Something’s got a Holt on me

If there was a contest to use the most words possible to say “Flash and Phil didn’t like each other”, today’s strip would definitely be a contender. Same for a most exposition crammed into a single panel contest, with panel 1 making a game effort. The only place such contests could possibly exist is, of course, the Batiukverse… so please forgive me if similar contests appear in this strip a year from now.

All that exposition in the first panel and Flash doesn’t realize the hall of fame awards given out at Comic-Con honor the deceased on the regular? Seems like having Comic-Con remotely would work well in Flash’s hypothetical honoring a live Phil Holt scenario, but since Flash doesn’t even know that dead people regularly get honored at this and other hall of fame ceremonies then it stands to reason that he wouldn’t know that Comic-Con and other events are held remotely. And by “Flash” in the previous sentence, I mean TB.

Understatement Of The Year

How do you make a “long story” longer? You do what TB does in today’s strip, talk about how long the story is while telling absolutely none of it. It could low-level fridge brilliance if it was in the service of a joke about how long everything in this story arc seems to be taking.

How do you make a short SOSF post shorter? Make it about today’s strip

Terminal Tedium

Oh, so we’re pretending the Atomic Komix crew actually works in today’s strip, are we? I suppose we are also pretending like it is normal for all of these people to fly to San Diego together for Comic-Con (not @home then, I guess)?

We’re pretending like Darin doesn’t have a wife and child to be concerned about? Wait… we’ve been doing that for years.

Well then we’re pretending that Flash has literally nothing better to do in his few remaining years (months? days?) than hang around a comic book company he never worked for? Oh… I guess we’ve been doing that for years too.

At least Chester appearing to care that his employees do their jobs is a new thing here.

The Mindy Projection

Mindy may be front-and-center in today’s strip, but we all know she isn’t the real star. The real star is…

The Pub-Lush-ing Industry

I think a considerable amount of time has passed between yesterday’s strip and today’s strip, because I’m pretty sure everyone today is three sheets to the wind and that Chester is holding the group’s 17th bottle of color-changing champagne (Also, Durwood changed his shirt). The only other explanation for “hobnailing” is that Flash is going full Crankshaft-mode here, and I refuse to believe that because the mere thought makes me physically ill. There is no explanation for everything Pete is doing regardless of the circumstances.