Le Chat Stupide

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Yeah, that Hollywood sure is crazy all right. This arc was a perfect example. What a wacky place, like how they changed the cancer screenplay so that Lisa lived, the way they wrote an adopted son into the script, the way they go to restaurants…man, the zaniness is just overwhelming in Hollywood, just totally nutty. No wonder Thelma (who, like Mason, only gets to have a personality at the END of the story) is seeing an imaginary cat that Les talks to when he’s agonizing over writing about his dead wife. Very clever, Author Guy, very clever.

And all this time it’s been that damned cat that’s made Les the single most objectionable character in the history of ever. I see. Perhaps Batom needs to slow down with the seasonal craft beers until AFTER he finishes one of these mega-long arcs. What’s another ten minutes, right?

But seriously, if this is indeed the end of the epically annoying screenplay arc, talk about ending with a resounding thud. You can almost hear the sad trombone after panel three….”whaaaa-waaaa”. TB’s the master of the anticlimax, it’s like he wants to just get it over with as much as his readers do. What a dreary display.

Home Is Where The Apathy Is

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After a long, insufferable summer of sitting around doing nothing, Dickface just can’t wait to get home so he can sit THERE doing nothing. The sheer ambition of the man boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Porch swings, gazebos, pizza, his overweight dimwitted pals, comic books, pizza…maybe if he’s lucky his wife will get sick and die so he’ll finally have some new material to work with. Then everything will TRULY be just like it was before!

It’s increasingly clear that Author Guy’s greatest talent is the ability to keep a straight face during those moronic puff-piece interviews of his. I’ve seen better “writing” on cereal boxes. The guy who does “Bazooka Joe” is practically Hemingway next to this joker. This was a complete shambles from top to bottom, obviously the “work” of someone who stopped giving a shit years ago.

The funniest thing about this is how everyone respects Les AFTER he gives up and quits. Welcome to the Batiukverse, where up is down, black is white and apathy is a virtue to be respected and admired.

For Reel??

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I sometimes wonder if Author Guy sits there in Batom Inc. World HQ with felt tip in hand, poring over his little stories and occasionally leaping from his chair and yelling “No! Dammit, this still makes too much sense! I have to dumb it down again and again until it’s JUST RIGHT!!!!”. It’s just difficult for me to accept that someone…anyone…could come up with anything this stupid accidentally. The way he ignores his own continuity, the way he glosses right over plot developments that just happened mere days ago, the way he does it time after time after time with such predictable ease…it has to be a con, it just has to be. No one can be this consistently awful without trying to be.

As far as today’s strip is concerned, uh, yeah. Dumb “insider” lingo, idiotic contrivance out of nowhere, plot details at odds with things that just happened a few days before, Les behaving like a self-centered narcissistic jerk-off, that stupid cat hanging around for no reason…yup, sounds about right. Why even bother with these plodding mega-arcs if you’re just going to give up halfway through and resort to crappy filler and nonsensical garbage to finish them up? Again, it makes no sense unless it’s on purpose. It has to be.

 

Sorry…Sorry Indeed

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Well, I would think that getting Adam Sandler to replace Mason f*cking Jarr would be quite a coup for a shitty little made-for-cable TV film. I mean the quality of his work aside, he IS a real “movie star” who manages to crank out a film every year or two like clockwork, plus he’s a major “name” with a fan base and everything. In fact, Sandler might actually be a good choice to play a smug neurotic asshole with a knack for being annoying, as it’s pretty much his main stock character.

But naturally Les replies with deadpan disdain, as he’s Very Serious Artist and not some clown who’s dancing to Hollywood’s depraved and vapid tune anymore. He’s using the ol’ kill fee (which Batom never even bothered to explain, BTW) to put this sordid chapter of his post-cancer book life behind him for good. No siree, no more Hollywood bullshit for the Delicate Genius. You either play by the cancer book’s rules or you don’t play at all.

Interesting to see Author Guy taking a direct potshot like that, I wonder if he’s “real life” pals with Sandler or something? That can’t be…can it? I’m sure that Sandler is merely TB’s stand-in for all lowbrow Hollywood dreck, an easy target. Anyone responsible for “writing” a piece of garbage as bad as this story is shouldn’t be knocking anyone for anything if you ask me. Sure, Sandler’s movies might be painfully bad but I’d wager that any one of his most awful films is still funnier than all of Act III combined, absolutely no doubt. I guess it’s easy for a guy like BatTom to take snarky little digs at at celebrities, working as he is in near-total anonymity and all.

And unless he ends up fleshing out this “SJ” movie fantasy (shudder) it looks like that’s all for Mason Jarr. I honestly always felt bad for the guy. Imagine being cast as Les Moore in a movie, I mean THAT’S indignity.

Thelma And Ennuis

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Today sees Tombat trying way, way too hard to drive home his “point” about how horrible “Hollywood” is yet again, this time via “Thelma”, Clay Wallace’s awful, rude, somewhat mysterious and clearly miserable office drone. Man, if that woman (she IS a woman…right?) isn’t a born Westviewian I don’t know who is, she’d fit right in at WHS, Montoni’s or the front desk at the local cancer hospital without missing a beat. Awful hair, worse attitude, obnoxiously rude…forget about those “Hollywood starlets on the make” because Thelma is the REAL threat, a woman seemingly MADE for Les Moore. Methinks they’ll get along wonderfully as they attack the business at hand.

Of course I have no idea what that business might entail, as Batom has wasted the entire week with a bunch of nonsensical and unrelated babbling, but still. I’m sure he’ll get to the “script doctor” and the “table read” eventually and then maybe this idiotic tale might start to become somewhat coherent. And then again, maybe it won’t. Either way, it won’t really matter as we all know this idiocy will end with Les sitting on that crappy porch swing ruminating over how turning down that filthy Hollywood loot was the only real choice he had because of Lisa and his “art” and so on and so forth. Dopey premise, weeks of pointless repetition and senseless yammering, quick and cheap “resolution”, that’s the time-tested FW formula responsible for churning out all this fantastic art over the years. Why tamper with success, you know? Sigh.