smirk – Page 5 – Son of Stuck Funky

The Eliminatrix

sorialpromise
April 26, 2022 at 11:10 pm
As great as our bloggers and posters are on SOSF, we still need material. That is Mr. Batiuk’s job. Boy has he failed his best audience…there are no nits to pick…Someday soon, Mr. Batiuk will raise his level of mediocrity back up to our standards.

Here’s a reminder why your friends here at SoSF limit ourselves and one another to to two-week shifts. Because you get strips like today’s strip that do nothing to advance the plot, such as it is. And Harry didn’t exactly say Donna was the better gamer; only that she “usually” posted a high score.

**“You have no idea”** must be the wacky catchphrase around the Klinghorn household.

While these three panels only serve to pad out this limping story arc through Saturday, they’re not visually unsatisfying, and yes, that is the strongest praise I can muster.

Stolen Valium

In today’s strip Les, appropriately, puts all of his stolen Hollywood paraphernalia in same place.

Marianne doesn’t appear to understand the concepts of opacity and walls.

Cayla plans to monetize this display even though presently no one seems willing to visit the Moore house for free (and people are willing to visit Dinkle!).

Why am I blandly narrating this strip in lieu of hard-hitting commentary and rapier wit? Because I know my limits. Why is Les blandly narrating his actions in the first panel? Because there is no limit to his disdain for even those that worship him.

“N”, the bag

Today’s strip marks Summer’s first appearance since… oh wait, yeah, sorry, that’s (Marianne) Winters, not Summer.

Summer actually has appeared in this strip as recently as 7 weeks ago, which is not something you could often say since she graduated high school. Even so, it’s kind of remarkable that Les and Cayla have interacted more over the past few years with a now-Oscar-winning actress than they have with their own children, both of whom (still!) appear to go to Kent State… less than an hour away from where Westview is generally considered to be.

And by “remarkable” I mean 1/4 ~~inch~~ AU from reality. I think I would have found it more relatable and more entertaining had we focused instead on the adventure that must have been Marianne’s efforts to bring an Oscar stuffed in a small drawstring bag through a TSA checkpoint.

You’ve come a long way, baby

Ah, the classic tug-of-war between privacy-invading exuberance and false modesty… who wins that race to the bottom in today’s strip?

Les’ false modesty does, of course. For one thing, it’s coming from Les, which makes it an additionally off-putting version of an already off-putting behavior. The biggest reason, though, is that Cayla’s desire to “let people know” is essentially moot, everyone already knows. Anyone who cares saw Marianne tell the television cameras that she was coming to give her Oscar away to Les this week. Yeah, if she’s trying to organize a mob to meet Marianne then that might not work if by “on the way” Marianne means that she’ll be there within the hour… but with Marianne’s very public announcement of her planned visit and the relatively specific time frame she gave, the Taj Moore-hal should have been descended upon by pushy celebrity obsessives and Starbuck Jones fans days ago. Where are they? Where’s Lenny and Frankie and (ugh) DMZ? Why am I asking you?

My mother, the car

Quite the crowd on hand in today’s strip, with the first panel serving as the Batiukverse equivalent of the semi-famous crowd reaction photo from the 2017 Academy Awards’ wrong envelope incident. While the crowd of stars watching Marianne are not quite of the same wattage as those in the 2017 audience, I still spy some big names.

OK, I don’t know who this is, but his mouth is huge
The shirtless Nazi who gets shredded by a propeller in Raiders Of The Lost Ark
George Foreman
Dorothy Hamill (what’s with all the sports people?)
The giraffe that stole David Cassidy’s hair
A Dilbert cosplayer
General/President Ulysses S. Grant
Who invited Creepy Pete?
Christopher Columbus (not that one)
Soft-serve ice cream
SHEMP!

Quite the menagerie present to hear Marianne call back to the time she went AWOL, nearly committed suicide, and then quoted her mother quoting an actress who was one of Hollywood’s most famous suicides. Anything to fulfill your parent’s dreams. How inspiring!