Montoni's – Son of Stuck Funky

Raising the Dolt

Over the last two weeks, “Terrible” Tom Batiuk and “Dangerous” Dan Davis have decided to bless us with another entry in the current passionate epic that’s been the main romantic focus of the post-Funky Winkerbean Funkyverse; a love that burns hotter than the stairs outside of Lizard Lil’s bookstore. I am of course referring to the love story between comic book writer-turned-screenwriter-turned-pizza shop owner Pete Roberts-Reynolds and Mindy Murdoch, granddaughter of Ed Crankshaft. The tale truly told of these two and Pete’s new pizza-serving robot has really showcased the chemistry they have. Just look at what has basically been Mindy’s default expression in most of the strips focused on the compelling and hilarious antics of them and their new robot pal.

Much like Stu Pickles dealing with his bratty niece, Mindy has spent most of the time — as indeed she spends most of her appearances — looking like a woman who’s lost control of her life. She seemingly regrets every single choice that she’s made that’s brought her to this point and undoubtedly is hoping that her fiance’s pizza serving robot will go berserk, and leave her with a fat insurance payout. BJ6K talked at length about just why Batty’s relationships don’t work and today I’ll be reinforcing the idea that he sucks at writing them by exploring the awful one between a woman who has at least nominally reached adulthood and her idiotic manchild boyfriend.

Mindy’s crossing over from Crankshaft into Funky Winkerbean happened late in Act II when she’d shown up to take the now open waitressing spot vacated by Becky Three Limbs. There she hung around as part of the Montoni’s scenery until she rather inexplicably became interested in sick twisted firestarter Mooch Myers. As ComicBookHarriet wonderfully documented this led to a story where Mooch discovered Lucy McKenzie’s comic book collection that, after some shenanigans, DCH John would use to fund the Komix Korner’s continued existence. That’s about all that’s really done with that relationship and by the time Act III rolls around Mindy and Mooch have broken up. So the relationship seems to have been simply to set up a story to explain how John’s shoddy business is still running after the timeskip in a story that was likely pawned off onto Crankshaft because between Lisa’s cancer and Darin’s search for his bio-mom, Batty had no space for it in Funky Winkerbean.

For the purposes of this entry, it also sets up that Mindy apparently has terrible taste in men. Possibly because her main examples of what a man are happen to be a self-absorbed old bus driver given to wanton acts of destruction and a nebbish Tom Batiuk self-insert.

After hooking up with Mooch, Mindy disappears back into the pages of Crankshaft and since I’m not really as familiar with that strip I’m not going to pretend to know what if anything she got up to over there; instead we’ll fast forward to 2017. Production on the Starbuck Jones film had wrapped and it had been decided to hold the premiere — as well as the Mason Jarre/Cindy Summers and Cliff Anger/Vera Nash double wedding that comes with it — at the Valentine Theater in Centerville because of Jff’s Starbuck Jones fandom. Pete, the film’s writer, is sent to scout out the Valentine for some reason (shouldn’t that be someone in the studio’s marketing department?) and comes across Mindy, showing up in Funky Winkerbean for the first time in a decade.

Pete’s immediately smitten and because for some reason he has tons of unearned confidence he decides to ask her out within seconds of meeting her.

For whatever reason Mindy accepts and unsurprisingly the date is at Montoni’s. Batty also cruelly subjects readers to the second of two vertical strips in a single week.

*Well why don’t you just date Jff then, Pete?*

Already Mindy seems to be regretting agreeing to do anything with this geek that’s not calling the cops on him for harassing her. But alas, she quickly gets over it when she detours from driving Pete to the airport to ~~drown him in Lake Erie~~ take him to Bedside Manor to meet her grandfather who is a quantum entity, simultaneously existing as a rotting husk in a Westview retirement home and a doddering, but still lively, old annoyance in Centerville.

Why does she really like him? Who knows. She only just met the guy, he acted like an ass and made bad jokes and took her to a crummy middling pizza joint that is an objective failure given what happened to it in Act III. None of it really matters of course. Batty loves using the red string to lasso his characters together so what need is there to explain it? Just accept it you terrible nitpickers!

In March 2018, Chester Hagglemore makes his non-anticipated return to the comic in order to announce that he’s reviving the “spirit of Batom Comics” by starting a new company called Atomic Comics — later chaged to Atomik Komix. As part of it he wants to recruit superstar (used very loosely) writer Pete to be his flagship (and seemingly only) writer, as well as Darin to do art. Pete tags along on Darin and Jess’ trip back to Westview and Pete laments the whole long distance relationship thing.

Of course it’s not helped by the fact that Pete basically blows her off for days at a time and she’s apparently just supposed to accept this as an amusing little quirk of his.

*My girlfriend wants me to pay attention to her!? Needy, needy, needy!*

He also claims that they’ve been moving so slow and old-fashioned that they’re still only emailing one another which is immediately shown to be a lie when Mindy texts him.

Now the context is, as said, that they were taking things slow and old-fashioned and given that third panel, the implication that what was sent is anything but. So that to me reads like Mindy is sending him some pretty naughty stuff which means either she’s sending Pete erotic pictures of herself or some pretty spicy texts, like erotic roleplaying. Either way, the heavy implication is that she’s sexting her boyfriend who then shows it off to his own friend for… what? To brag, I guess, because look how goddamn smug Pete is in that third panel.

