Tag: tedium

Con Artist

By request: a Comic Con attendee stuns BatYam by cosplaying as long-forgotten FW Act II character Cutty McCutterson, WHS’ legendary wood shop teacher. Remember his running gag about the tourniquets?

Hey gang, just a quick Wednesday night post for the hell of it. I was visiting The Komix Thoughts blog, and learned that our old pal BatYam was, of course, attending this year’s Comic Con. So I clicked to “read more”, and discovered that Comic Con mainly consists of cosplaying weirdos and standing in (or as we sometimes say out here, on) line. And after reading his five or six gripping sentences and seeing his handful of rather mundane photographs from the event, I began to ponder the question of what it would take to get ol’ TomBan excited about anything at all, as he always seems to be all low-key and barely amused in that annoyingly dull and tedious way of his.

“Today I was rooting around in the attic, and I found a mint copy of Action Comics #1. It was exciting.”

“Today an old friend gifted me with the actual suit Adam West wore in the “Batman” TV series. It was interesting.”

“Today I was bitten by a spider, and now I seem to have developed super powers. I wonder where this will lead?”

Comic Con is like his FAVORITE THING IN THE WORLD and he describes it like a trip to the DMV. And this, in a nutshell, is why we so mercilessly mocked his “writing” abilities. We should all chip in and buy the guy a bottle of No-Doz and a Benzedrex inhaler, just to maybe wake him up a little.

“Comic-Con isn’t nicknamed “Line-Con” for nothing”. Given his rare knack for hilarious insights and witty zingers like that, it’s easy to see how FW ran for over two hundred years. I love his random, mundane vacation pics. Like when he went to Hollywood and took pics of that one building. Great stuff.

A Smug Bearded Dick With Ears Walks Into A Bar

Link

I studied this one for a while, trying to figure out what the smug bearded jerk’s massive word balloons were supposed to mean. “Suspend his disbelief” in what? Life? Death? Funerals? Roulette? The continued existence of Bob Dylan? Then, after some really annoying pondering, it started to make sense, sort of, in a roundabout and stupid way. I believe that what Les means here is that he refuses to acknowledge that he’s getting old and will die relatively soon, choosing instead to willfully ignore this harsh reality. Which is really out of character for Les when you think about it, as the guy’s entire identity is based around death. Unfortunately though, not his.

Anyhow, this is what happens when BatYam tries to out-clever himself. Everything devolves into a weird, half-assed mess where you end up wasting valuable minutes trying to figure out what the hell is going on. He could have simply said “I try not to think about it” and saved all kinds of word balloon space, but he’d have just wasted it anyway. God I hate Les so much, curse all you people who say “I’d even prefer a Les arc over this”. Never, ever wish for that, it’s bad mojo.

The Trilogy Of Tedium

Link To This One

It’s called a “tetralogy”, you nimrods. Or a “quadrilogy”, if you prefer. It took me all of three seconds to learn this. But BatYam felt he really needed to drive Flash Freeman’s general imbecility home, again, so here we are. It would appear that once again he’s done the impossible and discovered something even more tedious than that “Elemental Force” arc from a few months back, and that “something” is watching Flash and Phil talking to Batton about it. That BatHam, always pushing his artistic boundaries.

That “Elementals” arc was absolute hell to get through and I really hope we’re not revisiting that fiasco again, because I am totally out of sub-atomic particle puns. It really is remarkable how quickly Flash Freeman became one of my most despised FW characters, as he wasn’t even in the strip until a few years ago. And it was better that way. Marginally, yes, but nevertheless.

Boreds Of The New Church

Link To Today’s Thing

Thanks to everyone who held down the fort since my last stint! So based on all available evidence thus far, Dinkle went over to Bedside Manor, told the Manorisms they had a gig, then loaded them into some sort of cargo van without telling anyone where they were going. That nursing home’s ombudsman must have quite a full schedule. Bedside Manor might want to consider some sort of key card entry system or something, as right now anyone can just wander in and lead the residents God-only-knows where.

And speaking of God, what’s Walt’s problem? Is he skittish about churches specifically or being indoors in general? I believe it’s the former, but the gag here is so weak it leaves itself open to multiple interpretations, all of them boring. Now if we were in Act II, we’d eventually learn that Walt was involved in some sort of ghastly and tragic church fire, collapse or explosion as a youth, which would explain his pensive reaction. But this is Act III, which means it’s probably just a time-killing aside that seemed a lot funnier jotted down on a pizzeria napkin than it ended up playing out in the strip. And that’s certainly nothing new.

Understatement Of The Year

How do you make a “long story” longer? You do what TB does in today’s strip, talk about how long the story is while telling absolutely none of it. It could low-level fridge brilliance if it was in the service of a joke about how long everything in this story arc seems to be taking.

How do you make a short SOSF post shorter? Make it about today’s strip…