word zeppelins – Page 3 – Son of Stuck Funky

Rag-snore-rok

Hey, we’re finally getting around to the reason behind Flash and Phil’s falling out in today’s strip and it’s… less than fascinating to say the least. Durwood, who asked Flash to elaborate on their split to kick this week off, appears to already know the answer to his own question anyways. So was the primary reason Durwood brought Phil up to Flash so he (and, by extension, TB) could humblebrag about selling Phil’s old comic book covers for the St. Lisa charity? I think that is a reasonable assumption.

I don’t know what to make of the fact that Flash is smiling as Durwood brings up the straw that broke the Holt-Freeman partnership camel’s back, so I won’t make anything of it much like how nothing has been made from this story arc’s rancid ingredients.

Something’s got a Holt on me

If there was a contest to use the most words possible to say “Flash and Phil didn’t like each other”, today’s strip would definitely be a contender. Same for a most exposition crammed into a single panel contest, with panel 1 making a game effort. The only place such contests could possibly exist is, of course, the Batiukverse… so please forgive me if similar contests appear in this strip a year from now.

All that exposition in the first panel and Flash doesn’t realize the hall of fame awards given out at Comic-Con honor the deceased on the regular? Seems like having Comic-Con remotely would work well in Flash’s hypothetical honoring a live Phil Holt scenario, but since Flash doesn’t even know that dead people regularly get honored at this and other hall of fame ceremonies then it stands to reason that he wouldn’t know that Comic-Con and other events are held remotely. And by “Flash” in the previous sentence, I mean TB.

Addition and Subtraction

Link to today’s strip.

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.

Special Dumblivery

The panel borders of today’s strip are just holding it, just enough to keep it from —

It burst into the frame! Get out of the way! Get out of the way!

Get this Funky! Get this Funky! It’s boring and it’s crashing! It’s crashing terrible! Oh my, get out of the way please. It’s boring, bursting into the frame and it’s — and it’s falling on the boring cast and all the folks agree that this is terrible. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world.

And oh, it’s…boring, oh, four or five segments into the strip. It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. The smirks and the lameness now and the text is crashing into the foreheads, not quite to the boring cast. Oh, the humanity and all the characters smirking around here. I told you. It’s — I can’t even type to the readers whose snark we host here. It – It’s….I — I can’t type ladies and gentlemen.

Honest, it’s completely a mass of smirking dreck. And everybody can’t hardly read it. It’s hard, it’s crazy. Folks, I — I — I’m sorry. Honestly, I — I can hardly read it.

I — I’m gonna step away where I cannot see it. Funky, that’s terrible. I – I can’t….Listen folks, I — I’m gonna have to stop for a minute because I’ve lost my head. This is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.

With sincerest apologies to Herb Morrison and humanity… and Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (who TB should also apologize to).

Chester’s Treasure

*Hat tip to iansdrunkenbeard in yesterday’s comments.*

I’m just so sick of that surprised expression that’s been on Chester’s face this whole week. Who the hell goes to the time and expense of buying up copyrights and setting up a “shell corporation” and then forgets all about it? And what was the point of this shell corporation, anyway? Merely to pad out this insipid arc for a couple few more days, I guess.