Tag: traveling green shirt

Shout at the Dinkle

Today’s strip reaches a level of trippy surrealism that even Heathcliffe’s current descent into nonsensicality cannot match for madness. Admittedly, I am not much of a Mötley Crüe fan, so perhaps Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars both attempting to play and chew on the same guitar is their MO. However, what the third Google Images result for “Mötley Crüe” is doing next to an image of Franklin Roosevelt (with his trademark cigarette holder photoshopped out) boring Funky’s dad and a couple other octogenarians is beyond me.

Also, it’s another Throwback Thursday!
Guess what TB was publishing on this very date back in 1983?
If you guessed essentially the same “Ha! band kids don’t practice!” shtick he was doing on Monday, you win one of several internets.

Hacks Headroom

I think there is some conversation or something happening in today’s strip, possibly involving former Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich. Sorry, I’ve been marveling at how these relatively small screens continue to capture most of Darin’s legume-like head rather than paying attention to whatever he and Kucinich are on about.

In other news, it’s Throwback Thursday!

What was happening in the Batiukverse 10 years ago today?
Wally, looking far too much like Act III Darin, tells Lefty he has decided to go back to Afghanistan after a single counseling session at the VA Hospital.

It’s clonely at the top

The video-conversation continues in today’s strip, with Durwood taking passive-aggressive swipes at his long-time pal. The “sponge clone” that Darin is busting Pete’s chops with, of course, was actually what Pete used to take The Amazing Mr. Sponge “to the top”. Of course, that is “to the top” of an industry whose best-seller nowadays typically moves less than half the volume of a mid-1960s issue of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen with all of its lunacy and bait-and-switch cover art.

Even so, “I came up with an idea that sold more copies of my writing” is pretty much the first thing I would put on my resume if I was an unemployed writer.

To Re-Pete This Message, Press 1

Despite his seeming disdain for most internet activity and his unabashed nostalgia for videotapes, compact discs, band boxes, and Space Invaders, TB seems to fully embrace one certain piece of modern technology, as we see again in today’s strip.

That technology, of course, is videoconferencing. TB LOVES to depict the technology of communicating face-to-face via screens that in the pre-Skype world of just a little more than a decade ago was accessible only to wealthy early adopters and Star Trek characters.

Petebusters

It’s Badly Drawn Beard Guy’s turn to speak. Mega Comics has “leaked the news” (no doubt via an anonymous Tweet) of the coming Spongeclone Saga, and cover artists are fighting over the gig like it’s Starbuck Jones. Naturally, Pete immediately balks at the prospect of tripling his workload—it takes all his strength to produce one monthly comic, let alone three! His superiors, no doubt acutely aware of Pete’s goldbrick tendencies, have already brought in an acclaimed and expeienced comic book writer “a guy who’s written a movie script for Netbusters,” which avid hate-readers of Batiuk’s strips will know  is where members of the Crankshaft household rent their movies. No doubt TB means to suggest that a “Netbusters” movie is barely a notch above “straight to cell phone.”