This blog has a longstanding “no politics” rule. But we have to tiptoe into it sometimes, such as when Tom Batiuk makes another saving throw for relevance. The July 25 Crankshaft was one such strip. It’s such a mess I have to respond to it in bullet point form rather than an essay.
Tom Batiuk must have really liked this joke, because he shortened a week of Batton Thomas gushing over The Flash #123 at Komix Korner to squeeze it in. I wonder if we’ll get today’s Batton Thomas strip as bonus content, as an alrernate version on Arcamax, or if there will be a later week where… never mind, I answered my own question.
Timing! July 25 is not the time for a joke about July 4 celebrations. It’s still better than this, though:
Vuvuzelas were the symbol of the 2010 World Cup. At least the 2026 World Cup just ended.
Nice epiphany, Dinkle. It shouldn’t be distracting that the focus of a long story arc makes his next appearance in a one-off joke strip. But putting Dinkle back in front of his choir destroys anything that In The Name Of The Father might have been about. It is the final proof that Dinkle never realized that he is a clone of his father: an egotistical, abusive, widely despised band director.
The fake name destroys the joke. Tom Batiuk loves his phony brand names… sometimes. And there’s no pattern to it. Today’s strip names the “Celebrate America 250” concert. The real names of the two competing celebrations were America250, established by Congress in 2016, and the Freedom 250, established by Donald Trump and the Trump Administration for their usual reasons.
Freedom 250 – not America250 – is the one that had the problem of artists cancelling once they found out what they’d signed up for. Country singer Martina McBride had an eloquent response:
I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to be a voice for those who have felt like they didn’t have one. It greatly upsets me that any fan who has been moved by my music may now feel like I’m abandoning the meaning behind those songs. I assure you, that is not the case. I appreciate every single fan who has reached out.
Today’s strip is clearly referencing the problem of big artists like McBride cancelling their appearances at Freedom 250. The made-up name of the wrong celebration confuses the joke. But the clear intent also means:
Batiuk picked a side, even if he thinks he didn’t. Poster Marty DaVille made this point. Mocking the cancellation fiasco technically puts Batiuk in the same category as comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, who came under fire for daring to suggest that any Donald Trump project wasn’t quite as successful as its press releases claimed.
He missed an actual good joke. The above problems aside, this would have worked:
The punchline makes no sense if you don’t follow the Funkyverse closely. Dinkle – and other “content creator” characters like Pete and Les – spend their entire lives being handed every opportunity they want on a silver platter. If you didn’t know that, the punchline revealing that an elderly church choir had a gig at a national Independence Day celebration would be confusing. (I know I’ve been using the word “confusing” a lot.)
And it misses another actual good joke. Considering the generally unimpressive roster of artists who did perform at Freedom 250, Harry Dinkle might as well have been a real-life headliner. You know who else cancelled? Milli Vanilli.
(Well, kind of. There’s some drama over who Milli Vanilli even is. But the band name is such a universal joke that there’s no need to process semantics. Or whether they performed or not. Or whether they performed or not, even if they did go on stage. Like I said previously, I did stand-up in the late 1980s. Piling on Milli Vanilli is practically a reflex.)
The church’s tax exempt status is an unnecessary detail. Batiuk seems to draw his word balloons before he writes what they contain. This often results in them being full of words that detract from the strip’s point. A better joke would have landed on something that actually happened in real life. Such as, Dinkle losing his job like Colbert did. But Batiuk wouldn’t dare even joke about that.
Batiuk crammed everything he could think of into this joke. None of it works, works together, resembles the real-life event it’s riffing from, or makes any sense.
They laid Lisa Moore to rest in 2007, scattering her from Ohio to New York. It was a sad thing; so very sad that Tom Batiuk didn’t want to deal with it and have Lisa’s death drag the whole strip down. No sooner had she croaked than we were thrust a decade into the future. Les and the other Act I characters were now middle aged; 46-going-on-60. But they weren’t the only ones who’d aged up as Act III was promoted with a promise. It wouldn’t just be the old men and women getting the stories but their children as well.
That’s right…
It’s like an ad for a new totally radical syndicated Saturday morning teen show from 1994.
First off, I wonder who they got to do this art because these characters all bear only the vaguest of similarities to the characters from the comic itself. Second, we were indeed intended to be getting stories about the sons and daughters of the Westview High School Class of ’92’88 ’78 but as we’ll see, Batty eventually seemed to have his own ideas.
Why that is, who can say? In the last couple of years of he’d been getting some writing help from Sean McKeever, a comic book writer who’d been making a name for himself at Marvel on books starring teenaged and college-aged characters. His scripting duties (for I assume he was scripting based on Batty’s plots) included the Senior Skip Day story that started the Dopey/Jessica romance and I suspect almost all of the stuff with them was done by him as well as he’d also done the story about Darin learning that Lisa was his birth mother. I was, and am, a fan of the stuff he was doing for Marvel from that time period and a lot of those strips read like watered down versions of the kind of things he had been writing. McKeever, in an old interview from the COVID times, had said that Batty actually wanted to bring him on full time as a co-writer but by 2007 he’d just signed with DC to write Teen Titans which had been his dream book so turned it down.
