Tag: Summer

Westview’s Only Growth Industry

Today’s strip

According to a UCSF study, when it comes to funding medical research

Depression ($719 M), injuries ($691 M), and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ($613 M) were the most underfunded.

If you visit this NIH funding report and click on one of the table headings to sort by actual funding, you’ll find that cancer research is well funded. Given how depressing this serious serial art form is, I might have a suggestion for a more worthy target for Funky Winkerbean’s charitable efforts.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to encourage donations to fund cancer treatment and research. It’s a generous and kind thing to do. But the constant droning of Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, Lisa… mentally drowns out the actual cause.

Not to mention poor Cayla (I thought I said not to mention her!). She’s barely visible in the background of panel 1, joyfully carrying a carton of T-shirts bearing her predecessor’s name, all the while about to be struck by a no-doubt suicidal falling leaf. At least the colorist remembered to use Fall colors for the leaves this time. Cayla’s daughter, of whom Cayla is the mother, is a barely differentiated smudge against the backdrop of The Gazebo in Westview (panel 2).

The titular character appears today, prominently displaying the effects of the contextual reality field that ensures he’s trim enough to run whenever the plot requires it. Don’t fret, though: he’ll be 75 pounds heavier the moment he returns to work at Montoni’s.

Summer Blue Times

Today’s strip

Les: Was [Lisa’s journal] hard to read?

Summer: No… It’s funny, insightful…

This strip… It’s sad, pathetic…

I’m puzzled, snarky…

That is I’m skeptical, confused…

Summer: The only sad part was getting to the end and realizing that Mom wasn’t going to be writing in it anymore.

Really‽ That was the only sad part‽

Snarkers! Let’s help Summer remember the other sad parts!

Lisa’s Legacy ’Lash

Today’s strip

Ouch! I just got narrative whiplash! For a strip that usually proceeds with the pace of a slow IV drip, it’s really unexpected to go from zombie prom, back to football for a day, and the very next day to Lisa’s Legacy Run. Has our favorite auteur suddenly decided to add cinematic flash cuts and literary techniques like simultaneous parallel subplots? Or is he just doing something incomprehensible like the time he teleported Les off of Kilimanjaro for a day to name Funky’s car?

Ah, Westview! Think of the tropes we’ll see today!

  • ¼-inch from reality.

    Check! Lisa’s Legacy Run, an event that briefly leaked out into reality, exists no more in Real Ohio, but persists like sciatica in Funky Ohio.

  • Being a “reality-based comic strip that depicts contemporary issues affecting young adults in a thought-provoking and sensitive manner.”

    Check! Cayla’s daughter and Lisa’s daughter are back from college, to help organize the race. In October. During midterms, I’d guess. Of course, we don’t know what’s been going on in these young women’s college lives, because all we’ve seen of that is them moving into a dorm room. You know: the most interesting, most sensitive thing young people do in college—move their stuff into a small room.

  • Cayla’s existence subordinated to Lisa.

    Check! She’s literally holding Lisa’s name before her.

  • A falling leaf.

    Check! Can you find it? Panel 2, center of window pane. It’s tricky, because the auteur and the colorist couldn’t be bothered to discuss how the falling leaf should be red or yellow, not green.

Hi! As the great Steve Martin once said (approximately): “I know it sounds insincere to say, ‘Hey! It’s really great to be here!’ But hey! It’s really great to be here.” I hope I shall snark entertainingly during my guest stint!

Threat Level Lisa

Link to today’s strip

YouTube (registered trademark, BTW) better upgrade their servers, pronto, before Boy Lisa follows through on his “threat” and crashes them with the tens of hits that video would certainly generate. Some arch-villian Frankie turned out to be. Ditto for his doughy henchman White Lenny, who is a real wuss compared to Black Lenny, who at least knew how to lean menacingly. Derin would have probably gotten the same results by simply throwing “Lisa’s secret journal” at them. Those corners do hurt, you know.

OK, so who had “they make a video of Summer reading random pages from her dead mother’s thirty-something year old journal that just happened to be discovered exactly when it fit into the story which forces Frankie and Lenny to give up when they threaten to air it on YouTube” in the “how does this arc end?” pool? Once again TheMaster finds the least-interesting, most random, nonsensical and totally balls-out stupid way of “crafting” a story that took what seems like a hundred weeks to tell. No one can predict what he’ll do and quite frankly I don’t think he even knows until he pens it. This whole story reads like he jotted it all down on a napkin while heading to the bathroom at 5am after a big craft beer, Seroquel and Nyquil bender. Like every other FW story does. It’s amazing, uncanny and totally inexplicable.

Prayer For The Sneering

Link to today’s strip

I’m admittedly as beady-eyed and nit-picky as anyone here at SoSF, so maybe my opinion is somewhat skewed. That said, Lisa’s silly little “prayer” comes across as being rather selfish and short-sighted to me. After all, how did she know back then what would become of Frankie? Perhaps he would have changed his ways and become, oh I don’t know, an ordained minister or a first responder hero or a devoted family man or whatever. Typical Lisa…me me me, always self-absorbed in that annoyingly cloying way she had (and still has despite being dead). In any event, as Nelson Muntz might say, “Haw haw! Your prayer went unanswered!”.

So what did Frankie do, exactly, to merit this non-stop sneering and eyebrow-cocking? His attempt to “cash in” on one of Lisa’s many tragedies? Les did it a few times. Cayla was practically boinging off the walls when the movie check arrived. Summer even went as far as to suggest a 3-D version of “Lisa’s Story”. What makes that any different? I get the feeling that any “outsiders” who dare to enter Westview get chased to the city limits by a group of pitchfork-toting sneering fat guys wearing pizza shop smocks in an old-fashioned car as “Dueling Banjos” plays in the background. What a bunch of hostile pricks.

But forget all that nonsense, as none of it matters anyway. The big news today is that Montoni’s appears to be selling T-shirts! I simply MUST have one, although because I’m not a XXXXL I doubt they’d be carrying my size. If Batom doesn’t start hawking these on his site he’s both lazy and stupid, because he’s sitting on a gold mine with those.