Datamining: New Smash Bros Leak
hee hoo
Marty is in full ass hole mode now. His success is measured in the failure of others, as that is the only way he has ever known it. The concept of a legitimate victory is foreign to him, so he makes up the definition of one as he goes, much to the frustration and dismay of those around him.
His confidence is admirable. I can’t wait to see what punishment I doled out for him to address the belief that he doesn’t get hangovers. (It’s probably none. Awful people do not get punished, ever.)
I do want to say that I believe the waitress will come back, with a name and a backstory in the next few pages. We will see. I’ve become quite fond of not reading ahead before I write these posts.
They just run around doing stuff
And out of nowhere we get continuity from Harvest’s strips? We must have been hitting the Mountain Dew HARD back then. (We were not good at misbehaving yet.)
We’re brushing up against our own continuity, and we known it. Continuity is what’s going on here, though. Flatliner had been around too long to not to become entirely self referential.
I’m following the arbitrary move I made last time, and that’s when the strip gets all weird and shrunken in the post editor, I cap off the number of strips for the day. I’m already asking you to do work of reading it, and in this case clicking on it in some fashion, too. I’m not going to make you read a third one. See what I do for you in cutting out a third of my own workload?
Updated 20 yrs later to say “What the ass?”
A pair of edits, and a skip- though to be fair that new skip is only because it is incomprehensible. It may have worked for a week in ’04 but it’s certainly lost to the ages today.
Harvest is smoking a pipe in that first strip but I believe Zelda is soon to out-do him with a bubble pipe in a space helmet if I recall correctly.
The cat costume is an obvious disguise- it’s the wrong color. Harvest should have known that a gray cat was driving him to work and not a black cat.
As I write this I’m fresh off having rewatched a 90’s Roland Emmerich film just last night. I might love his trash movies much more now than I did when Flatliner was happening. The rest of the stuff on that list, I don’t remember. I still hate Unbreakable, though. Boring, overrated garbage. I did recently laugh at Old, though.
Pixel Perfect Panels
I find it endlessly great that the only payoff to the Prom Kings title and theoretical storyline is not in the Prom Kings chapter. This was probably around the time I divided it up, too. I was also too old to be going to proms, for sure. Though I guess I wasn’t old enough to be providing any contraband, so it’s just mildly barf.
I like that in the second strip it’s implied that the bear and the cat are probably just hanging out slightly off screen in all of the living room comics. My mind also races back to the ever-rotating posters. Were theses guys following a careful schedule, rotating through these awful posters highlighting things they should have been ashamed to even know about? Yes, yes they did.
If Flatliner were to come back today, there’d certainly be posters for the dumb crap I love now. My tastes have changed ever so slightly. So there would no longer be Love Hina or smile.dk. There would just be Murder, She Wrote and (find a second thing you enjoy, add it here by September 20th. -j)
Lanny and Ryan in hell might be Lanny and Ryan in purgatory, and this might be the start of a long story arc? I’d blame now knowing on the fact that this is seemingly the one project in my life I’ve ever been ahead on, but I can actually blame it on having gone through so many comics so rapidly. Have I gone through the purgatory arc and completely forgotten? I don’t know!
odl lay
I finally took some time away from updating this site. It went completely unnoticed because of two very important factors. First, this site will continue through with Flatliner through December 14th even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. The second, and much more important factor is that no one reads this site.
Marty comes down from his fantasy and we see him at dinner with Todd after work. Marty is incapable of keeping his mouth shut when it matters. So not only does he tell Todd about all the promotion, he immediately goes on to describe his fantasy with needless details, including Todd’s misfortune.
More of Marty’s mental goings-on are forthcoming, though I don’t think that would have continued to happen as often as the focus shifted away from him and on to the relationship between he and Chip. Chip was intended to be a main character. The world they live in has taken a back seat to Marty’s surroundings to establish his jackassery for this first and only installment.
Ready, set, good god, no!
And we’re off to the racist! Is that the phrase? Chapter 4 begins. In my admittedly damaged memory, Chapter 4 was good. The first comics of course stand as a testament to the fact that it is not. That’s why I clarify that memory is damaged. If it doesn’t directly relate back to Perfect Strangers or Family Matters everything automatically is assigned a lower priority. My niece’s middle name? It doesn’t immediately come to mind. The brand of chips that Carl and Steve stood in front of in the episode where they ripped off Honey, I Shrunk the Kids? Bringles. It was Bringles.
