Son of Stuck Funky

That Song From Toy Story

1994 was a year of notable happenings. The world celebrated the election of Nelson Mandela. Gen Xers everywhere grieved at the loss of Kurt Cobain. Americans were mesmerized by shady doings in the world of of sports when a man attacked Nancy Kerrigan and squeaky clean O.J. Simpson turned out to be neither squeaky nor clean. A strike would put a giant dent in the popularity of baseball. Final Fantasy VI, one of the greatest video games ever and origin of the handle I’m using for SoSF, would be released for the SNES.

But who cares about any of that? We’re interested in the goings on in Westview, OH and what had been going on come the start of 1994? Well, not a whole lot. Les became a teacher, Funky began his long association with Montoni’s, Lisa returned, we got some school shenanigans with the early Act II generation of high schoolers and… that’s really it. The first couple of years of Act II are honestly little different from the last few years of Act I. The gags are toned down, there’s some more storylines but there’s also a lot of carryover from Act I that, given the focus of this series, we aren’t seeing much of. For one, a lot of what became Dinkle’s stock gags like Holtron poorly investing the band funds or Skip Townes’ shady dealings, are present. So too are some things like the weeks dedicated to test answers where the student drawn in the strip is completely superfluous to the joke. But the mid-’90s will mark the definitive end of the last vestiges of Act I as those hold out gags are swept aside for good.

I’ve found it interesting the way TB likes to tell the story of the strip’s transition into more serious material; away from gags and into soap opera. If you listen to him, you’d almost think that there was Lisa and she was pregnant and in 1986 she miraculously gave birth to the more adult and serious Funky Winkerbean; the mature comic that Batty had wanted to do. You’d also think that the time jump in 1992 would act as a clear divider between Act I comedy and Act II maturity. It’s an interesting bit of retconning that has nothing to do with reality as the truth is that the transition was much longer and it was close to a decade between Les showing up at Lisa’s door and screaming “What happened!?” and the final move to the version of Funky Winkerbean that fascinated people in a way not unlike a car accident.

But will this affect Sadie, a character who somewhat epitomizes that transitionary period? Let’s take a look as we begin to move out of the very early years of Act I.

When last we saw her, Sadie was screaming in agony thanks to dear big sis Cindy spraying perfume in her eyes. In 1994, Sadie’s first appearances are in early February objecting to Mickey’s new Chuck Taylors.

And Mickey, of course, is none too happy about it.

*I’d maybe think about losing the mullet too, Billie Rae.*

In spite of her objections, Mickey will apparently give into the crowd and ditch the shoes since the week ends with Linda now wearing them.

Stuff like this is probably the most Cindy-like that Sadie’s been so far and while it’s not quite at the level of how Cindy had generally been portrayed, for Sadie I feel like it’s definitely more than a little out of character. And speaking of Cindy, we follow it up with what’s actually a bit of a rarity: a week dedicated to the sisters actually interacting with one another with Sadie showing her glee at having to live with her older sister once again.

*“Yes, it’s the love of my life: a balding pizza man that my old guidance counselor, Claire Voyant, said I’d marry.”*

Sadie, in fact, gets quite a lot of play this month by following this week up with another week where she takes Les’ writing lessons to heart.

*The irony of Tom Batiuk making a joke about someone shallowly associating characters with themselves is lost on no one I’m sure.*

And she even finishes it up with a Sunday where she and Susan talk about dreams and nightmares.

Now I know that Susan’s expression is meant to convey, once again, Batty’s thoughts on Sadie’s shallowness but I mean really, just look at that. She’s tryng to connect with Susan by relating a similar sort of dream she’s had. Maybe it’s not even shallow. Maybe it says something about Sadie’s own psychology, the drive to maintain her popularity and the pressure of that comes with it represented by having to make sure she’s always looking her best in any situation!

After a good solid month of attention, albeit not in stories of any real significance, it’s not until the beginning of April that Sadie again shows up as the Poetry Club decides to start a literary magazine.

Perhaps Sadie is just being lazy, or maybe she’s just tryng to give Susan a little something since she knows Susan is the one actually into this. You be the judge. The week continues as we get more ruminations on popularity vs. unpopularity.