I suspect that had McKeever taken up Batty’s offer, he would have been doing stories with the high school characters and without him Batty, who showed less and less interest in younger characters the older he got, just kind of shrugged. But he did still make an attempt at writing them which means it’s now time for the fourth entry in our examination of Summer Moore’s history.
The very first thing Summer gets up to is tagging along with her father on a trip to New York for the (first?) Lisa’s Legacy run.
Remember, he didn’t want the spectre of Lisa’s death hanging over the strip.
And tagging along is the right term because while she’s there, she’s just sort of around to throw in a comment or something. While in New York, the Moores meet up with Cindy who takes them to the grand opening of Montoni’s NYC location where Summer promptly gets hit on.
And we also get our first look at Act III Funky who’s become balding and fat.
Summer is having no part of Funky’s crap and frankly I’m right there with her.
In November we also get the reveal that she’s a jock as Summer takes the opportunity to make fun of her father. Also, her teammate looks like she could be the sister of that one balding kid from the final generation of WHS students.
Around this time is also when we’re properly introduced to the rest of the Funky Kids, the next generation who will theoretically be carrying the strip. Aside from Summer we have Jinx Bushka, adopted daughter of Bull and Linda Bushka. She’s introduced in a way that would make you think she’s a performative theater kid type but if she was that disappears immediately.
There’s Rana Howard, formerly Rana Winkerbean. Batty seemed keen on the idea that all the kids were the opposite of their parents so while Rana’s the daughter of a band geek and comic store owning dweeb, she gets to be the requisite Most Popular Girl In School right down to what I believe is stealing an old Cindy joke.
But on the flipside there’s Maddie Klinghorn who’s set up as being her father’s daughter. Except you’ll never know it because she gets absolutely zero focus and thus very little in the way of actual personality. Like even Jinx will get a couple of stories focused around her, Maddie gets absolutely nothing. She’s pure scene filler.
She’s got nice hair at least.
Rounding out the group is Cory Winkerbean, the bad seed. A big story throughout the first few years of Act III is how Funky’s focus on business has led to neglect of his family and so with the money that Funky provides but not the terrible puns, Cory’s turned out to be a moody troublemaker.
While it’s not directly related to Summer (yet), Mopey Pete Roberts (not yet Reynolds) returns to Westview having achieved the highest level of prestige in Batiukland: becoming a comic book writer. In this we’re also introduced to Maddie’s younger siblings Tyler and Abbey.
I am almost 100% sure that this is the only time in Act III that Crazy Harry’s other kids are shown or even mentioned. Donna was pregnant at the end of Act II which also makes this extra confusing. Because Maddie was born in 2003 but looks as if she’s a full decade older than her brother when at most it should be like 3 or 4 years. I guess it doesn’t matter because Batty memoryholed them but still, come on man.
It’s Christmas time and Summer, being 15, wants to go on a “solo car date” with a guy. Les responds to this in the way that only a loving father can: by laughing in his child’s face as if she’s the biggest moron on Earth.
But Les caves and decides to let Summer have her date, and Summer gets back at him by laughing at him for being a dork and trying to explain the birds and the bees to her. As she says, she’s a teenager with the internet so presumably she’s already been exposed to at a minimum Naruto and Harry Potter slash fiction.
There’s nothing you can teach her that she hasn’t already learned from the writings of xXSasukesGrlXx.
All of this is just build up to her date showing up for one strip so Les can play the role of embarassing parent while turning it into a sappy Lisa tribute.
Oddly enough, this is also the last time that Summer is shown being involved in anything romantic, at least on her end. There’s other stories that involve boys having crushes on her but never again is she shown having feelings for another boy, trying to date or anything like that really. Why that is are things we can speculate on much, much later so we’ll just move on to Summer’s last significant appearance of the year.
Just before New Year’s, she’s shown joining her dad and his buddies for a game of football and naturally, like the true jock she is, can’t pass up the opportunity to bully her father for being a wimp.
Meanwhile, Funky’s smug grin is growing to cover his face like lichen on a large rock.
She also shows up at the beginning of the year having attended a party that Cory threw to further the story of Cory being Problem Child (1990) as he’d thrown the party while Funky and Holly were out of town.
She starts getting some attention paid to the fact she’s an athlete in February which leads to a week of flashback strips where she climbed up a tree…
…and Les got stuck going up after her.
Should have left him there. I’m sure he would have been fine.
March begins a story wherein she leads the JV team to the conference finals.
Which is, of course, against Big Walnut Tech leading to the first appearance of Keisha Williams and Summer showing that, as great athletes tend to, she can be both overly aggressive and a little conceited.
She’ll eventually be your mommy too, Summer.
And being that kind of athlete means she eventually decides it’s time to play hero ball.
Which of course works, bringing Westview its first championship since some time during the Act II days. The excitement is so much that it almost kills Les, though unfortunately “almost” is the operative word there.
A month later the trophy arrives at Westview as Les and Becky gush over how amazing Summer is. I believe this is the first of the comic cover homages which will become an Act III staple. Apparently this is also the last professional work of the great Jim Mooney who passed away a few weeks before this strip was published.
