real places in Ohio – Page 5 – Son of Stuck Funky

It’s Grrrr-Ate!!!

Special thanks to Charles for a fantastic debut and the rest of Team SoSF for just being you!

If only Les could find a way to do his book tour DURING the annual cancer fun run, then EVERYTHING would FINALLY be going his way! That way he could still Lisa his Lisa while simultaneously Lisa-ing. While there’s nothing really wrong with BatNom using FW to promote himself like this it might be a little more…uh…”interesting” if he wasn’t so obvious and ham-fisted about it. “These new Lisa’s Legacy shirts are GREAT! Machine-washable and no more nipple-chafing either!”.

It’s sort of tough to really viciously snark on a charity cancer fun run, but every time I read the words “Lisa’s Legacy” I can’t help but think to myself that “Lisa’s Legacy” is really just a bunch of totally insufferable comic strips, as she wasn’t even a real person. A few years of Lisa sitting under a tree and calling Les “Spanky” followed by a decade of strips featuring Les talking about it is not exactly a “legacy”, unless you happen to be one of those people who assigns vast importance to obscure mundane things. You know who I mean.

Still though, I really want one of those “Lisa’s Legacy” T-shirts, as IMO not enough people look at me quizzically these days. My ultimate SoSF dream is to attend a Batiuk book signing, ask him a bunch of questions about obscure FW characters (“whatever happened to Mooch?”) then hand him a FBOFW collection to autograph.

I don’t think he knows how YouTube works, you guys

Today’s strip

So Les is overnighting at Columbus because of course he is. And I bet the museum is footing his hotel bill, although it doesn’t quite look like what Les is accustomed to when it comes to his Lisa travels. No wonder he’s miserable all the damn time.

And there’s Cayla, who spent her Les-free time constantly searching and watching YouTube updates so she could catch yesterday’s lady putting up that video of Les, because of course that woman looked exactly like someone with an active YouTube channel, and Cayla has nothing else to do. Watch as it goes viral, because of course it will, getting more views than any YouTube segment of any network and cable channel in America.

The Banality of Banality

Today’s strip

Today’s strip really isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. A woman (who is dressed in lavender shaded clothing- ever notice just how often Batiuk has a middle aged woman dressed in that color?) asks Les if she can record him signing her book for some damn reason. Les being Les screws it up, and when his screw up is pointed out, gets all pissy with the person who pointed it out.

It’s dumb. It’s banal. Why is she recording Les signing her book? Is she going to watch this video again? Post it to Facebook to have her friends watch it? “Oh look, it’s that guy who writes about his dead wife! I’m going to watch him sign his name again and AGAIN.”

And Les, naturally, gets all pissy-faced with her, as if she’s done something irritating to him. Hey man, it’s your screw up. Own it.

Anyway, I was thinking that this book signing can’t possibly last beyond this week, but I’ve underestimated Batiuk before. This guy can stretch a guy signing books out to four weeks easily. That’s a god damn story to him.

If Only We HADN’T Seen This Coming

Today’s Strip

And today Batiuk goes back to the tired well of Les running into a former teacher who can’t believe that Les is a successful published author. It’s an odd thing, because while I haven’t read much Act 1, I was given the impression that while Les was hapless (usually due to others’ shortcomings), he wasn’t portrayed as an idiot. It’s just Batiuk’s standard “every high school kid’s an idiot who will never amount to anything” trope. It’s so powerful that it applies even to The Delicate Genius of Westview.

Although I can amuse myself my imagining that instead of the obvious meaning of the punchline, Rita can’t believe that Les wrote a sequel to a book that was about a woman dying of cancer. There can’t ever be a sequel less essential than this one.

Plus, “back in Ohio”? You’re in Ohio now, you damn ninny!

This again?

Today’s strip

So now Les is back signing books, since nothing more than his crass comparison of himself to a biblical figure is worth showing of his talk.

I guess the idea is that someone’s selling Les’s personally signed books on eBay, because after all, the signature of such an immense failure would be so valuable. One of the oddest things about these Lisa’s Trilogy of Books strips, and Lisa’s Story in general, is how divergent Les’s success is within the strip itself. Is he really an author whose signature would be worth reselling his books on eBay? Or one who’s worth sending all over the country on a book tour? Apparently so from the strips, even though there’s nothing in the way that Les is portrayed otherwise that convincingly shows he’s a successful writer.

Anyway, looking at the motley bunch in line for Les’s signature, I’m puzzled by who exactly is supposed to be the audience of this new trilogy. I can’t imagine any of the people shown being interested in all three of the books as they were presented, and for some of them, I can’t see how they’d be interested in any of them. That counts as a quarter inch, I guess.