Seriously, what a rotten little creep.

Since he’s in Ohio, Creepy Pete naturally takes it as an opportunity to see Mindy again taking her out to a show at the Valentine (because they can get everything comped and he’s a cheapskate) and dinner at… well, guess. They’re celebrating their seven-and-a-half month anniversary and Pete is so excited because this is “usually” when he gets banished to the Friend Zone.

*You can see the interest die and regret settle in in real time.*

Mindy, of course, is not amused by this at all since the implication is that Pete is a terrible boyfriend which… yeah, no shit. He’s Pete. But the natural urge to devour his head as if she were a praying mantis passes and Mindy stays with him, apparently cool with the fact that he’s giving up his Hollywood job to move back to Westview and write comic books.

Maybe she just takes pity on him. Perhaps that’s the secret, she looks at morons like Pete and Mooch as if they were the person version of a stray animal and feels compelled to take them in and fix them up. But perhaps the real answer is that she’s a pretty (per the standards of this fictional universe) blonde which means that charmless dorks are deserving, nay entitled, to her. Whatever the reason, she deigns to give him a goodbye kiss before he flies back to California. No doubt she’s also secretly hoping that his plane crashes into a mountain on the way back.

Pete and Darin take the job of course which means that he and Mindy are able to see each other. Pete shows more of his trademark charm and once again Mindy must fight back the understandable urge to toss Pete and his eyebags into Montoni’s pizza oven.

*“Well Min, I’ll tell you that mine is 69420.”*

With Atomik Komix now up and running — taking months to produce nothing but covers — Mindy decides to pay a visit to Pete at the studio. Pete proceeds to respond to her knowledge of comic book minutiae by acting like a patronizing dickhead.

Why is Pete surprised? He’s been talking to Mindy for about a year at this point. Mindy knows he writes comic books and likes comic books. Wouldn’t her knowing and liking comic books too be something that’s brought up early on as an interest both share and a common point of connection between them? Maybe Mindy just decided to hold that back otherwise Pete would have been proposing to her on date #1 ala DCH John and Becky. Or maybe it came up and Pete, being the unaware cretin he is, just ignored it because getting to know his girlfriend isn’t something he actually cares to do. He’s too busy creating bizarre fantasy scenarios in his head where he self-inserts into the lives old comic book creators after all.

Pete had been doing this thiking/fantasizing on the replica Cosmic Treadmill that had been lugged over to the studio and while Mindy waited for him to actually acknowledge her existence she’d also idly decided to color in an unfinished cover which Darin is flabbergasted by and lands her a job as Atomik Komix’s official in-house colorist thus proving that she has slightly more talent than her useless boyfriend.

Doubling down on being more useful than Pete, she comes up with the name Atomic Ape for the publisher’s trademark character after the boys have been tearing their hair out coming up with one. She also casually comes up with a sidekick for the character — Charger Chimp — when Chester suggests “the Lone Ranger needs a Tonto.” Pete responds to this like an absolute baby, throwing a giant bitchfit over her having the temerity to try and create a “cute and cuddly” sidekick for Atomic Ape (even though his boss is the one who suggested it) because he hates sidekicks.

*May as well have added a “You dumb broad!” somehwere in there.*

*“Wow, this guy is a total nitwit,” she thinks; stunned by his complete childishness.*

Mindy once more overcomes her urge to shove the stupid little hobgoblin out of the window and the two continue on as normal. The next big moment in their relationship occurs in the summer of 2019 when Pete takes her to the county fair but fails to win Mindy a prize. Showing that he’s not allowed to suffer any setbacks, the carny (a folk known for their kindness and honesty) gives Pete a giant stuffed tiger out of pity.

*It’s at least better than a ring made out of an I.O.U. paper?*

How the hell did Pete blow through his savings at a stupid carnival game? God, what a dumb putz. Anyway, after the first of their engagements the next year Pete invites Mindy and Jff out to Los Angeles for the premiere of the new Starbucks Jones movie. The urge to drop Pete out of the bucket of one of the helicopters helping to put out the giant fire that Pete has kindly invited her to see likely crops up once more when she has to remind him that instead of visiting caves where they film old B-movie quality pulp serials, they should be spending the day together. Like adults in a relationship tend to do.

*Yeaaaaah. Okaaaaaay. God I really wanted to see those rocks.*

But somehow, like usual, she’s able to push down her disgust at the fact this idiot nearly got her father killed (her idiot father’s own stupidity not withstanding) and continue with the relationship. By this point, Mindy has also become the protege to Golden Age has-been Ruby Lith who’s regaled Mindy with stories about what a sexist hellhole the comic book industry is. Thus when a beady-eyed nitpicker wanders into the Komix Korner and begins to criticize the work of her and Atomik Komix as a whole (in a story that is totally not Batty venting), Mindy is ready to push back while Pete stands around like the useless turd he is.

Jumping ahead to the next major stop on the Pete & Mindy Romance Express, it’s now late 2023. Funky Winkerbean has been done for just about a year but Batty has decided he’s not quite done with one aspect of it. Thus Batty inexplicably has Pete decide to get out of comic books, where he’s paid by an immature man with infinite money to do nothing but come up with characters and ideas for terrible covers, in order to resurrect the Sacred Temple with Pizza Box Monster helping to foot the cost.

