billytheskink here, back for my third non-consecutive fortnight of guest weblogging. Today’s strip was not available for preview, so we’ll have to all be unpleasantly surprised together. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get a month-long break from the usual schmucks and watch Mr. Clean repair the band box, gear by gear and piece by piece.
Tag: Starbuck Jones
You’re probably a craven liar like everyone else in Hollywood, Ms. Soyring
“My pal Pete Ratti,” declaims Derwood Faroni in today’s strip, “would be perfect for putting words into the mouth of Mason Jarr.
“Fortunately, Les, my sort-of stepfather, whose wife Lisa died of cancer, has warned me about you Hollywood types, so I expect you to betray me,” he continues.
Also: The artiste works in a few bricks in panel 1, and uses ¾ perspective in panel 2 to go wild with a brick sidewalk.
“Oh, yeah, Lisa was my birth mother.”
Quid Amateur Quo
Less than a week ago I marveled at how Batiuk had engineered a Hollywood screenwriting opportunity for recently fired comic book writer Pete. Today’s strip has me marveling at how wrong I was.
Charles
April 19, 2015 at 8:47 pm
…The suggested storyline is so absurd it’s insulting. The producers aren’t going to go to the lead actor to get recommendations for script doctors…and in the extreme situation where they do so, they’re not going to accept the suggestion when it turns out to be a rank amateur who just got his ass fired from a crappy comic book company.
Charles, I’ll go ya a couple better: how about an even more rank amateur, who, after dragging out the process of writing the screenplay (which he insisted on doing), decides it’s too much work and walks away, sinking the project while still getting paid? On the recommendation of the star’s new girlfriend?
City of Tiny Lites
Mason Jarr the movie star is nothing if not wistful. During his Ohio sojourn, he remarked that Westview reminded him of his dear old hometown, while tonight the lights of L.A. remind him of Christmas. They kinda remind me of the backdrop of the Johnny Carson-era Tonight Show.
We’re treated to another glimpse of Batiuk’s understanding of How the Movie Industry Works: the movie Mason was signed to star in last summer is slated for production “this year” (well that’s vague enough), but, as happened with the ill-fated Lust for Lisa telepic, the script still needs work. It’s certain that Les, who wore out his Hollywood welcome on his first try, won’t get the call. Perhaps Mason should offer to write the script, seeing as how he must now be an expert on Starbuck Jones.
The Invisible Man Gets A Makeover
Once again, Tom Batiuk goes with “tell, don’t show” and graces us with a wall of text about a (fictional, in-universe) character we’ve never even seen and care nothing about. In a strip well-known for having stupid character names, The Amazing Mister Sponge is really up there in the top ten. Were I a super-villain (and I’m not saying I’m not), if one of my henchmen called out, “Hey boss, the Amazing Mister Sponge is after us!” why, I’d probably collapse from laughter and be unable to launch my scheme. So maybe he does have a super-power. I imagine it loses its effectiveness the second or third time, though, and starts being annoying. “Why can’t one of the good heroes try and stop me? This is embarrassing…”
It really makes me curious about how Mr. Batiuk decides on a storyline, what factors come to play that cause him to deliver…this. Don’t you love how the episode ends on a cliff-hanger, the idea being that we’re all on pins and needles to know what Pete’s scheme is? In reality, we know it’s going to be a crashing bore, except “crashing” implies something happening. If this is Tom Batiuk’s depiction of the pressures of being a cartoonist, there’s a much better solution than wasting space: retire. Sure, you can spin your wheels until the glorious 50th, but here’s a cold hard truth. No one is going to buy The Complete Funky Winkerbean: 2010-2015. No one.
I guess one thing is that Mr. Batiuk seems to have lost any enthusiasm for drawing. That Starbuck Jones face on the wall, for example, is a terrible drawing. If that’s an example of Pete’s artwork, no wonder we’ve never seen this Sponge-Head.
As for the “real” characters depicted here, Darin is a bland smiling blank–the kind of image you’d see if TV stations still used “test patterns.” And Pete has clearly been rejected from The Muppet Show for “looking too lifeless.”
Son of Stuck Funky 