She also shows up for a Mother’s Day strip that naturally flashes back to Lisa.
There’s also a few debuts and returns around this time. First off is Summer’s half-brother Darin who returns to the strip in order to welcome back Mopey who’s going to be living in the apartment above Montoni’s as all young Westview men must do.
Also Mooch is there and then promptly disappears into the void. Should have brought him back for that L.A. fire storyline.
At the end of the school year, long time secretary and walking pile of nothing Betty decides to retire and turn over her duties to another woman. A transfer from Big Walnut Tech.
Cayla is here (and has yet to undergo her caucasoid metamorphosis) and she, and her daughter, will play a big role in Summer’s life going forward.
But already we can kind of see how things are going. Despite all the proclamations, a lot of that initial year or so of Act III is spent largely on Les, on Funky, on the adults in general. I didn’t mention it before for instance but at this time Les takes up a secondary job of becoming the new night manager at Montoni’s. A lot of time is spent on Funky being so focused on success that he’s letting his personal life and business go to shit while all his employees are beginning to dislike him.
Summer’s around of course and has yet to be completely sidelined (that’s for later) but aside from the month or so focused on her basketball prowess, around is all she really is. She’s just sort of there and that, I am sure, will bode well for her future usage under the Batty’s pen. That still puts her as better than Jinx and Maddie and at least she hasn’t disappeared into nonexistance like Crazy Harry’s other kids. Small miracles I suppose, but it’s a rather inauspicious start for humanity’s supposed savior.
Since we’re at the end of Summer’s freshman year of high school I figure that this is as good a place as any to leave off for now. We’ll take a look at how things go for her in her sophomore year next time.
With the advent of good ol’ Cranky bitching to a poor receptionist at the doctor’s office on Sunday, I think we can finally say that, ‘In the Name of the Father’ has reached its conclusion.
And boy, what a tale uh….softly…told it was. I’m guessing by ‘softly’ Batiuk meant ‘lacking direction, momentum, or motivation.’
It was awful, truly. So, for me, it was great. Because at least awe at awfulness is a feeling. His attempts at regular old Crankshaft gags, while objectively of better quality, leave nothing to be remarked on. It’s eating a stale, dollar store box of chocy-chip cookies, and remembering the taste of name brand Chips A’hoy. Forgettably disappointing.
But the arc we just got was a greatest hits medley of all Batiuk’s best sins. We got plot holes, weird retcons, call-backs to people who died in horrible ways, failed attempts to be artsy and profound, depression, ruin, and wry grins.
I went back and binged the entire seven weeks in one go. It took six minutes. Like many of Batiuk’s prestige pieces, it does improve somewhat being consumed this way, because you’re not stuck too long on a strip that’s nothing more than inane exposition, or a bland bit of conversation.
Somewhere along the line Batiuk has forgotten entirely that his audience will be reading his stories one strip at a time, with 24 hours between strips. No one is going back and rereading this dreck in massive chunks except for me. So, even if not gunning for a laugh out loud punchline, each strip should do something more than blandly progress the weeklong conversation.
RIVETING
That’s just one of many guidelines for writing well that Batiuk has either forgotten, willfully ignored, or never knew in the first place.
I confessed in some earlier posts that I dabble occasionally in the dark arts of fanfiction, and as I muddled through this nonsense for more than a month, my fanfic addled brain couldn’t help but cough up a version of the story that I saw as better.
I held myself to the constraints of being more or less the same story, told in way consistent with the best possible version of Batiuk’s style, taking up the same seven weeks. I briefly thought about trying to paste strips together for the true fan comic experience, but the task was too daunting, even for me. I hope you’ll accept my script format.
So, nestle in dear nitters, for a the first part of a story entitled, ‘Sentimental Journey’… which like all tales competently told begins with an inciting incident.
Week One:
To Be Continued…
Now, let me talk through a couple of my creative decisions, and how I think they fix some of the problems I think wrecked ‘In the Name of the Father’.
1.) Do not include Chippewa Lake Park. Yeah, both places are real and existed and it’s plausible Lucy and Eugene would have visited both. But all Batiuk did by adding a new location was confuse absolutely everyone. He’s spent 30 plus years building up Summit Beach Park as special. Keep things focused! (Something you’ll hear me repeat.) So everything here is Summit Beach and the Wisteria Ballroom again.
2.) Don’t try to make Eugene’s moving a big mystery. Two of the strips in the first week of ITNOTF were all ominous about Eugene moving. The audience doesn’t care about Eugene alone, he’s a bland quaternary character. You can’t build any stakes on his fate. The audience instead needs a little reminder about what the ancient love triangle is all about, as Lil is a main character of the strip.
3.) Try to make things specific to the characters. The only day that kind of maybe worked that whole week was maybe the “Good old days, getting old days strip.”
Except that it these sort of platitudes could be blathered by any two characters in this strip looking at any old picture. I did my best to make things a bit more personal.
4.) A wider range of emotions. Other than a few ominous side eyes by Eugene, most of the week in ITNOTF is full of bland grins. I tried to throw in some shock, surprise, concern and sadness.