*Yes, Batty fills this storyline with muliple “raising the dough” jokes. Of course he does.*

Mindy, naturally, is so thrilled at the prospect of Pete leaving behind his relatively stable career for the notoriously easy business of running a restaurant, a business that is not at all prone to failure. Really, why the hell would she stay with him after this? He quit his job and decided to take his savings, their savings really at this point, and buy into a pizza restaurant that closed due to bad business. All without consulting her about it beforehand. He just does it, then tells her after the fact.

Mindy should have left him then and there but she at least does immediately point out how stupid and poorly thought out the whole thing is.

Pete decides to spring one more surprise on her when he proposes to Mindy. Mindy, of course, accepts (despite already having been engaged for four years at this point) but inwardly she knows she made a mistake. Apparently she’s trapped in her own body, unable to control her own actions and thus is unable to stop herself from marrying the eyebagged munchkin. How terrifying for her.

So terrifying she’s apparently suffering some kind of psychotic break.

With Montoni’s successfully (?) reopened, they do what all young (??) couples living in Westview are expected to do and move into the apartment above Montoni’s. Once more, Mindy realizes that she’s got her work cut out for her with this doofus.

That more or less brings us up to the present. Most of Pete and Mindy’s appearances in Crankshaft basically fall into this category. Some crap happens at Montoni’s, Pete looks like a jackass, Mindy looks as if she’s hoping to come back as something other than a blonde woman surrounded by jackasses in the Greater Akron area in her next life. For a romantic couple they’re not even doing much coupley things as they seemed confined entirely to the space in and around Montoni’s — as if some kind of magic barrier has been erected that prevents them from leaving the immediate area — to engage in whatever wacky BS Pete’s dreamed up this week.

Pete and Mindy’s relationship is just really bad even by the standards of all the other bad relationships Batty’s forced readers to endure over the decades. There’s is nothing to show why she likes him and half their interactions are Pete being an annoying asshole while she contemplates if the negatives of a jail sentence will outweigh the relief of a little “accident” lifting the gun-wielding chimpanzee off of her back. And then in the end she swallows it down and resigns herself to having to play mommy-wife to an idiot manchild who may or may not even be able to tie his shoes without her help. Mindy herself doesn’t even seem to know why she’s going along with all of this half the time, it’s as if she has some vague awareness that her actions are being guided by outside forces and that she’s merely an action figure to be moved around to enact the childish scenarios this god has dreamed up for her.

It’s a truly awful relationship the embodies all of Batty’s worst traits in writing them. No reason for the characters to be together, no actual romance or chemistry or anything. The guy is a man who is broken or deficient in some way who’s essentially taken care of by the woman who somehow puts up with all of his crap. It’s like a whole “women are wiser” thing or the cliche sitcom set up of a schlubby moron and his pretty and smart wife but done in a way that feels even more outdated and lame. As if Mindy’s (or Rachel’s, Cayla’s, Lisa’s, Holly’s, etc.) role is to be a minder more than an actual wife or lover. Pete is just such an unlikable manchild even by the standards of the other manchildren in Batty’s work that it really makes the whole thing even worse than normal.

Really, if it’s possible to feel bad for a fictional character then I feel bad for Mindy. She’s not really all that interesting but she’s also fairly inoffensive which, for the characters occupying the Funkyverse, is usually the most postive thing that you can say about them. She doesn’t deserve to be shackled to such a failure and she herself seems to know it. Pete is not just an annoying twerp, he treats her like garbage by ignoring her, talking down to her and engaging in major life altering decisions that affect both of them without once ever talking to her and making sure she’s actually okay with any of it. Never once does he act like someone who’s actually in a relationship with another person who may have her own thoughts and feelings on things. He’s a selfish bastard who treats Mindy as someone who just kind of hangs around and who he occasionally gets to sleep with (unless she hopefully shuts him out when it comes to that) and for some reason Mindy is forced to go along with all of it, beholden to the whims of an immature moron because Batty has decided that she is to be Pete’s reward.

On the bright side, all of that regret and doubt that she’s forcing down into the deepest recesses of herself will eventually morph into cancer and allow her to ascend to sainthood. But as we’ve seen, not even death will free you from being trapped in Westview.

That about wraps it up for this timely little interlude into current Batiukian events. I’ll be getting back to the main event after this because there’s still so much more of Summer to see.

Failure to Launch

I had previously showed and examined the history of Sadie Summers to determine whether or not she lived up to Batty’s assertion that she was his biggest mistake. I, and others it seems, did not really see her the same way her creator did and that her biggest problems were endlessly underused potential and missed opportunities. After all, she did manage a 15 year run and it took a literal decade long timeskip for Batty to finally get rid of the character he so detested. So she was a failure mostly through no fault of her own.

In terms of failed characters in Funky Winkerbean, there are plenty that would hope to be as successful as Sadie was. Today, we’ll be looking at some of these characters and speculating on where things went wrong. This won’t be a comprehensive look at any one character but little snippets of a large variety of them. So let’s get started with the Parade of Failed Characters.

LIVINIA SWENSON: One of the more well known examples of this group. Present in the very first strip, she would appear fairly regularly early on with what seemed to be a few stock gags. First, there was her repeated shooting down of eternal loser Les Moore.