If you’re wondering if we are opening with a weed conversation, no, no we are not. Should it have been? Oh, yes. It should have. These are the days when we hadn’t even had a new Ghostbusters movie in 15 years, and the internet was all pretend bullshit like this site was. There weren’t even a bunch of misogynists to connect with and crap all over the perfectly fine reboot that would happen in approximately 12 more years.
Then Harvest tried to grow facial hair and did not like the response he got. In response to that response, he went full internet and published a strip where he kicks Hitler. I know that in the modern internet it’s illegal to not be saving up to buy an NFT of Hitler if you’re white, but back then you didn’t have to hide your dislike for him.
Anyway, it’s September 19th for you. For me it is considerably earlier. On September 19th, I will be enjoying my privilege as an American to serve on a jury of someone’s peers. I will of course be using the whole thing to take offense at who they consider me to be a peer. I bet they don’t even main Daisy in Smash. (BRB- Giving myself an award for my most Flatliner-esque line said in a blog post so far.)
High on a hill
Marty only understands victory as a measurement of quantity and I support this. Love what you have, and double down on it. Things don’t need to be better if they can just be bigger. That’s how Microsoft blasted their way into game console business and look where they are now!
Marty’s vision of what a perfect life would be is so grotesquely tangible and achievable, even for him. I think we’d all be better off feeling that way. It’s just too bad that instead we have capitalism. At least a few people are happy.
What was I doing giving myself the one month time frame? I suppose it’s a realistic choice. Flynn was not a character I would have wanted to keep developing. In the long term, I think Marty would eventually own the sandwich shop. There’d be a whole thing about what to rename it when it opened, and Marty would reveal the new name as Flynn’s anyway. Maybe Marty’s last name is Flynn and he was like a nephew but somehow didn’t make that basic connection. It would be great if he were completely unaware that he was benefitting from nepotism and he thought his shitty life had been triumphantly earned.
Happy are they
Flynn drops the bomb on Marty that he’s up for a promotion. He’s probably in danger of going up a tax bracket if he starts making more than minimum wage. If he were not so thoroughly engrossed in how much he loves his job, he would need to talk to his accountant to make sure it would make sense.
His accountant is likely Todd, who would begrudgingly advise Marty to take the job without doing any math, as he is not an accountant and also it’s something like 50 cents per hour over minimum wage.
As I mentioned in a previous post, this position is not going to Marty, though it won’t be covered in this script anywhere. The plan was for Marty to become a reluctant coworker of, roommate with, and eventually a subordinate to Chip. The Perfect Strangers energy remains strong- the goal was to put the two characters together and their lives would actually move forward, which still cramming formula into every story.
I actually laughed out loud a little bit when I re-read the “I’m poor now.” part. I wish I’d thought to mention that the t-shirt is stained. Too bad that computers don’t work like that and you can’t go back and change your documents ever.
Soon their duet will become a trio
Flynn’s words are very specific. He is not “getting on in years” and losing his cognitive senses. He includes an adjective each time he notes Marty’s presence. He’s been a good employee for the last three years. He’s been the most loyal employee for four years. It sounds like an oversight and I’m covering it up to hide a glaring error. It’s more likely the former, as that is exactly what happened.
Even so, that would have given a nice timeline for an origin story. Too bad this project is dead and it will never see the light of day. Actually it’s probably my most beloved original creation because I haven’t run it into the ground, covering every little possibility in my head. I wrote this, enjoyed writing it, and slipped it out the door never to be paid attention to again until now. There’s a lesson to be learned here. If only I were capable of learning…
I think we’re setting up Marty with some long term motivation to get his shit together, get promoted, and level up as an adult. He needs something that drives him just slightly more than the crush he sees once every two weeks if he’s lucky, so I dangled a promotion in front of him. Ultimately, the promotion was to be usurped by Chip during his tenure at the Sandwich Shop. We will not see that in this script.
My memory of the next scenes is pretty hazy. I’m hoping that I enjoy them.