5.) A bit of classic Dinkle behavior. If we’re going to learn Dinkle’s hardass personality was in reaction to his father, let’s get a little taste of it when he’s first shown in the story.
6.) Crankshaft being Crankshaft in Crankshaft. While he stood around blankly staring for most of ITNOTF, I hope to weave actual Crankshaft time into this, even if he doesn’t have a ton to actually do.
I acknowledge that one way this week still fails is in setting up clearly for the audience any question that would make them interested in what is next in the story. Lil taking the photo to Dinkle is plausible, but there’s no real stakes to it.
By talking about how Lucy loved the old band music, I’m hoping to establish why Lil would care at all about who Larry Dinkle was and follow Harry around listening to his stories. I also planted a little reminder of the whole thwarted proposal fiasco, so maybe people would speculate that I would finally resolve that.
I am welcome to any kind of criticism on this. After all, I’m not a Pulitzer Nominated Cartoonist of 50 plus years. I’m just a woman who has written some fanfic and binged some YouTube videos on story structure by other amateurs .
Tom Batiuk’s latest attempt at a prestige arc, which he pretentiously titled “Dinkle, I Am Your Father” or something like that, is over.
Well, it’s not officially over. But I’m calling it over as of Thursday, because that’s the best place for it to end. I’m sure Friday, Saturday and maybe Sunday will be full of Lillian smirking at us, and explaining how we’re supposed to interpret the ending. Which insults the reader, and undermines the point of leaving it ambiguous. But I’m done showing Tom Batiuk how to do his job.
This will also be the last leg of the strangest multi part post in SoSF history. Weather forecast: clear, smooth sailing. No trauma dumps or cluster f-bombs on the horizon. This post draws on elements of Destroy Everything You Touch, so read that if you haven’t already. Be warned: that post is also a M*A*S*H-level dive into my own psyche, tied into the two subplots of this tedious story. This post will continue that analysis, focusing on the Eugene and Lucy half of the story.
The problem is easy to explain. Eugene and Lucy is not a love story. Eugene and Lucy is a limerence story. Let’s start at the beginning:
Was it, Lillian? Was it really? Who besides you was even looking at them? It’s a dance! People are looking at their own dance partners! Like they should be! Get over your Main Character Syndrome! (No theory of mind, a central problem in all of Tom Batiuk’s writing, rears its ugly head again.)
This is not love, this is limerence. Also known as “putting someone on a pedestal,” “in love with being in love,” “infatuation”, “obsessive love”, and similar things that are bus stops between “crush” and “creepy.” It’s when you’ve built a fantasy version of someone in your mind, independent of any actual information you have about the person. This is a great explanation:
“Eternal Sunshine” is all about limerence. And it’s a damn good movie too.
Eugene and Lucy are a concept to each other. They’re both in love with the imaginary versions of each other they think will fulfill them. We don’t know anything about Eugene and Lucy, and they don’t know anything about each other, beyond one pleasant night at a pre-World War II dance, and an implied brief relationship. The story makes a lot of bold assertions about true love, but it provides zero evidence of that.
Most romantic relationships in the Funkyverse are actually limerence. They’re all arranged marriages between minor characters who don’t seem to have any reason to be together. This happens when your only source of how adult relationships work are comic books for 9-year-olds, and a marriage to your high school girlfriend.
John Howard and one-armed Becky are the most mismatched couple you could possibly create. She’s a disabled person with genuine talent, and is using it the best she can, hyper-motivated to prove she still has worth. He’s a lazy slob who only wants to spend all day in a comic book store, without ever contributing income to the family, or changing his T-shirt.
John and Becky, Bull and Linda, Mason and Cindy, Pam and Jeff, even Les and Lisa don’t even seem to like each other that much. (Exception: Funky and Holly genuinely do like each other, and have some sweet moments.)
I’ve long struggled with limerence, and it was a key reason many of my adult relationships fell apart. I took every relationship way too seriously, far more than my partner took it. Because I immediately turned any girl who gave me the time of day into a potential wife. I filled in any unknown data with what I wanted to be true. Limerence and low self-esteem is one hell of a cocktail.
The key is separating limerence from tangible qualities.
In high school, I didn’t see anything but attractiveness and popularity as being important. I learned in adulthood that confidence, personality, positivity, values and common interests are far more important.
Let’s revisit Christine, my unrequited love from high school I introduced in Destroy Everything You Touch. (Inverted trope: I was her unrequited love.) She had personality, positivity, shared values and interests with me, and enough confidence to approach me when she otherwise didn’t have a flirty or forward nature.
This is not limerence. This isn’t me filling in the blanks with what I wanted her to be. These are genuine qualities I observed, based on many real interactions over a year or two. She was legitimately a very good potential partner, and would have been at any age. But in high school, I picked Ken O’Brien when Dan Marino was available. (Please note that Ken O’Brien was still a pretty good NFL quarterback, and two-time Pro Bowler. Susan, if you’re somehow reading this, I don’t regret picking you at all. You were awesome. My first kiss with you was one of the few romantic milestones in my life that actually went really well.)