And there was also her being a young feminist.

However, her prominence would very quickly diminish and by the second year or so of the strip she’d quickly become barely better than a generic student. Her appearances would go down in number dramatically, with her final one being a wordless appearance in the Fourth of July 1976 strip.

Infamously, she would “show up” at one of the many Coming Reunions having been killed offscreen via her name and photo on a board showing Westview High School students who had died, many decades after she’d stopped showing up.

Why She Failed: Likely a case of Batty just not knowing what to do with her. He probably figured there wasn’t a lot of mileage in her young feminist thing and her shooting down Les became redundant once Mary Sue Sweetwater was introduced to fill the same role. Also she was The Girl and we all know how ineffectual Batty is at writing women.

ROLAND MATHEWS: Another character who appeared in the very first strip. He was the radical leftist who didn’t bow to The Man, man, and played by his own rules.

But he was also something of a hypocrite given his denigration of the women’s lib movement (via his antagonism of Wicked Wanda) and fighting capitalism with capitalism.

By 1975, however, he would be gone.

Why He Failed: The likely reason is that Batty probably figured there wasn’t enough to be mined from his shtick. Roland and Livinia both had the problem of being tied to specific cultural moments that were long becoming passé by the time they were being phased out in the mid-’70s. Of course it would be shortsightedness on TB’s part because the hypocritical radical never goes out of style and there were plenty of ways to take Roland’s character after Act I as well. So naturally Batty decided to do the most logical thing and after nearly half a century bring Roland back in the waning months of the strip…

…as a transgender woman named Rolanda and using the first strip posted as justification. It’s easy to say that Batty was simply pulling a contemporary issue out of his ass in a shallow and thoughtless attempt at chasing glory. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d do it with LGBT issues after all. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt as in 2025 comics writer Tony Isabella would come out as a transgender woman named Jenny Blake Isabella. Given how close they are, I don’t think it would be surprising if Batty knew about it long before Isabella came out publicly so I’m willing to take it more as a shout out to a good friend… with a little self-aggrandizing back patting on the side.

DEREK AND JUNEBUG: A pair of characters from early in the strip’s run. Derek, being African-American, seemed to exist as an excuse to make race-based jokes. Though they were never at his expense but rather directed at the unintended ignorance of characters like Les and Funky.

While Junebug was… well…

Yeah.

Neither would be written out or completely disappear per se. Junebug would appear well into the late portions of Act I as one of the cheerleaders in the recurring Cheers For Losing Football Teams gag weeks. Although like a lot of similar gag weeks she, specifically, does not need to be there for the joke to work. Derek’s importance would just steadily plummet and not even an attempt to give him a hip new hi-top haircut late in Act I could bring him back to relevance.

*This is like a Who’s Who lineup of characters for this entry.*

After Act I, both Derek and Junebug would continue to make what amounted to glorified cameos during the various Reunions That Came and Went and poor Derek would later get retconned out of a remembrance of the story where he, Funky, Les and Crazy Harry painting Big Walnut Tech’s school rock.

Why They Failed: As said, Derek mostly seemed to be a vehicle for race jokes and perhaps Batty quickly grew to feel uncomfortable with that. But he also seemed to serve the role of straight man having to grudgingly deal with the morons he was surrounded by and that’s still funny on its own. But I suppose Batty didn’t think so. Junebug was pretty much little more than a loud and sassy black woman and I could see Batty probably realizing that what amounted to an eyerolling stereotype wasn’t going to fly.

Of course, the work could have been done to make them into more rounded characters but effectively dropping them is much easier and never let it be said that Batty didn’t take the laziest way out of a given situation.

MARY SUE SWEETWATER: Batty’s Original Cindy, the first Batiuk Blonde goddess and unending desire of Les’ affections and unfortunate victim of his many romantic overtures.

She lasted at some point up into the 1980s but her relevance had massively declined long before then as Batty had other gags for Les and decided to have him pointlessly swoon over a variety of new girls instead, including a story arc with an unseen girl that our own BJ6K utterly despises.

In the later portions of Act III, though, Batty was feeling nostalgic and decided to drag Mary Sue out of mothballs but not before deciding that she needed a little divine punishment for denying God’s Favored Son what was rightfully his.

*Ha ha, it’s funny ’cause she’s fat and frumpy now while Les has pretty women throw themselves at him for some reason.*

But Batty was not quite done with humiliating Westview High’s formerly most popular girl and in 2022 poor Mary Sue would be unceremoniously Livinia’d, probably of diabeetus or something. But she deserved it for her cruel treatment of famous writer and Oscar-winning actress Leslie Moore.

Why She Failed: She never had much in the way of personality to begin with and as stated it seems that TB very quickly grew bored of her. Once Cindy showed up her fate was sealed.

JEROME: A marching band member who was introduced as a rival to/annoyance for Holly.

He marched out about as quickly as he marched in.

Why He Failed: Incredibly easy to see why. His entire joke was pretty much his posture as part of him taking the band too seriously. It’s not remotely funny and I can imagine that this is one of the few instances where Batty stopped and rightly thought “What the hell was I thinking?” and immediately deep sixed him.

BODEAN: A delinquent introduced during the late Act I story arc where Barry Balderman is forced to go to summer school.

