Tag: sports

Terribull

Link to today’s strip.

I actually laughed at today’s episode.  Not because of the “joke” or anything, but because of the way Bull is drawn in panel one.  With his oversized head, he looks like a giant, enraged baby.

And the idea of a giant, enraged baby running out onto a football field, arms a-flappin’, all red-faced and colicky, is funnier than anything seen in this strip in a long, long time.

Other than that, now that we’ve gone from three full days of talking about Bull to actually seeing Bull in action, nothing’s really changed.  All this has happened about a hundred times before.  Bull is a terrible coach who hates his players and is certain the season is doomed.  I almost put myself to sleep just typing that out, it’s so boring.  Maybe Tom Batiuk has a point in having characters discuss things off-stage; it saves him having to draw action.

Of course, we’d miss out on the giant, enraged babies dashing out onto the field.  Personally, I’d miss that a lot.

Is Tom Batiuk really going to be doing this for another five and a half years?  Jesus wept.

Good Thing Watch:  that giant, enraged baby.  Every time I look at that, it makes me happy.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Listless

 Link To Today’s Strip

Every so often The BanMan throws one at you that just leaves you completely befuddled. I THINK that’s Wally, Rachel, Tony and Funky in that photo although I’m not 100% certain about that. I had to Google “Margo Lanes” and sure enough, Margo Lane was a character in an old-timey 1940’s serial, “The Shadow”. Surely there are four or five still-living people that might get that gag, although the odds on them also being FW readers are, uh…fairly slim, I’d say.

“Why was everyone wearing Santa hats…?”…I’m just gonna go way out on a limb here, Jess, but I’m guessing it was because it was CHRISTMAS TIME, which would be the most logical reason. Good thing she isn’t a detective, huh? I have no earthly idea where this could be going (other than “nowhere”) although “the gang at Montoni’s starts a bowling team” would probably be as good a guess as any. It’s also pretty obvious that Jess is spending WAY too much time in that pizza place too. Where have you gone, Boy Lisa? A boring strip turns its yawning eyes to you.

 

Pant-a-losers

He’s been spending a lot of time in the past, Batiuk has, dating to this past spring when Les got yoked into being reunion chairman. The reunion committee meetings reacquainted us with Junebug and Barry Balederman, and set the stage for a Lisa tribute. The reunion itself of course was the setting for the time pool silliness, in which the Act I cast were trotted out to meet their present-day counterparts (uh, sorry Lisa!). We’ve had a couple Sophmoric Sightings sightings. And speaking of sightings, we saw Les sharing the park bench again with Lisa’s ghost. And speaking of Lisa, we’ve once again dragged out those damned VHS tapes , this time to bake ’em and digitize ’em and preserve ’em for. Ever.

Along the way, Batiuk has of late altered his visual shorthand: the flashback scenes retain their photo album corners but are in full color instead of washed out sepia. Like the central triptych of today’s strip, which offers a perfectly passable gag and which for all we know is a redraw of a published strip from that era. Compare and contrast Coach Jockstrap’s humorous, deadpan style with that of his protege Coach Bushka, who harangues his players with Crankshaftian malaprops.

Bushkaball

My fellow bloggers out there are familiar with a WordPress feature called “post tags.” Adding tags to a post “aids in navigation and allows posts and to be grouped with others of similar content.” For example, you might notice the tags for today’s post are listed this post, just before the comments, like so:

posttags

It’s a fun and handy feature, and you can even display the tags in a “tag cloud” (on this page it’s in the right-hand sidebar, under the heading “Most Tagged.” The tag cloud displays your most-used tags, and renders them in larger or smaller font sizes depending how often they are used (note the size of “Les” and “Montoni’s“).

I mention this because I regret never having created a tag called “Last panel in which everyone exchanges puzzled expressions in response to what a main character has just said.” The problem, see, is that post tags should be succinct, and there’s really no way, short of an acronym, to shorten that description. And the “LPIWEEPEIRTWAMCHJS” tag would be used a lot: in pretty much every strip that’s set in Mr. Moore’s or Mr. Kablichnick’s or Mr. Dinkle’s classroom, for starters.