Tag: smirk

Wimbledumb

Warning!

Today’s strip contains panels that some readers may find offensive. At least we hope you find Les smirking offensive. If you don’t, what is wrong with you? Anyways, reader discretion is advised.

Bull really has no excuse for not remembering how to open up a can, he used to open up a can all the time on Les. Oh wait, sorry, that was retconned… Or was it ret-retconned?

Les and Bull’s tennis matches were a not uncommon element of late Act II, but I am not sure we’ve seen them play at all in Act III. It was on the tennis court that Les finally became comfortable with having Bull as a coworker, after the reveal that Bull bullied Les back in high school because he went home to an abusive father every night. Just another reminder that literally everybody in this strip wallowed through a maudlin morass of serious issues at some point during Act II.

Ugh-mblebrag

Oh, of course today’s strip is going to drag the Bedside Manor band back into this. I had my fingers crossed that something else would happen, but really, who didn’t see this coming? Hopefully we’ll get the lucid Mort Winkerbean this time.

I hope the Bedside Manor ensemble’s ill-fated record deal involved a lot of Sousa marches, or at least a slow-paced take on The Ballad Of The Green Berets, because they’ve got less than a week to rehearse. Looks like Dinkle’s about to write a check that his baton can’t cash.

The background characters almost make up for it all, though. Almost.
Let’s see… we’ve got Wooly Willy, Hawaiian giraffe-man, the no-neck dad from “Dustin”, and a blonde smart enough to hide her face so she can always deny having been an extra in Funky Winkerbean. I would much rather be dropping in on their conversations.

Ham Handed

The ass-lathering continues today as Kablichnick steps up to the plate. The normally dour and cranky science teacher positively gushes about how Starbuck Jones inspired him: “Follow our hearts”? “Do what we love”? “Succeed“? Teacher, please. When it comes to unbridled contempt  for one’s students, Jim Kablichnick makes Les Moore look like Mr. Chips. The only thing he loves about his job is the opportunity it provides for him to spout his views on climate change, interspersed with painfully unfunny “jokes.”  Cliff expresses his surprise at meeting someone gullible enough to have bought his line of hokum. And we all know about the Ovaltine, but do the Junior (hah!) Spacemen of America employ some kind of secret handshake? It looks like the ol’ Commodore greets his fans by grasping their clenched fists.

Baby I’m a Star(buck)

billytheskink
June 8, 2016 at 1:05 am
Mason shooting for Les Moore levels of schmuck-ery here…He provides Cliff with no schedule or itinerary and then makes him get into full costume on set, Cliff surely assuming he would be shooting his scenes for the film. Nope, Mason springs the news of an immediate photo shoot at some restaurant with zero relevance to anything on a wholly unsuspecting Cliff and then shoves him through a dingy Cleveland alleyway into a decades-old limousine.

…which would have been undignified enough if all this was just to surprise ol’ Cliff with an Ovaltine toast. But today Cliff is pressed into service autographing pictures or posters or some crap, and he approaches this task with the same disdain for his admirers that book-signing Les Moore has for his. No doubt book-signing Tom Batiuk at some point encountered one of his own fans who, overcome with excitement in the presence of greatness, forgot his own name.

Cliff: “Some things haven’t changed in fifty years, have they?” So now this 1950’s style Starbuck Jones serial film dates back to 1966. Help me out here, boomers: maybe Saturday matinees were still a thing in the midwest, but here in Jersey, we were getting our superhero kicks watching Batman. On TV.

Slow Motion Story Arc Too

Link to today’s strip

Wow, Mopey Pete sure can become a whirlwind of activity when something really stupid inspires him, you know? Just think, if Cliff had never sold that old decoder ring Pete never would have come up with the idea to stage an event where old SJ fans gather to talk about old decoder rings. It’s so funny how life works out that way, innit? Good thing he didn’t auction off his old SJ underpants too, or this arc could have taken an ugly, ugly turn very quickly.

I like how all this nostalgia-wallowing only serves to emphasize how Anger essentially wasted sixty years of his life living as a bitter old recluse for no reason whatsoever. But it’s all OK now as at long last he has a reason to celebrate the only noteworthy thing he ever did…sixty years ago. When you think about it like that it’s all incredibly depressing. And it’s also kind of depressing how a guy who’s been doing a daily comic strip for forty-four years could possibly create a new character this one-dimensional and shallow, although it’s certainly not surprising.