He and Barry connect during the summer, bonding over their shitty parents and Barry helping him discover that he’s dyslexic, which Barry is knowledgable about because he too is dyslexic. Unfortunately literally none of this is ever followed up on and outside of a few small appearances Bodean fades away before Act I even ends.

Why He Failed: I guess Batty really wanted to do a Breakfast Club riff focused on Brian and Bender and once he got it out of his system he didn’t really have much use for Bodean. Hilariously, he’s mentioned prominently in the description for The Complete Funky Winkerbean, Volume 6 (on sale now, BUYITBUYITBUYIT) as a new cast member alongside Cindy Summers so Batty seems rather proud of a character he almost immediately discarded.

CARRIE: Cindy Summers’ best friend and right-hand girl during Act I. Carrie pretty much served the expected role of both enabling her friend but also being one of the only people willing or able to give her a needed ego check once in a while.

She even gets a story dedicated to her late in Act I when she gets caught shoplifting at the mall.

But while she appears right up until the very end of Act I she doesn’t survive the transition to Act II, only getting small appearances during Cindy’s wedding to Funky and Cindy serving as maid of honor at her own wedding.

Why She Failed: Pretty easy to see in this case. Act II and beyond Cindy is such a completely different character from her Act I self that there really wasn’t much of a place for the Alpha Bitch’s Sidekick when Cindy’s attitude had 180’d like that. Maybe she still could have had use as someone for Cindy to bounce off so she has her own circle outside of the Montoni’s Dungeon but really, Carrie mostly filled a role that wasn’t needed anymore.

DUANE: Duane was a slow kid who Les hung out with in the gym a couple of times.

After only a handful of appearances he disappeared.

Why He Failed: Another one that seems pretty easy to see. I’m guessing Batty quickly got cold feet at making jokes about an intellectually disabled person. At least one that wasn’t an evil sporto.

GINNY WOLFE: If the saying “the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long” could apply to any single character in Funky Winkerbean, then it would easily be Ginny. She first shows up in 1985 as a mere substitute teacher.

But almost immediately she’d be either promoted or retconned into being a full-time teacher and regular member of the cast, teaching a sort of vague health/family class. Her most notable trait was that she seemed to be just about the only teacher who actually tried to do her job seriously which seemed to cast her in the role of Westview’s Frank Grimes.

She got a rather nice moment near the end of Act I, dancing with Les at the prom in an attempt to lift his spirits after his date stood him up. This friendly relationship between the two would continue into the first year of Act II where Ginny was portrayed as Les’ main work buddy.

She then completely disappears at the start of the 1993 school year, her spot having been taken by new teacher Linda Lopez who is basically just Ginny right down to teaching the same class. Only hispanic and much more jaded. No mention is ever made of why Ginny was gone, not even an off-handed line about taking a job at another school or anything like that.

Why She Failed: I… I don’t know. I really don’t. She’d been a regular and prominent character since the mid-’80s and then poof! There one minute, gone the next with no explanation. The only thing that makes even a shred of sense to me is that perhaps TB wanted to add a bit of diversity to the cast and so decided to replace Ginny with an effectively similar character. But really, out of all the characters in this entry Ginny’s “failure” is the most baffling because she wasn’t really a failure at all.

TRACY: In 1989 it was yet another prom story and Batty decided to actually do something with the strip’s namesake, who’d long been supplanted from his role as central character by Les, and give him a girlfriend. Thus come prom, Funky is one of many boys vying for the previously unseen and newly single Tracy and lucky him, she chooses to go with him.

*This isn’t the only shot at “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” that TB would take around this time. I’m guessing he really hated that song.*

Funky and Tracy would be an item all the way up until the time jump at which point she’d disappear until randomly coming back for a week in 2005.

At least I think this is Tracy. I’m pretty sure this is Tracy. Vicky was the name of a girlfriend that Funky had in the first year or two of the strip but seeing as this “Vicky” was Funky’s prom date I assume this is Batty screwing up names or something. Anyway, this led to Funky briefly falling off the wagon which caused some short-lived strain in his relationship with Holly in the lead up to their wedding. Tracy would disappear for good after this but managed to get a small cameo in an Act III strip where Funky is reminiscing about a merry-go-round.

Why She Failed: Even during Act I Batty didn’t seem to have much of an idea as to what to do with her. Her personality largely began and ended at Funky’s Girlfriend. But hey, their relationship lasted longer than the Divine One from Act I.

CLIFF: In the mid-’90s, Fred Fairgood decided that WHS needed a security guard and hired only the best of the best.

Cliff was another character who’d disappear fairly quickly but he makes what is probably the most confusing appearance in the entire strip. During Crazy Harry’s time travel trip back to 1980, he stops by WHS and gets accosted by none other than Cliff as he tries to warn Lisa about The Cancer.

“No wait, wasn’t Cliff not introduced until the ’90s?” you’re likely wondering. “Didn’t you just say he was hired by Fred who wasn’t principal at the time this strip is supposed to take place?” Yes, you’d be correct. Given that only a few months later, the Funky gang would be shown as having graduated in 1972, it’s clear that by this point Batty had long stopped caring about keeping the timeline coherent. So Cliff was somehow a security guard 16 years before he got hired which was 8 years after the gang had graduated high school and nobody thinks anything of it.