Limerence can even make you idealize yourself! I caught myself comparing Christine’s 16-year-old self to my 54-year-old self, not my 17-year-old self. She was calm and easygoing, which I am now, but 17-year-old me very much was not. I was high-strung, and hadn’t learned how to manage my anger and frustration yet. Which might have been a serious obstacle in any real relationship with Christine. And I’ve had partners in my life who were attracted to me for qualities I definitely didn’t possess.
In the Funkyverse, limerence can apparently affect other people. Lillian seems to have swallowed the notion that Eugene and Lucy were some kind of destined couple that only didn’t get together because of her own selfish act. This is ridiculous.
If anything, Lillian should have been the one to tell her sister “oh come on, it was just one guy, get over it already.” Which is yet another way she should could have reversed her misdeed, but didn’t, even though she could have still covered up what she did. Lucy’s Story has a comprehensive list of the others.
It’s time for the lightning round! Today’s topic is Why This Story Sucks, Even By The Usual Low Standards Of The Funkyverse.
It’s too easy to move on. Despite my low romantic potential, I still preferred hoping for future opportunities in college over lamenting missed ones in high school. As any 18-year-old would.
Eugene never got a response to his letter, and interpreted that as a rejection of his marriage proposal. He served in the military until the end of World War II, and then came home. Imagine a returning soldier with a broken heart while V-J Day in Times Square is going on. No war veteran is going to be moping about the girl who said “no” years ago when they return home to a demographic abundance of females. Many of whom are throwing her panties at him, eager to start creating future baby boomers.
It should have been extremely easy for Eugene to forget Lucy and find a new girl. We’ll soon see why it wasn’t.
Something triggered my nostalgia. I haven’t been pining for Christine for 38 years. I never even thought of her for 37.95 of those years. Eugene has been in a consonant state of pining for Lucy since 1946, even though she died in 2009.
I don’t idealize the past. I realize that a relationship between Christine and I might not have worked out, for a million different reasons. Which would have been fine.
I spent most of my high school nights dreaming of random, unremarkable girls who caught my fancy at some point, but whom I never had the nerve to approach. They seemed unattainable to me. I daydreamed about how receptive they’d be to me, and how well-suited they’d be, even though I had no reason to think that. All while I ignored someone who actually was those things, and was trying to tell me she was interested. That’s what limerence does to you.
I recognize my own mistakes. Despite everything I wrote previously, I ultimately don’t blame anybody but myself. I could have started a relationship with Christine almost anytime I wanted to.
The failed relationship was a symptom of a much bigger emotional problem. This was obviously the case with me. My inner demons caused me to do an irrational, self-destructive thing to a desired relationship. We’ve often said that Eugene simply should have re-proposed to Lucy, or gotten a clarification of what her answer was. Why didn’t he?
Because Eugene was so afraid of rejection that he chose “no response means no” over Lucy actually telling him no. Why else would Eugene act like his “I’ll never bother you again” promise was more important to keep than his “I want to spend the rest of my life with you” promise? Which he didn’t keep anyway, because Eugene and Lucy had some kind of contact after that?
The four days of wordless, actionless panels imply that Eugene is moving into some kind of senior care facility, or hospice. And he’s ashamed of this. To be fair, dying at age 99 would be early compared to people like Lillian Mckenzie, Ed Crankshaft, and Mort Winkerbean. But I think there’s a much better explanation.
Eugene is moving into a mental institution.
Just like Lucy did.
And for the same reason Lucy did: because he was so in love with a concept that he let it destroy his entire life. And it also took Lillian down with it.
In a psychology class in college, I heard a story I’ll never forget. There was a psychologist who worked in a home of people having severe detachments from reality, to the extent that a woman would tell him she had a new baby every single day. The doctor said “even if I could push a button and cure her, I wouldn’t. She’s much happier where she is.”
So this is a bittersweet ending, which is an improvement from the just plain bitter we usually get. In the end, Eugene and Lucy got together, in a way. Unless this story is somehow still continuing. And if it is, then let me say with no irony whatsoever: bring on Batton Thomas!
After wandering through the wreckage of the abysmal Eugene and Lucy story, this week’s Crankshaft explored Harry Dinkle’s alleged self-esteem issues. We will talk about both of these stories today, how they’re connected, and how this led me to a surprising realization about my own life.
There are two important bits of background. The first is Lucy’s Story, which explains what the abysmal Eugene and Lucy story actually is.
Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy is drafted into World War II, boy snail-mails marriage proposal containing “no response means no” clause, jealous older sister hides that letter, girl has mental breakdown, boy and girl somehow go another 60+ years without ever discussing the topic again, girl dies in 2009, boy is still longing for girl in 2026, boy has to move to a new home at age 99, Crankshaft readers wonder if they’ll ever find out where boy will be living now. (There will be a follow-up post about that.)
I know that summary got strange, but this is a strange storytelling world. If you asked the author to explain, he would say “It’s called writing.”
The other is Leaving Westview, which turned out to be perfect prologue for what I’m about to say. I’ll repost the important part:
I said or did every one of these things. For real. For real for real.
