Tag: Pete

Martin Mulls It Over

Greetings, SOSFers! It’s billytheskink here – your favorite lizard-named, Martin Mull-referencing, pointless trivia-posting, guest author.

I was wishing (and hoping, and thinking, and praying) that yesterday’s strip was the coda to this Comic-Con arc. It certainly looked like it could be. Unfortunately, it was a tease, and today’s strip takes us right back to yesterday’s ocean-side confab to discuss… the Starbuck Jones movie premiere. Goody, another week of this. That’s four straight weeks now.

A relative of mine had a baby back in June. That baby will be 8 weeks old at the end of this week. FW strips involving Starbuck Jones will have appeared during 65% of her life. This makes me incredibly sad.

Retcon Artist

SosfDavidO here, and it looks like the boys are back at Comic-Con in today’s strip. The human lamprey John is nowhere to be seen this time, however! He probably still owes them for the hotel from last year. That and the “Oh, my, I seem to have forgotten my wallet.” routine near the end of a pricey Comic-con hotel dinner was probably enough to give him the boot.

But enough about Dead Skunk Head. Let’s talk about Darin, who, up until he got reconned into being a Hollywood storyboard artist a few years ago had been reconned into a mobile applications developer. That’s right, lifelong passion for art and expensive animation school be damned, Pete asked him to come out to Hollywood and suddenly he’s shitting out major studio quality storyboards like he’d been doing it as long as people with decades of experience in the industry.

Time will tell if Tombat can handle Darin being an anonymous storyboard artist for long or if some director will look at him and say: “I don’t care if he’s had a lick of acting school, let’s make him the lead in the Starbucks Jones Junior Space Cadet series!”

Meanwhile, Wally, who has been struggling in school and trying to get his life together didn’t even get as much as a panel in yesterday’s 4th of July strip. Nope, instead we got a lame pun about sand. SAND.

I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

La Vida Patetico (Extended Disco Remix)

Link to today’s strip.

Oh. My. God.  Pete and Dullard are pathetic beyond my ability to measure.

Well, I guess working as a storyboard artist must pay pretty damned well.  The shipping and insurance alone on that garbage is probably going to be over two hundred dollars…especially if the treadmill is a fully-functional model that is being shipped fully assembled.  Although I doubt the treadmill “works.”  Museums don’t really tend to sell that kind of thing.

And when we last glimpsed Dullard’s house or apartment or whatever, it sure looked small–where is he going to keep that monstrosity?

Maybe they can turn Skyler’s room into a Flash Treadmill Room.  A phone call to the local orphanage would be the first step.  The orphanage in Westview is just bursting with inconvenient children; in California, I’m sure they’ll have no problems finding something similar.

As for the “dolly,” again I can’t comprehend the idea of wanting something like that.  It just seems (to me) like a huge waste of space, unless you’re running a comic book store.  Or unless you’re Chester the Chiseler and live alone in a giant mansion.  In that case, superhero statues are your best friends, and lord knows you can’t have too many of either, especially if one column has a big fat zero in it!

I originally was going to say that this whole arc reads like something from a huge Flash fan who happens to be five years old, but that just seems too mean, even for me.

I understand being a huge fan of something which has made you profoundly happy, and the urge to share that happiness by trying to share the fandom.  But there are ways to do that which work, and there are ways to do that which actually turn people off from the “something” you’re always on about.  This story does a good job of showing that Tom Batiuk is the world’s biggest fan of the Flash, and that he has no way of transmitting this enthusiasm (bordering on unhealthy obsession) to anyone else.

Note:  personally, I always thought that the Flash was a pretty cool superhero.  I only rarely read his comics but it seemed to me that they went out of their way to be scientifically plausible, and as a callow youth I appreciated that.  He’s even better in the animated Timmverse; the previously mentioned episode “Flash and Substance” is very entertaining.  Even better is “The Great Brain Robbery” where Flash and Lex Luthor switch minds.   Should I mention the best line in that episode?  No…cause I’m evil.