Why He Failed: Batty seemed to have a thing for the “old person doing stuff that old people don’t do” gag and Cliff was just one example of that. But his gag wore thin very, very quickly so it’s easy to see why he’d stop showing up. He was an Act I style character in a post-Act I world.

CARLO: It’s 2000, Funky is now co-owner of Montoni’s and decides he needs some extra help so it’s time to hire a dedicated cook. He eventually settles on Carlo whose whole shtick is that he’s a preening prima donna chef, not a mere cook.

As quickly as he showed up he… well, doesn’t not show up but stops having much of any focus. He does inexplicably manage to last all the way into Act III, still an employee of Montoni’s in 2010.

The gang’s all here. There’s Khan aka Kahn, Les, Holly, Funky, Carlo, Rachel and wait; hold up. Who’s that on the far end? It’s… a waitress who randomly shows up for a single strip in 2009 as if she’s been waitressing at Montoni’s the entire time.

Anyway, in spite of Funky’s assurances, that 2010 strip above turns out to be the last appearance of Carlo (and Dark-Haired Freckle-Faced Waitress) as near as I can tell.

Why He Failed: He had one joke and it sucked, simple as. DHFFW standing around and looking sad was more intriguing than him.

JAROD POSEY: Balding moody loner who, as punishment for smoking in the bathroom, gets forced to watch the football team practice.

Shock of all shocks, he actually has a great arm and is quickly press-ganged into being the new quarterback for the Scapegoats. Despite doubts, he leads the team to a win.

You’d figure that this would be an ongoing story. The talented outcast finding success on the football field and gaining the acceptance of his peers, you know? Of course not. Outside of a one-off cameo where he puts the moves on Gloomy Crankshaft Twin he never again shows up.

Why He Failed: Batty is lazy.

While this is not an exhaustive list of characters we’re running kind of long so this is as good a place as any to wrap it up. To run it back to the start of this piece, Sadie is far from the only failed character in Funky Winkerbean and characters can fail for many reasons. Some, like Jerome and Carlo, are shallow and ill-conceived and worthy of all the negatives that Batty (or the reader) can throw on them. But many come down to TB being too lazy to have simply taken a few minutes to think about what could be done with them once he’d seemingly mined all he was going to mine. Some times he just made really nonsensical decisions like memoryholing Ginny or doing nothing with the easy story of outcast jock Jarod’s rise to being the big man on campus.

I guess in conclusion, all I can really say is that Batty should have given more appearances to DHFFW.

Where did she come from? Why is she so sad? Is it because she knows she’s a great design wasted on a piece of wallpaper? Is it because she’s trapped in Westview? I suppose like many of these other failed characters, we can only speculate on what could have been.

Sadie Sinks

Last time in this little retrospective on the life and times of Sadie Summers, we charted her journey as the strip entered the mid-1990s, exiting the wilds of early Act II as the comic that surrounded her would begin to settle into its more familiar form. By this point the holdover gags from Act I had begun to fade away as more dramatic storylines took their place. The period covered by part 3 saw the establishment of the poetry club’s literary magazine which would lead to a long storyline involving a suicide attempt by Susan Smith and, more broadly, a madcap trip across Europe for Les Moore tha would end in his proposing to Lisa.

Sadie was… involved in this but only just barely. A lot of her time during that period was spent either around the mall with her interchangeable friends or doing poetry club stuff with Susan but for the most part she never got deeply involved with the serious stories. It was that relationship with Susan which would be the most significant as 1995 had ended with Sadie being the one to welcome her back to Westview High in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness that Susan had received. After all, one can assume that the logic is that if the most popular girl in school is showing her support then everyone will have to follow suit. It’s an interesting and welcome bit of character development for Sadie. But sadly, like a lot of things with her it turns out to be a very stop-start sort of deal.

Much like most of the other years during the early portions of Act II, Sadie gets an early appearance in 1996 spotting Les at the mall.

She also complains about proficiency exams.

And has a sleepover.

*At least my birthday strip wasn’t a Les or Dinkle one.*

You’ll notice that there’s not really much going on in these and it’s very frustrating considering how 1995 ended. At least Sadie’s making some appearances though because I believe Susan basically disappears for a while and it goes along with a problem that Batty will have in the transition to Act III. He wants to do these big dramatic stories with heavy themes but doesn’t want to do the follow up. How Susan readjusts to life is an obvious story to explore, how Sadie being there for her is an obvious story to explore, but these aren’t things that Batty is interested in doing. He wants to do emotional stories without focusing on the emotional fallout from them. It’ll happen with the death of Lisa, it’ll happen when Bull drives over a cliff and it happens here, too, in the wake of Susan’s suicide attempt.

So following the big story with Susan, we get Sadie there for a big emotional moment when she returns… and we get nothing else. We get some pointless nonsense where Batty continues trying to make Sadie into Cindy Lite. She does get a multi-week story in May regarding the prom where oh no, she doesn’t have a date!

It’s also at this point where Sadie gets a redesign as she decides that the prom is a good time to get a haircut that she frets over but ultimately can’t back out of.

*Congratulations on finally entering 1993!*

As said she’d been fretting over not having a date and as Becky was still mostly a prop for her mother, she’d yet to be designated as Wally’s One True Love so that earlier appearance might have been set up for her having to settle to taking him. But no, Sadie just finds some random guy who breaks up with his girlfriend to take her.