While this looks creepy on the surface – and is being done by a known creep – it is perfectly appropriate. We saw in the previous post that Lisa died on October 4, 2007. This is 15 days after that. It’s an emotionally powerful comic strip, which Funky Winkerbean was capable of producing sometimes.
But nothing will ever make Les Moore stop sniffing his dead wife’s clothes. Not 20+ years. Not a marriage to another woman. Not raising a mixed family, both racially and in the step-parenting sense. Not a phone call from Lisa from beyond the grave. Not a house that seemed to generate new Lisa artifacts every couple years. Not being handed a freaking Oscar trophy for a Hollywood movie about Lisa, which Les was sabotaging at every turn. Not other chances Les had to work through his grief.
Les smelling Lisa’s clothes is accurate and quite sympathetic. The aromas left from loved ones onto clothing, triggers memories in a very powerful way.
This is very true. A scent or a sound or song or a noise or a place or an object can trigger long-forgotten emotions, and turn you back into the person you were when you were having those emotions.
My first experience with this was when I was 21 and in college. I’d had a particularly triumphant night out clubbing with my best friend, Todd. We were staying at his parents’ house, and when we got there, they had some cheap bathroom product. The scent reminded me of my high school girlfriend, Susan, whose bathroom had that same product. I had no active feelings about Susan at that point. But the scent of flowers and petrochemicals in a $1.50 pharmacy item turned me from a young man happy about a rare successful night meeting women into… well, Eugene.
I recently had this experience again. Something very specific reminded me of my high school The One Who Got Away story (analogous to the Eugene-Lucy story), which helped me finally understand why she got away (the Dinkle story). This is all about people and things I haven’t thought about in a very, very, very long time. Which led me to into even deeper rabbit holes in my own head. And it finally showed me the bottom of the rabbit hole.
I’ll try to keep my story from getting too cringe. But today, I’d rather be cringe than whitewash uncomfortable realities. So buckle your seatbelts. This flight will be experiencing turbulence. Trauma dump up ahead.
I went to an emotionally abusive Christian elementary school that gleefully took a flamethrower to my self-esteem. I was a shy and introverted child by nature. The people my parents trusted to educate me used me as an object of ridicule and scorn. That piled an avalanche of self-doubt, which I didn’t previously have, on top of my shyness.
Long story short, the Christian school shunned me. And I have no idea why. Apparently, at some point between 6th and 7th grade, somebody decided I wasn’t the kind of Christian they wanted their Christian school to produce. Even though I was an agreeable child who did everything he was told, read the Bible, and got mostly A’s. But I’d already seen them do the same thing to other kids who deserved no such treatment either. There seemed to be about one kid a year who randomly got on the school’s bad side. It made no sense to me. And Christian schools aren’t in the business of teaching the critical thinking skills that might result in someone questioning their judgement.
So I’ve been dealing with self-esteem problems most of my life. Mine were caused by that very specific and identifiable thing. It wasn’t a combination of factors, or a vague, whiny Freudian Excuse like Crankshaft is pushing this week.
Funky Winkerbean appealed to me in 1988 because I related to Les Moore’s high school struggles, as depicted in the above strips. It was the only thing in media that seemed to understand what was going on in my head. So when its attempt at ripping off Peanuts ended with the girl wishing Les had asked her out, I felt personally betrayed. Even 16-year-old me didn’t believe that. That was the day I became a critic. It is my villain origin story. Mwahahahahaha!
I also shared something with adult Act II (1992-2006) Les Moore: wanting to be a writer, because of my perceived skill at it. I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up. It appealed to my writing skills, my sense of justice, and my failure to foresee that newspapers would become an obsolete medium. I would ultimately get a college degree in journalism, with a broadcasting focus. I promptly switched careers to Information Technology in adulthood, which I still work in today.
I’m honestly embarrassed to tell this story, because 50-something men should not be still processing failed high school relationships. But it’s too important to the larger story to omit, gloss over, or be vague about. And it’s a universe less creepy than anything Eugene does. More importantly, I refuse to worry about embarrassing myself anymore, for reasons I will soon make clear. So let’s go.
In high school in 1988 or 1989, I had creative a writing class in 2nd period, and journalism/high school newspaper class in 5th period. In both those classes was a girl named Christine. I still remember her last name; it was similar to that of a 1980s game show host.
One day, out of nowhere, Christine approached me before 2nd hour Creative Writing class about needing to talk, with this look on her face like it was something really important. I couldn’t imagine what this could be about, but I didn’t want to deal with it right then, so I said “talk to me in 5th hour.”
The truth is: despite my general cluelessness about how these things worked, I sensed Christine was going to tell me she had a crush on me. For some reason, I didn’t want that. And there was no logical explanation. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this girl. Not even by the sadistic social standards of high school. (Cindy Summers, I’m looking at you.)
I really liked Christine as a person. We worked together on the school newspaper. She was pretty. She was nice. She got along with people. She had no off-putting qualities. We had the same sense of humor. Considering that my defining trait in high school was doing open mic nights at legitimate adult comedy clubs, that should have been huge. (It was the late 80s. Everybody, including me, was trying to be the next George Carlin. Too bad none of us ever succeeded. Well, maybe Jon Stewart a little.)
