Tag: Pm nd Jfff

Valentine’s Day, August 1

Today’s strip was not available for preview. It will, almost assuredly, be about Max Murdoch’s imperiled Valentine Theater though.

But before The Valentine was Max’s imperiled theater, it was Ralph Meckler’s imperiled theater. For those of you fortunate enough to not follow Crankshaft, bespectacled and mustachioed Ralph is Crankshaft’s best only friend. Poor Ralph is a decent enough character, and is (sadly) a definite contender for the Batiukverse’s ultimate “chew toy” award.

Not only did he struggle for years to keep The Valentine afloat before unloading it on Max and his I-guess-girlfriend Hannah, he also failed in a recent bid to unseat Centerville’s corrupt, do-nothing mayor. In fact, he lost the mayoral race on a coin flip because the election was tied. The election was tied, of course, because his good “friend” Crankshaft forgot to vote. Oh, and he let Crankshaft make that fateful coin-flip call…
Also, his wife has Alzheimer’s (revisited in two different books) and his son was killed in the Vietnam War.

Sheesh. No wonder he says stuff like this…

The Loan Punman

Welcome, everyone, to that damn Crankshaft theater. Today’s strip finds us back in the middling maudlin morass that came to define this strip during Act II. It certainly says something about the relentlessly positive Comic-Con arc that it failed to provide much refreshment in its departure from this strip’s trademark tone.

“Valentine’s Day may be over.” Heh, cute. Doesn’t explain how you’ve been making your loan payments for 10 years and are only now in danger of default… maybe you’ve been driving customers away by needlessly questioning them instead of taking their money.

Meanwhile, Ann Fairgood Pm nd Jff play the “Incredible Hulk” TV show’s closing credits music in their heads as their son walks out the door with his oversize copy of yesterday’s strip.

Hey You Two, Get A Room

Link to today’s strip

160607

There’s been an awful lot of very peculiar hand action going on in this strip lately, hasn’t there? Now I’m not going to speculate too much on what’s going on here. Perhaps the infamous Centerville Groper has finally been paroled. Perhaps they’re just very much in love. Or perhaps the tall guy is a new pickpocket who’s just starting out. It’s, uh…quite awkward though.

Then we have that other guy’s wildly uneven legs. Was his gym built on a steep hill? Shark bite? It’s not just strange how one’s way bigger than the other, it’s that the one on the right goes straight down with no curvature at all. And that neck on the person in front of him…gak, what the hell happened there?

So the entire mid-central Ohio area solved the stupid SJ puzzle and are now excitedly queuing up to finally get a glimpse of the guy who was sitting around doing nothing for the last sixty years. Suddenly the SJ serials of the 1950s have become more than just some forgotten old crappy movies, they’re the literal cornerstone of the nostalgic childhood memories of people who weren’t even born when they were released. Incredible.

Decode Blue

Link to today’s strip

And I immediately recognized this piece of crap from all those shitty Funky Winkerbean comics I used to read as a kid. So, that Anger asshole is doing an appearance at some stupid nostalgia-themed restaurant now, is he? Why that sounds just swell! Everyone can greet him and talk about how great his old movies were and how great the old theaters were and how great old Hollywood was and how great those old Starbuck Jones comic books were and what they were doing for the last sixty years while Cliff sat broken and alone in a squalid apartment with faulty lampshades.

Of course the most objectionable thing about this totally worthless arc was how he insisted on dragging this Jeff character into the fray in a painfully transparent attempt to lure FW readers into checking out his intensely dreary “mommy didn’t love me” arc he’s been doing over there. FW is loaded to the rafters with boring aging morons who play with comic books all day, yet he had to ram Jeff down our throats just to cross-promote that remorselessly shitty other comic strip he’s trying to pimp again. What, someone like DSH John or Crazy Harry can’t spend a week looking through the attic and jabbering about comic books?

 

I’m halfway ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille

Finally, after spending a week laboriously rehashing details we already knew, the
story arc goes somewhere. Too bad it’s Saturday and Sunday’s color strip will likely feature Les helping Pete move out of the apartment above Montoni’s.

And calling all you eagle-eyed nitpicking snarkers out there! Has Lisa’s journal *ever* been mentioned before? I mean, I know she left a massive library of reconning VHS tapes but I don’t recall anyone every saying anything about any journal.