It would be easy to say that yeah, Sadie was just pulling her leg, but I mean look at all their other interactions so far. There’s no bullying towards Susan so if it was a backhanded means of insulting her it’d be wildly out of character so I’m taking that as an attempt at trying to boost Susan’s confidence a little. That Susan didn’t take it isn’t really Sadie’s fault.

It’s not until summer when Sadie gets another bit of focus with a week dedicated to her engaging in charity work.

*Crying mallrats, destroyed jewelry stores… it’s like Sarajevo but worse!*

By this point we’ve also hit another Funky turning point as August 1994 is when Tom Batiuk stops drawing the strip and penciling duties are taken over by Chuck Ayers.

In September Sadie is feeling rebellious by spitting on The Man and his oppressive dress codes.

She continues her antagonism of everyone’s favorite unfairly maligned auteur the next month by protesting his terrible, horrifically unfair and misguided grading practices.

Les just wants to encourage a student doing good work but Sadie is having none of it.

When doing this I’ve typically attempted to stick to a strip or two I feel gets across the week or stories the best. Really I could have just used one strip from this week and moved on but I mean, come on! How can I ignore Sadie calling Les a loser to his face? This isn’t lovable underdog nerdy high schooler Les Moore, this is smug-for-no-reason adult Les Moore! This one strip alone should be enough to put her near the top of any character ranking chart.

With that CMOA out of the way, Sadie finishes out the year with her sister in a few Black Friday strips that show just how far Cindy’s fallen.

*“Now Sadie, let me tell you about the value of copper.”*

Much like 1994 Sadie gets some early appearances in 1995 too with a Sunday where she butters up her dad for some cash which is followed up later in January by another week with Cindy.

That’s right, we’re well into True Act II territory now where Tom Batiuk can tell the types of hard-hitting adult stories he couldn’t tell in Act I like… balancing a checkbook. A whole week of Cindy lecturing her sister about it.

By this point the sibling rivalry is basically long gone; we’re far removed from the days of physical violence and attempted homicide. In fact, you’d think there’d be a whole lot more done with the two sisters and the way they interact and how their relationship might change — but nope.

In mid-March we return to the literary magazine which, after it’s introduction, had basically been sitting on the backburner for a year. But because this is the point where a lot of the plot threads that Batty had been weaving since 1993 start coming together, that means it was time to finally revist this one.

And of course, the magazine will need a name.

*Like I said, a woman of the people speaking in clear language the common folk can understand.*

Not for nothing but I was definitely not into poetry. I was more the prime age for Goosebumps books (tangent within a tangent: I love going back through old Blogger Beware entries) and laughing at the off-kilter and slightly edgy humor in issues of Game Players that my 10-year-old self didn’t always completely get. A high brow kid I was not.

Anyway, Sadie’s name is the one that wins out and now that the magazine is all set up it’s time for all (both) members of the literary club to submit their first poems for the debut issue.

Yep, with this we’ve hit the point of the first truly big, truly dramatic and soap operatic story in Funky Winkerbean with Susan’s crush on Les. Her poem will of course cause a stir but what of Sadie’s poem? Likely a biting satire of consumerist culture I’d bet. She’s smart after all.

From there it’s getting the magazine actually put together.

And this just seems like more of Sadie’s flippancy but the very next strip…

Despite her declaring it only a “token offer” Sadie actually stayed and helped Susan put it together. And sure, Sadie isn’t cultured enough to know who Emily Dickenson is, big LOLs and LMAOs all around at her vapidity, but that betrays her apology to Susan. She does think that Susan had a real friend, that the friend died and her reaction is “Oh man, I screwed up…” and apologizing. And again… she didn’t blow Susan off in spite of what the previous strip said.

From here it goes into the the big story about Roberta Blackburn’s moral crusading against the magazine for it’s scandalous content and you’d think this would be a great chance to do more with Sadie, what with her being caught up in all of this. Yeah, you’d think that but Batty has different ideas because this is Les’ story so he, not Sadie and not even Susan, is the one who gets all the attention. The most Sadie can get is a couple of small appearances.

*This is basically her future from here on out.*

She then drops out of focus for most of the rest of the year until November. Susan had destroyed the tape of Les’ proposal to Lisa and in her guilt had attempted suicide. In November she returns to school and we get a mostly silent week of her walking through the halls, having to deal with the uncomfortable looks everyone else gives her until near the end of the week. Because one person is there for her.