By the time 5th hour arrived, I still didn’t want to deal with it, so I avoided her. The next day, we went back to being flirty/friendly with each other. That status quo remained for the rest of high school. But she never directly approached me again after that day. After graduation, we went our separate ways.
I tossed my high school yearbook in the trash decades ago. But I recently remembered what she wrote in it. “…and remember the girl who always STARES at you! Love, Christine.” With the game show host’s surname in place of her own, because that was a running gag between us. My God, how many times did this poor girl whack me with the clue-by-four?
But I had severe self-esteem problems. So severe that I sabotaged a potential relationship that I actually wanted. The idea that a desirable girl had a genuine interest in me made no sense in my mind.
It’s hard enough to approach the opposite sex when you’re an introverted, awkward, not-terribly-attractive teen. It’s impossible when you’re mentally convinced there’s zero chance of success, and that any failure will end with you being dragged in front of another classroom for another round of humiliation. So I friend-zoned myself. I threw away the chance to make a sweet, intelligent, pretty, funny girl I genuinely liked my first girlfriend. When all I had to do was stand there and let her initiate it.
I was so convinced of my own worthlessness that I couldn’t let that happen. I blocked her like Dikembe Mutombo.
I never rejected Christine. I rejected myself. I played the parts of both Lucy and Lillian. Christine tried to send me a love letter, and I hid it from myself. It was the most honest case of “it’s not you, it’s me” in the history of relationships.
That’s what a self-esteem problem looks like. So watching Crankshaft throw a pity party for Harry goddamn Dinkle severely pisses me the fuck off.
Harry Dinkle is not a person who had childhood trauma and self-esteem problems. Harry Dinkle is a person who caused childhood trauma and self-esteem problems in thousands of people over his career. (Including the elderly choralists who are following him on this journey.) He plays the role of the Christian school in my story. Not the victim.
Dinkle’s ego must be fed at all times, and doesn’t care how many people he has to grind up for meat. He’s a pervert, and this is how he gets his rocks off. The Colonel Khadafi outfit he wore like fetish gear doesn’t disprove that theory. And, as is often the case, he’s protected by a system that refuses to do anything about it.
What the Christian school did to me in 1983 made me reject Christine in 1989, and I didn’t even realize that until 2026. She liked me, and I liked her, but I rejected her. Why?
Now, I want to be very clear about a few things. One, there was never any sexual or physical component to this abuse. It was psychological only. Two, I had/still have a great family that was very loving and supportive about the whole ordeal, who made the right move. They yanked me out of that Christian school overnight, and put me in public middle school.
I probably could have used some counseling, but I think they didn’t know how to help me, and I definitely didn’t know how to ask for help. On top of all the debris that was in my head, I could be a difficult child in my own right sometimes.
Third, the psychological abuse was mostly traceable to one teacher at that Christian school. I don’t want to say that person’s name, because I’m afraid I might summon them, like Voldemort. So let’s leave that person in damnatio memoriae. And in hell, where they no doubt are today, according to the rules of their own belief system.
This is how abuse perpetuates itself. Someone hurt me, which ultimately made me hurt someone else (even though declining interest in a relationship is not a hurtful act if done tactfully). I never realized until now that tearing myself down, which was basically my coping mechanism, was also painful for the people who cared about me to watch. No wonder some them gave up on me.
Six years ago, I wrote this about the Dinkle family Thanksgiving:
Look how many details in this strip are about (Harry) Dinkle’s toxic workaholism. The house decoration and the choice of Thanksgiving meal are based on his career. The annual band turkey sale makes Harry tired of turkey, so turkey must not be served, no matter what anybody else wants. His daughter entered the same career as him, so you can guess what the table conversation is going to be about.
Look at (Dinkle’s wife) Harriet’s face as she presents the Thanksgiving non-turkey. Her weary eyes seem to be seeking his approval. Her daughter gives her companion an aside glance, as if to say “see, I warned you it’d be like this.” He seems to respond in kind, as if acknowledging he’s seen this in his own family. Harry is genuinely happy, because everything revolves around him, exactly as it should. And everyone knows it better stay that way.
This is the Thanksgiving of a family that revolves around a selfish, obsessive narcissist. And it’s a common theme in Funky Winkerbean.
Get the fuck out of my fucking face with that fucking bullshit.
I called this post Destroy Everything You Touch, because that’s what Tom Batiuk does to every “prestige arc” he gets his grubby, comic book-stained fingers on. His writing is so shallow he trivializes everything he tries writing about. It insults anyone who’s really experienced it. Which is why all those Lisa’s Story collections aren’t selling.
And Batiuk has tried writing about every trauma you could think of. Dementia, layoffs, freedom of speech, domestic terrorism, transsexuality, illiteracy, amputation, “climate damage”, bullying, war, PTSD, alcoholism, racism, coming out of the closet, football-induced CTE, suicide, cancer, and cancer incest. He did childhood self-esteem this week. Most of these things he’s tried writing about at least once.