*He’s shivering because this story has no heat.*

In the fall, she makes a glorified cameo during a story where Batty, via Wally, tells us that tobacco is wacko.

This is the point where it’s clear that Batty’s interest in Sadie has really waned as it’s not until January 1998, nearly a year and a half later, that Sadie next appears, this time in what’s nothing more than a random one-off strip.

She next shows up for a two week story in March. Les’ class is going on a trip to Washington D.C. and needs to have the number 1 focus of Batty’s high school strips (school levies are number 2): a fund raiser. But poor Susan, finally getting some attention again for the first time in over two years, is having trouble selling anything. Sadie picks up on this and decides she’s going to help out Susan.

(By the by, the D.C. trip is the origin of one of my favorite Batiukisms: vendos!)

*That would put Susan above most of the cast of this comic.*

Naturally, this involves that apparent favorite of teenage girl activities, the makeover. Which means that Sadie, Tiffany and Courtney-Who-Is-Now-Brittany drag Susan out to the mall.

And by the time they’re finished, Susan is practically unrecognizable.

*Considering Batty likes having his guys call their girlfriends and wives “kiddo”…*

So Sadie’s given Susan a makeover, doing something to help her feel more confident, she’s also paying for it all herself. And it’s not presented as having any ulterior motive, like it’ll reflect well on Sadie. She seems to be doing it entirely for Susan’s benefit and Susan doesn’t reject it. She likes her new look and keeps it. And it even benefits her… kind of.

This whole thing will lead to another attempted prestige arc as Batty decides to tell a story about domestic violence as Matt Miller turns out to be a less than ideal boyfriend and we have yet another instance of Frustrating TB Writing. Because Sadie and Susan are friends, because Sadie has done a lot for Susan and because Sadie’s makeover is the genesis of this story one would assume she’d have a big role to play in this storyline. Her friend is dating the big man on campus, he’s being controlling and physically abusive. She should have a lot to say and a lot to do. But no, she has nothing to do with anything. All she can get is a background cameo during graduation.

*Even worse, she has to talk with Linda.*

That’s it, that’s all she gets in a story where her friend is a victim of domestic violence! But of course, this story isn’t actually about Susan because this morphs into a story about Les and Lisa where we get the first (I believe) of the endless retellings — either in full or truncated — of the Lisa’s pregnancy story as well as the first retcon where Frankie (named for the first time) is revealed to have physically abused Lisa and forced himself on her.

Because that’s what this story needed. Not Sadie acting as someone her friend could confide in or maybe using her position as the most popular girl in school to stand up to Matt. Nope, it needed the Moores hijacking it and adding rape to the comic’s lore.

But let’s move on from that unpleasantness to something more, temporarily, happy as soon after graduation it’s the wedding of Funky and Cindy and given that her sister is getting married, Sadie will surely play a role right? At this point, I assume our collective naivete has been thoroughly washed away as she gets another glorified cameo.

*And the last of the Big Eighties Hair holdouts falls.*

At this point, Sadie is reduced to bit character status as it’s not until May 2000 when she next shows up with Cindy getting her a job at Westview’s Home for Wayward Young Women during breaks from college.

*I told you, Sadie, there is no escaping it.*

As is to be expected, this goes absolutely nowhere and Sadie won’t show up again until early 2002 when she talks with Wally before he takes the ROFLcopter to Laughganistan.

A few things, first that first panel in the first strip (firstfirstfirst) is wildly out of character and another example of Batty writing the character he thinks Sadie is versus the character that she actually is. The second is that this is a pretty radical change in direction for Sadie who’s gone from (as Batty sees her anyway) vapid popular girl concerned only with her own image to a conscientious peacenik.

Sadie will actually get the most attention she’s gotten in years in 2002 as she shortly afterwards hears the news of what happened to Wally and is obviously deeply affected by it.

And then shows up for Monroe’s brief return when he reads a letter that Wally had written shortly before his ROFLcopter was shot down by a LOLcket.

But looks are deceiving and like usual this is yet another false start as it’s close to a full year later, during the John Byrne illustrated story of Wally’s return in 2003, that she next shows up snarking about Becky’s taste in animal-haired men.

Now this is definitely the judgiest we’ve seen her in a long time but given that eternal Montoni’s waitress and Wally’s future Mrs. Fix-It Mommywife is joining in I guess we’re not intended to find it too bad. Or maybe we are as Rachel’s only real character at this point was “hot tease”, I don’t know.

It’s yet another year before she shows up again, this time in 2004 for a week of her reflecting on being a student in Les’ class.

*I guess this is supposed to be some sort of joke?*

She gets another appearance that year talking to Rachel about Becky finally escaping Pizzacatraz to take up the job as the WHS assistant band director.

By this point she’s been reduced to what are pretty much cameos as in 2005 she gets some wordless appearances during a week dedicated to Tony trying to teach his employees, including new waitress and Crankshaft guest character Mindy Murdoch, proper etiquette.

*“Especially that cartoonist guy. His stories never go anywhere.”*

And also makes a background appearance during the double wedding for Funky/Holly and Wally/Becky.

