Tag: wry self-deprecation

There’s No Deprecation Like Self-Deprecation Like No Deprecation I Know

Link To This Thing

That’s right, I’m back for an incredibly rare and extremely courageous third week. I don’t give a damn about what those fancy doctors say, with their “degrees” and their “worrisome test results”, I’m doing it, dammit. Never you mind “why”. If I want to throw myself on a grenade arc for the sake of the SoSF staff, then that’s what I’ll do.

As always, the regret re: doing a third week began immediately upon seeing the Monday strip. More Boy Lisa AND Batton f*cking Thomas…sigh. Maybe if Batton spent a little less time softly making wry, self-deprecating remarks about how mediocre and obscure he is and a little more time working, someone might actually read his stupid strip. He’s one of the dreariest, least-likeable characters in the entire strip, minus maybe Linda, I guess. Why is he even there? He STILL works out every day in the Atomik Komix studio? What, Phil, Flash, Ruby and Pete aren’t already wry and self-deprecating enough for one office?

The Les He Knows, The Better

More word zeppelins in today’s strip… Not as bad as yesterday, but still, get your bookmarks out, folks!

You know, this is actually one of TB’s tidiest retcons, probably because it is one of the very few intentional ones he’s ever undertaken. It takes the original scene and changes its context (slightly) by depicting a previously unseen scene. Tidy. The pieces actually fit together. There are no loose ends, deleted original context, or unresolved conflict with the originals scene. See? That’s not so hard.

Heck, as a bonus it even (unnecessarily but adeptly) explains a silly detail from the original scene, why Les has a camcorder and this Hari Seldon story readily at hand as if he was waiting for Lisa to lament about all the things Summer she will never get to experience. Turns out, he pretty much was just waiting on the chance to whip that camera on out.

Tidy as it is, this retcon was no more entertaining or less irritating because of it. In fact, it makes the origin story of the Lisa tapes tremendously off-putting. The focus shifts away from the impending reality of Summer growing up without a mother seen in the original scene to the needs of Summer’s nogoodnik parents… First, Lisa wants to record the tapes so she can live vicariously through Summer’s adolescence in her imagination. Then, Crazy and Lisa hatch this cockamamie plan to let Les take credit for the idea to record the infamous tapes, which only soothes his ego and bolsters his hero complex. These people are awful and I hope I never wind up sitting next to any of them on an airplane.

Porch Wry-rates

Cue the laugh track for today’s strip… because otherwise there’s just this long, awkward pause between non-jokes. It’s like a newsprint manifestation of those “sitcom without the laugh track” videos, only more more cringe-inducing. Why are these two ostensible friends (one of whom is terminally ill) being insufferable to each other? This kind of thing works when you establish that the two characters have some type of relationship and that unbearable wryness is their M.O. As far as I know, Crazy and Lisa never had much of a relationship of any kind (he was Les’ weirdo buddy), much less a whole Gilmore Girls thing going on.

Lisa really let Harry slide on that face after saying she didn’t feel as bad as she looked? Sure, she’s dressed like Crankshaft, but she’s also sick and at her own home. He’s the one who went out in public dressed like Gallagher wearing a Paul Simon Halloween costume.