(Also, musical titles are a recurring theme at this blog. And “Destroy Everything You Touch” is a god-tier banger.)
You. Do not feel. Do not know. What you steal.
Funky Winkerbean and now Crankshaft are misery porn. To the extent misery porn works, it’s because the storyteller spilled their guts onto the paper. Great personal memoirs don’t hold back about embarrassing and personal details that most people wouldn’t want others to know. Their brutal honesty makes them compelling to read, and helpful to people who are going through the same things.
Funky Winkerbean gives us this:
The greatest writer in the Funky Winkerbean universe is a not a man who spills his guts onto the page. It’s a man who’s too emotionally fragile to even read his own wife’s diary. So he passive-aggressives their daughter to reading an entry about her own mother being sexually assaulted. Nice guy, that Les Moore.
(Narshe, I apologize if I spoiled something you were planning to use in Part 4 of your story. But please do use it again. Because this may be the single worst thing Les Moore ever did. And there’s a lot of competition for that crown.)
I consider what happened with Christine the biggest mistake of my life. Not because I’m Eugene, still sad about a girl he lost because he couldn’t be bothered to find out what her actual answer was. But because I lost the better man I might have become a lot sooner if I had given myself a chance in that relationship.
However it might have gone – and unlike Eugene, I make no assumption that life would have been perfect after that – it would have been a net positive. Whatever happened, this girl was never, ever, ever going to humiliate me. Which I now know is what I was really afraid of.
It would have ended amicably, given me confidence and experience, and probably helped me face my inner trauma a lot sooner than I did. Christine would have been a better high school girlfriend for me than Susan was, though Susan was a pretty good one. (Other than some things that were my own fault, which is the nature of high school relationships.) And I would have saved Christine a little rejection and confusion. Lord knows life already gives you enough of that. Especially in high school.
Or maybe I’ve misread this entire situation, and Christine just wanted to tell me my fly was down.
(That was a joke. This story needed to end on a lighter note. And I refuse to second-guess myself anymore.)
One other thing I want to mention, because it ties into the “some things trigger deep memories” theme, and because it’s funny. While I was working through all this, I found a playlist of 1988 hit songs on YouTube, and set it to shuffle. This was the first thing it pulled up:
Mwahahahahaha! I am the Rickroller! You fell right into my devious trap!
I’m kidding. It was actually this:
Debbie Gibson is another woman I hadn’t thought about in 30+ years. Nor has anyone else.
I have no particular memories attached to this song. But the overwhelming 1988-ness of this music video reinforced the feelings I was working through. (This isn’t what initially brought Christine back into my head. It’s not important what that actually was.)
But imagine me, a 54-year-old man, blubbering about a blown high school date while listening to an obnoxiously peppy Debbie Gibson song. That’s a pretty funny visual. Imagine that happening to Jim Carrey in one of his better movies. Or Jack Black. Or Chris Farley, if I’m being honest about who would play me in a movie. (And if I’m being too honest: Rick Moranis, if he ate Chris Farley.) Or it could be treated seriously, in a movie like Fatso.
I hope I didn’t bait-and-switch you. You came here for newspaper comics snark, and I gave you my dead chicken moment. Which is what this feels like: discovering what my real problem was. I’d been trying to find it for 40 years.
This is why I know a lot about neurodivergence, and why I frequently mention it as a factor in the creation of these comic strips. I thought for a long time that my problem was untreated neurodivergence. But I could always recognize emotions and social cues adequately. I just couldn’t act on them, because of my crippling fear of humiliation. I’ve been throwing darts at the wall for decades, trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. But I think I just did.
I’d like to leave a few ground rules for the comments:
I’m willing to answer any questions anyone may have, though I reserve the right to be vague or silent about certain things.
Being an abuse victim isn’t my whole identity, and it will not become that. I have accepted that it’s a small part of who I am. But it will not destroy anything it touches, anymore. While I would never question anyone’s approach to processing their own trauma, I personally think some people lean a little too hard into the victim identity.
I realize a lot of people went through a lot worse than me. So there will be no Trauma Olympics.
I’m not looking for a pity party, safe space, psychoanalysis, therapy-speak, or anything like that. I just wanted someone to listen to my story. If you’re reading these words, you’ve done that, and you’ve done me a great service. Thank you. I actually feel really good about this whole thing.
I’m not looking for closure. I consider it closed. I said what I needed to say. The people who have been living rent-free in my head have been evicted.
I am open to reconnecting with Christine, but I’m sure she has a family that wouldn’t appreciate that. It’s not her job to help with my recovery. My only purpose was to document the key role she inadvertently played in fixing something that was very broken in me.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but please do not try to figure out who Christine is, or who I am. There are enough clues that someone with connections to our high school class could figure it out. But I have very little contact with any of those people anyway, I now live 1,300 miles away from my hometown, and I don’t do the social media thing.
Calvin & Hobbes had a terrific story where they try to build a robot, so Calvin doesn’t have to make his bed. Here’s the ending (SPOILER ALERT):
Psychological abuse and self-doubt made me throw away an opportunity to get to know a delightful girl who could have helped me a great deal in life.
Son of Stuck Funky 
