Aside from Les, Cayla, and their offspring, about the only other folks not seated at Harriet Dinkle’s massive Thanksgiving table were the Atomik Komix Krewe. Maybe it was necessary for them to work through the holiday: after all, AK is a booming comics publisher, regularly pushing out new titles, operated by a staff of six people with a median age well north of sixty.
It was too much work for yours truly to sit at the computer like Flesh Floppyhead (thanks to snarker Sourbelly for coming up with that moniker!) in today’s strip and look up “gravitational wave theory.” OK: I spent three minutes looking it up, enough time for me to glean that it doesn’t really have to do with the ability of one to “defy gravity.” The letter writer, by the way, can accept a superhero who’s “composed of air…and who needs an airtight suit to encase him,” but must take exception to Doctor Atmos’ also being able to defy gravity. Look, forget about wave theory: according to basic physics, nothing can defy gravity. Except in, say, a comic book. Jeez, what kind of terrible person goes online to complain about comics not following real life?
I’m less curious about the identity of the unseen mystery nerd in today’s strip than I am about how they intend to “make it” to Comic-Con, which even in the Batiukverse is occurring “@HOME”.
Hey waitjustagoshdarnminute! This webpage is the same thing Pete was looking at on Monday, isn’t it?! Pete wasn’t even contacted directly by the Comic-Con or Eisner Award folks? He learned the news by reading a press release on the Comic-Con website? I don’t know if that is hilarious, sad, or hilariously sad…
(Some of our loyal SOSF commenters actually noted that Pete seemed to learn of Flash and Ruby’s induction via such indirect communication as a webpage earlier this week. It would appear that J.J. O’Malley was the first commenter to mention it, so please come up to receive your “Beady-Eyed Nitpicker” award, J.J.)
I want to thank everyone in the comments yesterday for completely ruining what I was going to post today. I was going to go on and on about how Dinkle has learned all about online fundraising multiple times over the past few years, and pull up the strips to prove it. But our crack commenters Billy the Skink and Banana Jr. already discussed it in depth. Jerks.
I mean, what am I supposed to talk about today? The fact that Dinkle couldn’t wait to call his wife over his viral cat video epiphany, and is postponing practice to do it? The fact that he apparently called his wife on a Playstation Vita? The fact that Lillian is now carrying the pineapple laptop around one handed, and it made me question if she’s been doing that all week?
While going mad trying to scrape together something passing for an amusing thought, my eyes were drawn to the wedding rings Dinkle and Harriet are wearing. It’s an interesting detail to include when the art so often seems quarter-assed. Scrolling through the strips this arc, the ring is inconsistent. It showed up Sunday, but the art on the Sunday strips is always higher effort. It showed up on Monday April, 12. But after that, it was nowhere to be seen, even when the hands were in focus.
Slipping off the ring to pick up chicks? What a sly lad.
And scrolling through archives, there are more disappearing wedding rings than last call at a dive bar. Wedding rings tend to appear when the person’s marriage is either being discussed, or the spouse is in the strip, and be absent otherwise. It’s like the rings exist in some kind of phantom zone and magically phase into being when contacted with an unseen magical matrimonial energy field.
This is best exemplified from Funky’s AA exercise rant from last month. Remembering his wife causes Funky to magically manifest his wedding ring mid-speech.
I don’t even know what I’m trying to say with this, just something weird I noticed.
Even weirder, did you know that Lillian magically manifested a ring yesterday in service of a crappy joke?
The Mystery Continues.
This has been your daily dose of Nitpicking News! Finding something to say about nothing since 2010.
Join us tomorrow as we veer off on oblique tangents to keep from going mad with boredom and frustration, and watch with baited breath as we wait to see if the downvote fairy will visit again tonight and slip us all a little present under our comments while we sleep.
Many many apologies for the late post tonight. I was working late on the farm, trying to get a field of mown hay chopped before forecasted rain. I was out there till 10, well after dark.
As I was driving the tractor back and forth across the field stubble, watching the windrows emerge from the inky black and enter the pool of tractor light. As I jogged from machine to machine in the chilly night air, a golden Cheshire moon sinking into the horizon, the Big Dipper above me at the very apex of the sky…I had a lot of time to think over this week. And I came to one conclusion.
It is dumber than dumb that dumb Tom thought that we all were too dumb to remember the dumb name of the dumb crowdfunding site, so he had to list it by it’s dumb name three dumb days in a row, and then he expects that we’re all smart enough to remember that dumb Dinkle wears a dumb medal under his dumb shirt because he showed us a month ago.
Oh look. Like so many of you guessed, adding a cat video will instantly lead to millions of dollars.
Sigh. I mean. I guess things are moving quickly. I wouldn’t have put it past Tom to subject us to a full week of Dinkle and Lillian sitting as they were on Monday, brainstorming ideas they won’t use back and forth, complete with bad wordplay.
But the writing today. Was he getting paid by the word? The letter?
It reminded me of an old ‘Between Friends‘ strip I used to have pasted to my door. (Between Friends is by Sandra Bell-Lundy. The art is simplistic, but the writing is great.) In the comic one woman spouts an unwieldly word-zeppelin. The other woman looks up at it, pulls out a pencil, and erases most of the words, simplifying the sentence.
The first woman looks at it and comments, “That’s what I said.”
The other woman replies, “No, that’s what you MEANT.”
A little something like this.
Or maybe something like this.
But, really, I think today’s strip is best with a little New Yorker magazine flair.
Aside from Les, Cayla, and their offspring, about the only other folks not seated at Harriet Dinkle’s massive Thanksgiving table were the Atomik Komix Krewe. Maybe it was necessary for them to work through the holiday: after all, AK is a booming comics publisher, regularly pushing out new titles, operated by a staff of six people with a median age well north of sixty.
Son of Stuck Funky 