Angela picks a very pricey and stuffy restaurant for dinner: Pouissant's. The boys don't exactly fit in--and the evening only gets worse when the headwaiter seats them at the worst tables in the place: by the bathrooms. Between slow, inattentive service, the horrible stink of the toilets, and her dining companions' boorishness, by the end of the evening Angela has just had enough. But the worst is yet to come--when the bill is presented, she finds herself committing the ultimate breach of ettiquette of the night: she has no money to pay the check!
BABF011-a--photoreal Lana visible on TV set (page 1)
page 1. The logo on the chip bag, "Laid", parodies Lay's Potato Chips.
page 1. The boys are watching an episode of the popular CW teen and young adult drama Smallville. In the series four forms of kryptonite have been introduced: green (weakens Clark), red (here, robs him of all inhibitions), black (splits him into his good and evil halves), and silver (causes paranoia; in actuality, not kryptonite but a part of a living computer virus named Milton Fine/Brainiac). The fictional type mentioned here, brown kyptonite, has a much more embarassing effect on Clark.
page 1. Angela's oath refers to Warner Bros. director Frank Tashlin, who early in his career drew editorial cartoons signed with the appellation "Tish-Tash". Also, "Tish" is an anagram for "shit".
page 2. "Jigaboo Junction's Next Top Crack 'Ho" refers to another CW offering, America's Next Top Model.
page 2. Josh's line about changing his socks is a reference to a line uttered by Moe in the Three Stooges short "Three Little Sew and Sews" (1939).
page 3. The fictitional clothing store "Charlie's Vintage Wear" refers to famous Warner Bros. director Charles M. Jones, and the streets the shop is located on are mamed for writer Michael Maltese and co-director Abe Levitow, whom Jones worked with in his MGM days.
page 4. The restaurant's name plays both on the word "puissant", meaning "strong" or "powerful", and the derogatory epithet "pissant". The restaurant first appeared in a lost short story by J.M. Sweet called "I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing Each to Each". The story, about a hearing-impaired man who recieves a radioactive implant in his ear that causes him to develop both augmented hearing and schizophrenic symptoms, was set largely in parts of Utica and New York City. This would either place Jigaboo Junction on the east coast (contradicting other references in past issues to it lying in the southern or southwest part of the U.S.), or indicate the restaurant is part of a franchise.
page 5. Josh's line about Alabama refers to a speech Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), an made during a campaign stop in which he claimed to have been deeply involved in the civil rights movement of the sixties, a move that earned him much criticism from black activists like Rev. Al Sharpton.
page 5. Commissioned is a semiautobiograpical webcomic about a cartoonist/role-playing gamer and his friends. Here is a link.
Al Bundy does a cameo, starting on page 6. Al is no stranger to the comic books; when Married With Children was at its peak in the early nineties, Marvel Comics produced a short-lived series starring the Bundys. This seems to suggest Jigaboo Junction is within driving distance of Chicago, where MWC was set.
page 7 . The dishes Jon tries to order, in very mangled French, are petit faux gras (the liver of a young goose), bouef borgnoine (beef cooked in wine), and poularde (chicken).
page 8. The man leaving the bathroom looks like one of the late Don Martin's designs. Martin was a longtime cartoonist for MAD Magazine, known for his eccentric art style and humor.
page 9. One of the restaurant patrons in the background of panel 4 bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Creosote, the extremely fat man from Monty Python and the Meaning of Life who consumes a large quantity of food and then, upon being given a "wafer-thin" after-dinner mint, explodes.
page 10. "Mastercrud" parodies Mastercard, right down to the famous red-and-yellow dual circle logo.
page 11. "Doubledeal Book Club" plays on the Doubleday Book Club, a mail-order library which prices their books pretty much as suggested, and Daniele Steel is indeed one of its top sellers.
page 12.The final panel parodies both the classic cocentric circle design of the Looney Tunes cartoons and the ending of the Married With Children episode "Wabbit Season".
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This story is part of an arc: 1 2
Title: "Family Ties"
Story (out of 24 pages): 8 p.
Writer: J. M. Sweet and Jack Staten Monahew
Pencillers: Kenton "J.C." Washam and J.M. Sweet
Letterer: Shane T. Eaton
Colorist: Theo A. "Jet" Swann
Summary
Penyem comes face to face with her deceased parents' ghosts, who proceed to berate her and tell her what a failure she has been as a person and a daughter. She is frozen with fear by the mad psychologist's spell. Rasputin observes that Jimmo--due to his half-alien brain--is immune to his spell and decides to simply kill him. Will Jimmo be able to break his sister's trance and get her out before her mind snaps and she ends up like Cat...or worse?
page 18. Penyem's mother's remarks to her daughter are quoted nearly verbatim from a post made to the Smoking Cat guestbook.
page 19. Jimmo is seen hatless for the first time in the series. His head resembles his namesake's, Barbaeus.
page 20. The evil wizard Gargamel was the Smurfs' archenemy, forever trying to capture or destroy them.
In an early draft of the script, Penyem and Cat were revealed to be lovers, and share a passionate kiss in front of Jimmo. This idea was scrapped, although a brief exchange between Penyem and Rasputin on page 22 does imply that she may be a lesbian.
Jimmo's last line paraphrases the final line of Oscar Levant's autobiography Memoirs of an Amnesiac.
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There are four pages of filler in this issue:
"Dusty Rhodes' Wild Side Factoids/"...And now, a poetic moment with Billy". Dusty Rhodes looks at elephants; Billy's ode to a gaseous legume.
"Factoids" contains recycled animation from BABF12-b. "Poetic Moment" contains recycled animation from issues #12 and #20.
"The Rubik's Cube". Ben helps Josh solve a tricky Rubik's cube.
"Radio Active". Jon boogies down to the music in a radio jingle.
The character Jon is sketching is Mr. Grumpy, one of the characters in the popular Mr. Men and Little Miss series, created by Roger Hargreaves. These colorful idiosyncratic characters appeared frequently in Sweet's early work.
"Aunt Flo's Place" refers to both a spinoff of the TV show Alice, starring Polly Marshall ("Flo") as a restaurant owner, and to a slang term for menstruation. Also, the restaurant's specials, "snapper" and "bacon strip", are slang terms for a vagina.
"Dr. Belch's Gag Bag/Change of Pace". A question on a vocabulary test; Monty gives to the church.
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Angela thinks Josh, Jon, and Ben are turning into a pack of couch-potato slobs, so she decides to try to impart a little class on them. She makes reservations for the Trio and herself at a posh eatery, hoping the high-class atmosphere will rub off on them. But can Angela transform these sow's ears into three designer Gucci silk purses?
