I assumed it looked something like that but I never cared enough to verify it, so thanks there, Tom. “Only to see”…there’s a gag so old and so musty he had to spray it with Pledge before he used it. There’s only one word that aptly describes this one…”duh”.

Why are Les and Cindy sitting there at all? The idea that Mason needs to stage this charade in order to sway a recalcitrant Les is dumber than a pillowcase full of broken toasters. Since when is everyone so afraid of Les? What HE gonna do? Take his stupid story and go home?

Coming soon: After ruining the project in a smug fussy rage, Les is outraged to discover that Mason is going ahead with “Liza’s Tale…The Second Galosh”, a story about a young wife and mother who contracts CTE after being stricken with a big hunk of cement during an explosion at the UPS store. Les takes his plagiarism case all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices laugh and throw trash at him.

Meet Cindy Sparks

Link To Today’s Strip

This one took a few seconds longer than usual to parse thanks to the incredibly clunky dialog. When these two fools start with the Westviewian banter it’s like trying to roll a dumpster up a flight of stairs. I concluded that Cindy must mean that if Mason has too much “chemistry” with whatever shameless harlot he’s working with she will make his life a vicious living hell when he gets home. Sounds about right. Describing Cindy and Mason’s marriage as “highly reductive” is being way too kind. And she’s supposedly the mature one.

“Are you OK with them looking to see who has good chemistry with Mason?”…wow. Maybe it’s grammatically correct but if it is it shouldn’t be. “Sure, because I can still make sparks happen when he gets back from the lab”…did I read this wrong? Is she talking about sex here? These two sentences should be in textbooks. Chapter Ten: Not So Good, This Is.

Coming next week: Les is mildly surprised to learn that Cindy carved “Mason + Cindy 4 Eva” into Mason’s chest with a Swiss Army knife corkscrew while he slept. No one else is.

Doo Diligence

Link To Today’s Strip

So Mason is insisting on holding a phony casting call just to assure Les that he’s putting every available resource into finding the perfect Lisa, even though he’s already decided who’ll play her? So they’re going to waste thousands of dollars and everyone’s valuable time just to put the smug bearded dick with ears at ease? BatHam’s insane “inside Hollywood” fantasies are spiraling out of control again. This is the most laughable cancer movie premise yet and they haven’t even settled on the cast yet. For anyone else setting your story on the set of a Hollywood movie would have all sorts of potential, but just like with Starbuck Jones he instead opts to focus on the most mundane aspects, like picking up a guy who’ll be sitting in during casting. Yet another fanciful sub-universe full of lore, characters and lingo where absolutely nothing ever happens. Sigh.

Why is Cindy always chauffeuring Les around? Isn’t she some sort of newscaster? It always amazes me how everyone in the Funkyverse always seems to have nothing better to do at any given moment. “The same driver”…he mentioned another arc, albeit a way more recent one this time. He’s suddenly doing that all the time and I find it kind of unnerving.

Chemical Snore Fare

Link To The Latest Breaking Lisa News

Awww, how adorable. Cindy will graciously refrain from being a psychotic, jealous, sexually-threatened shrew while her husband does his job. How very thoughtful of her. Why she needs to be involved in the cancer movie is another question entirely, but that’s just how things work in the Funkyverse. By the time this is over Pete will be “head writer”, Boy Lisa will be “storyboarding” it and Funky will be running craft services, from Ohio, via Skype.

You don’t normally see a lot of cleavage in the strip. Not that I’m demanding more, mind you, in fact quite the opposite is true. But, for reasons only known to him and probably best left unexplored, he had to make sure to remind readers that Cindy is still hot, just in case we somehow missed every Cindy arc since her ignominious Act III return. The characters in this strip “grow” more slowly than stalagmites.

In case you’re counting, “Cindy is jealous over Mason’s co-star” is the sixth old arc he’s mentioned over the last four weeks. It’s officially a trend now and not just a weird FW anomaly. Someone’s wallowing in nostalgia again, why is anyone’s guess. It seems that having an excuse to use Lisa again sort of jump-started his interest a little, which had been noticeably waning over the last, uh, five years or so. Sigh.

In a Funk

Today’s strip was, of course, unavailable for preview.

But please, let us discuss poor Funky. When was the last time Funky had an arc that wasn’t pointless filler? There is hardly a character in EITHER Funkyverse strips that is stagnant as this poor lump.

If the arc is dealing with something bordering serious, Funky is the world’s most passive protagonist, reacting to events outside his control and doing what other people tell him to. Alternatively he serves as the distributor of jobs, food, and apartments to whoever wanders by needing them like some kind of slapshod Greek god rising from a rickety machine to fix ‘conflicts’ in a piss poor drama.

If Funky is going to show any initiative of his own, it is to chase down a pizza box monster.