#169: The Town Buffoon

Arthur Trope Presents: The Inscrutables

No. 169

“Town Buffoon”

Well, the jury is in on Slothrop. I thought my better angels might prevail on this, but no. I just spent the better part of 60 min being dressed down in the Committee Room over our underwhelming social media numbers. It felt like the Inquisition. Slothrop was Torquemada & the other eight potatoes just stared at their hands. Turns out the sponsor meetings went poorly. And the licensing partner mtgs were even worse. Two sponsors pulled out and the licensors all lowered their rev share proposals for the rest of the year. The margin on tchotchkes in Hong Kong wasn’t great to begin with. No one blamed this on the new “strategic vision”, they put it all on “bad social”. Or at least no one spoke up when Slothrop did. I sat there feeling like the village idiot & was prepared to walk out, but couldn’t come up with an epic one-liner to throw down before I quit in a blaze of glory. There’s just too much to compress into one line, about the Committee, about the SynrSys acquisition, everything. Then Slothrop abruptly ended the meeting. It was strange. For some reason, I almost broke down and confessed to being promoted twice in the last month by accident. Interrogations do strange things to you, I guess. But whatever guilt I felt about that is now gone. Inky called in sick today. He didn’t say it, but he has friends at Marvel and I’m guessing he’s in NY working that angle. You can see from #169 that he didn’t clean it up. This is all Artie. Unpolished, the way Slothrop wants it. Not sure what the plan is now, so I’m going to carry on for the moment. I’ve pulled all the old panels, logged them, and queued up the S-MCSS machine for a thousand runs. There’s no one else here to make it happen, other than maybe Hanelore. So that’s the plan, while I try to think of some good one-liners. The moment has sort of passed, but it feels like a safe bet there will be others. Feel free to DM me with ideas. -Ed.