*I really have to give TB credit for somehow fitting two lame jakes into a single strip. Bravo, Tom!*

Sadie gets her first speaking role in well over two years in a November 2006 strip as she and Mindy complain about Rachel getting all the tips.

*Speaking of racial profiling, remember the Montoni’s red lining story? Remember how that went absolutely nowhere?*

The next week, Sadie appears as background wallpaper during Becky’s baby shower.

That 11/25/2006 strip will turn out to be Sadie’s last appearance. 2007 is basically all Lisa, all the time between her cancer and Darin searching for his bio-mom so Batty has no time for anyone else, especially not for characters he doesn’t like. She did get an Act III character design sheet however.

But if Batty ever had any intention of using her then he quickly discarded those ideas to cast her into the, as he called it, “Dumb Character Phantom Zone” and she was neither seen nor even so much as mentioned again. What happened to her in the intervening decade between Acts II and III? Who knows? Maybe she got out of Westview, got a decent job somewhere working in, I don’t know, marketing or HR or something. That seems like the kind of thing she’d do.

So that’s it, with Sadie’s final appearance we’ve come to the end of this examination and history lesson. But what was the point? As I said at the start of all of this, Sadie definitely is a failure on Batty’s part but it’s not for the reasons he considers. Rather, it’s because Tom Batiuk failed to ever properly realize her actual potential.

TB complained that Sadie was a clone, a doppelganger and a “pale imitation of her big sis” but she was that only because that’s what he wanted her to be. He wanted her to be Cindy Jr. because he enjoyed writing Cindy in Act I but the problem is that Cindy only worked the way that she did because she was a cartoonish character in a cartoonish setting. Act II clung onto a bit of the cartoony wackiness for two or three years but the very nature of what Batty wanted to do meant that the more absurd tone just wouldn’t work in the more serious and dramatic setting he was trying to create. This means that the bits of Cindy he wanted to carry over with Sadie were completely inconguous with what the comic had become as they were made for what was effectively a different comic entirely.

And when he realized it wasn’t going to work, what did he do? He gave up and declared her to be stupid and ill-conceived. Instead of taking that mistake and working with it he simply threw up his hands as if there was nothing that he could do. This is in spite of the fact that, as I’ve hopefully shown, there were myriad directions to take her character that worked into that whole pale imitation of Cindy things. Plenty of stories that could have been done, ways to evolve and explore her character. The worst part is that it seems as if on some level Batty actually knew this. There are countless examples shown of Sadie having more below the surface, or of interesting directions she could have gone only to just never amount to anything. Her friendship with Susan is the most glaring one, but why give her that connection with Wally before he ships out only to do nothing with it once he returns?

And none of it is helped by Batty’s inability and lack of desire, which became worse as he got older, to write about characters he can’t relate to. Sadie was a woman and she wasn’t into comic books or pulp serials or writing or chasing awards and accolades so how could he relate to her? And if he couldn’t relate to her, how could he write her?

At least by the standards of Funky Winkerbean, Sadie Summers is a good character. But all the same she is a failure, not through any fault of her own but because the person writing her was too shortsighted to consider anything beyond his own view of what she should have been. He wanted Cindy II but the circumstances of the strip meant she could never be Cindy II. A better writer would have taken that as an opportunity to really think about this character and dive in. But we are not talking about a better writer, we are talking about Tom Batiuk and instead he would continue trying to force Sadie into a role she was thoroughly unsuited for. And for the crime of being unable to be what he wanted she was unceremoniously tossed aside.

She thus stands as a testament to many of Batty’s worst traits. His inability to think outside of his own poorly constructed box, how easily he gives up when presented with something that frustrates him, a lack of vision that causes him to miss an easy or natural story and being unable or unwilling to follow up dramatic moments in a satisfying way (or at all) are all present and in full force with Sadie. That, I feel, is Sadie’s true legacy and as such she will forever exist as one of the most damning indictments of his shortcomings as a writer.

No Quarter Given

Meanwhile back in 1973, Donald/Donna has beaten Crazy Harry, whose young self must have already stormed out of the pizzeria. Mister Tony Montoni is not impressed; he’s only concerned that The Eliminator’s prowess deprives him of revenue (hey: a single quarter in 1973 represents $1.77 in today’s money). Speaking of money, I believe that time-traveling Donna and Harry are visible to everyone else. Did they order a slice? Did they bring some pre-1973 currency with which to pay their tab without revealing that they are from the future?

It’s been fun (mostly) posting this week’s “Untold Tale,” and I hope TB has some more of these in the works for us to rip apart. Thanks to you all for reading and commenting!

The Hands of Time

billytheskink
June 26, 2024 at 12:22 pm
Given what Donna had to say about the helmet in that April 2022 story arc where Crazy creeped out Act I Lisa…she pretty much considers it to be a hallucinogen. Or at least that’s her cover story.

Since colorist Rob Ro didn’t show, I’ve added a touch of color. Click to see today’s B/W strip.

So: skeptic Donna acknowledges that the helmet is indeed “scientifically advanced” and “magically endowed,” and that the time travel effects are in fact not hallucinations caused by the trippy and possibly toxic fumes emanating from the helmet’s cheap plastics. Also, she’s time-traveled with Crazy on prior occasions. Got it. At least Batty and Burchette have taken the effort to change the appearance of Montoni’s storefront between the present and the past.