Tag: traveling green shirt

Off Track

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. today’s strip returns to the Frankie plot-line which is horrible for two reasons:

1. Whatever these two dopes are plotting, please get on with it! Talking in veiled, coded language just confuses everyone. Even if you came right out and said what your Big Plan was we’d probably still be confused because it’s going to be something really, really dumb.

2. Most of last week’s black and white rambling from Jupiter Jones ended up going absolutely nowhere. One could credit this as a slow-burn sort of plot building but there’s so many loose ends that never get returned to I’m guessing there’s a good chance the jealousy Cindy has may not even be visited again.

♩♫♪♩♩

Paul Jones
September 15, 2016 at 3:12 am
Well, there is a remedy: calling in legal to sue John into the Stone Age.

Batiuk’ll go ya one better: how about “back to a ball of dirt“? That’s one for the Batiukionary! Something that’s even nearer and dearer to TB’s heart than old comic books and weird turns of phrase is protection of intellectual property. And while siccing one’s lawyers on, say, a blogger for “unauthorized use of the Funky Winkerbean name, trademark or comic strips” might be valid, query what standing has the studio to go after Dead Skunk Head? And if that’s the lawyers calling John, how the hell did they get his number?

Flop Secret

Naturally Pete Rafalowski frequents whichever fanboy gossip site John’s posted to, even while he’s on the set of The Upcoming Starbucks Jones Movie. My favorite thing about today’s strip is how Mason “Jarre”, so blasé in the first two panels, appears completely taken aback in panel three. Even the little Superman curl on his forehead is sticking out, like a miniature version of Cindy’s high school hairdo.

Wally Thinkerbean

If only Tom Batiuk trusted his characters to inhabit their own stories. and his readers to follow along. We’ve long since established that poor Wally can barely function in 21st century Westview. But in a story arc where he’s the main character, we must listen to Wally’s wife and uncle cousin boss narrate the “action”. In the case of today’s strip, this is done in order to set up the wordless third panel punchline, where we see “focused and ready” Wally sitting intently, surrounded by his younger peers whose attention is anywhere but on the lesson. This marks quite a change for our Wally in the six years since his first community college go-round (see below), during which time he was not merely distracted but actually asleep in class. It’s gotta be those glasses!


Tandboori Chicken

What!? After pulling the rug out from under us once with that “It was just a video game” cop-out ending to the Wally getting IED’d story arc Tomhack wastes our week with more of the same in today’s strip

How much of this is a dream!? Because Darin working on a major Hollywood movie with pretty much nil experience seems more like a far-fetched fever dream than them illegally boarding a Chinese vessel. Is this Inception or some shit I don’t have time for? Is Pete dreaming all this back in New York!?