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Funky Winkerbean, 3/11/17
OK, since we reintroduced the “Les has writer’s block” plot last week, I decided to dig into my archives and figure out what book exactly Les is trying and failing to write. This is his recent writing career, as near as I’ve been able to reconstruct it:
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10/13/14: After winning many accolades for Lisa’s Story, his book about his dead first wife, Lisa, Les surprises his alive current wife Cayla with the script for a graphic novel about her. Sure, it’s framed as “finding a new love and new life,” i.e., it’s framed as being post-Lisa, but she’s gotta be excited about that, right?
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10/17/14: She’s extremely excited about that, especially when Les promises to take her on an epic, tax-deductible “vacation” to Hong Kong to watch the book get printed!
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6/20/15: Eight months later, there’s been no movement on getting the Cayla book published, but Darrin suggests that Les write another damn Lisa book, this time about how Les and Lisa met. They met in high school, actually, which is pretty boring, but that doesn’t stop Les from being hella intrigued:
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8/18/15: Les announces that he’s taken Darrin’s advice and will begin “a prequel to Lisa’s Story” and that also oh, by the way, “my publisher has decided to hold off on publishing the book we just finished” (presumably the Cayla book) “and bring them out as epilogue and prologue,” thus cementing Cayla’s status as an epilogue to Les’s actual story with his actually important wife, Lisa, and also postponing the publication of her book and their big vacation to Hong Kong indefinitely.
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8/19/15: Even though the Hong Kong trip is off, Les tells Cayla to keep her passport current, because he might whisk her off to Paris at moment’s notice! This never happens.
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11/29/15: Les is having some trouble starting on this new book about how he met his dead wife Lisa!
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3/3/17: Les is still having some trouble starting on this new book about how he met his dead wife Lisa!
So all that sort of made sense, assuming you’re starting from the premise that Les is a monstrously bad husband, which, duh, but now today’s strip implies that this trilogy/prequel thing is a new idea, and that The Last Leaf (oh, I forgot to mention that Les’s book about Cayla, ostensibly about finding new love and happiness, inexplicably has the awful, death-haunted title The Last Leaf) already came out, and, I dunno, man. I think the important thing is that we never saw Les grappling with the process of writing his Cayla book at all, whereas his new Lisa is book is going to get rehashed over the course of multiple timeline-instances, forever and ever.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/11/17
At last, under a new writer, Rex Morgan is moving away from tales of the Morgans getting huge checks and/or mafia protection and getting back to basics: medical drama! Specifically, drama about dehydration and sleep apnea, some of the least exciting medical conditions known to man. Can’t wait for the six-week exploration of the heartbreak of shingles!
Mark Trail, 3/11/17
“Okay, honey! I was only kidding with you!” says Cherry, with a deadened facial expression that tells us that she was very much not kidding, that she doesn’t even know what the word “kidding” means.