So, don’t let Tom Batiuk give you the idea that the flash is only for cretins, dimbulbs and creeps.  The Flash is one of the good ones.

Pete on The First Try

Link to today’s strip.

Pete sure looks pleased with himself, as well he should; he has answered correctly.  Dullard, on the other hand, looks around worriedly.   I said a man’s wife is his best friend.  Just like mine is my best friend, always there, always by my side.  Wait a minute, where’s my wife?  If she’s my best friend, why isn’t she here instead of Pete?  How come I don’t have any cookies?  Yes, Dullard has answered incorrectly, as the wives, mothers and daughters of Westview have no place in a man’s life, unless there are cookies to be served unto him during the sacred reading of the Book of Comic.

On the wall behind them is a collection of boomerangs, presumably those used by Captain Boomerang, a member of The Flash’s rogues gallery.  All I know about Captain Boomerang is that he uses boomerangs to commit crimes, and his original costume looked as if it–how can I put this?–would not be out of place on an off-Broadway stage in the mid 1990’s, or a hairdresser’s salon in the late 1960’s.

I assume the Captain didn’t just buy his boomerangs at any available sporting goods store; they were probably custom made to be, uh, deadly, yeah, that’s the word. (Yes, I know boomerangs are technically deadly weapons, but they’re generally not designed to be deadly to people.  Except in The Road Warrior, the “Fun and Games” episode of The Outer Limits, and…Flash comics.)

So while an exhibit of boomerangs on the wall is perhaps slightly less stupid than Jay Garrick’s hat, it still makes The Flash Museum in Central City kind of clueless as to how an actual museum is supposed to work.  I thought about saying, “I’d love to listen in on the planning sessions for this museum,” but I have this ghastly premonition that we do not have long to wait before we will witness just that.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Link to today’s strip.

The written content of today’s strip makes “trivia” look like Tolstoy, so I’m going to ignore it.  Despite Dexter Myles constant pointing.  What the hell is that guy’s deal?  “The fingah!  The fingah!”

No, what I want to draw your attention to is the object in the glass case in panel one.

It’s not a flying saucer.  It’s not a hubcap.  It’s Jay Garrick’s hat.

I hate myself for knowing this and typing it out at you, but the original golden age Flash was a guy named Jay Garrick.  He safeguarded his secret identity by…putting on a hat.  Seriously, no mask, no hood, just a hat.  “Jay, are you secretly the Flash?”  “Of course not, that’s silly!” (puts on hat)  “Oh my gosh, Flash, how did you get here?  And where’s Jay?”  Finally, we have someone who makes Superman’s glasses look like a James Bond disguise.

But that’s not what worries me.

If someone was going to build a comic strip museum, you couldn’t put a baseball cap and glove, or a yellow porkpie hat, into a glass case and claim they belonged to Charlie Brown and Dick Tracy respectively.  Because neither of those folks exist, so it’s not possible to possess items that they used.

So, then, someone made a replica of Jay Garrick’s hat for the museum.  “So what?” you’re probably asking me.  But why would they do that?  What does the hat by itself do, when you could get a more complete impression by making a statue of Jay Garrick wearing his hat?  Both are equally fake, but the second makes more sense.  Unless…

–unless The Flash is a real person in Funky Winkerbean, and that’s Jay Garrick’s actual hat.  And he donated it to the museum.  Suddenly, all of this makes sense.  No.  No, no.  No, it doesn’t.  But it seems logically consistent, given the contents of The Flash Museum in Central City.  But if there are actual superheroes in the Funkyverse, why are there comic books?  Why does Pete struggle to write them, when he can just read the newspaper and copy what actually happened?  How come these heroes never save anyone–yet get gigantic museums in their honor?  Could you hire Superman to destroy Westview, because evil?  Why hasn’t he done so already?

AAAARRRRRGGGHHH

MIND

BLOWN