Yep, Sadie’s there and what does she do? Goes over and warmly welcomes Susan back. It’s an unambiguously kind gesture and shows that Sadie is pretty definitively not the character her Act I sister was. And you know what? It’s good storytelling from Batty, not just this strip but the entire Sadie/Susan relationship. They’re friends and it’s easy to see why they are. They spend a decent amout of time together, Sadie never really disrespects or talks down to Susan, she helps Susan out when she could have easily blown her off and she’s the first person to not treat her with any awkwardness whe she returns.

The reader doesn’t need it spelled out, the contents of their strips together allows them to get the gist of it: Sadie, over time, has come to genuinely like and respect Susan and on some level does seem to see her as a friend. But it’s also a source of frustration because it’s something that could have had a lot more done with it because, SPOILER ALERT, this is Sadie’s last appearance in 1995 and from here her appearances are going to drop off dramatically. Sadie and Susan, as much as anyone in this series does, have good chemistry. The seemingly shallow popular girl and the shrinking violet geek is as much of a no brainer pairing of characters as any odd couple can be.

But we run into one of Batty’s big problems as a writer. Sadie is too different from him so the thought of him doing more with her or the pairing of her and Susan seems to be beyond him. Much like every Westview High generation has its Cindy, so too will it have its Funky and Les, the duo of lower totem pole male nerds who are also best friends and will thus receive the lion’s share of what little attention Batty gives to the high school students. For early Act II that spot is filled by Wally and Madison. But it shouldn’t have been and in fact, there was no reason for it to exist at all. Madison was a complete nothing of a character so I feel like there was much more to be mined by having Sadie and Susan as the core duo of the early Act II high schoolers with Wally around to fill the role not of loser but of the Gen X grunge slacker. You know, fitting in with what you’d expect his character to be given his design and interests, and you see how this kind of guy fits in with the friendless academic nerd and the image conscious queen bee.

So I like the relationship between Sadie and Susan as much as I like anything in Funky Winkerbean and I think that it’s one of the strongest parts of the comic. But Batty’s own indifference-turned-dislike of one of the characters means that after this moment it goes absolutely nowhere. It’s emblematic I think of one of his biggest issues when it comes to writing. There’s something easy, something interesting sitting right there and he refuses to even consider it because he’s so laser focused on his own ideas about what he wants that he’s completely blind to it. Sadie welcoming Susan back could have been the start of a long running story arc for the two that explores both characters, the ups and downs of their friendship and the way each changes the other. You know, very basic stuff; a slow pitch softball lobbed right over the plate.

TB claims that Sadie was just a clone of her sister but by this point that is clearly not true. Writers will like to claim that sometimes a character just sort of did things on their own and while that’s obviously not literal, a character can just seem to naturally move in a certain direction as you write them. With Sadie, it’s very clear what the natural direction for her character was but instead of going with it, Batty would stubbornly fight it. It comes off as if he wanted her to be nothing more than the clone, the pale imitation, of her sister that he claims she was because for him that was much easier to write. But that wasn’t what Sadie, removed from the confines of a gag-a-day comic where it’s easy to fit into a more archetypal role for joke purposes and now in a more dramatic strip that requires more nuance and depth from its characters, actually was. Any halfway decent writer would have realized this and thus gone with it.

Instead, Batty will continue trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and it’ll be well over two years before Sadie and Susan interact again. We’ll see that, the rest of Sadie’s high school time and indeed the rest of her time in the strip in general when we finish off this series.

Pavlovian Noises Of General Approval

Josh Fruhlinger’s April Fool’s Day post at Comics Curmudgeon included this remark:

This is just another example of (the main characters of Intelligent Life) responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval.
April Fool’s Comics – The Comics Curmudgeon

I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase, “Pavlovian noise of general approval.” For our purposes, I take the word Pavlovian to mean “expressing a conditioned or predictable reaction.”

Which got me to wondering: is this blog just Pavlovian noises of general disapproval? Are we just throwing red meat at people who enjoy that particular flavor of red meat? Are we no better than the clucking, smirking, comic book-addicted clones of the Funkyverse, who stand around agreeing with each other that all Tom Batiuk’s personal tastes are really neat-o?

I think we are better. And I’ll tell you why.

If you pay $5 to go to a live show, a social contract emerges. You, the ticket-buyer, have an expectation that you will be entertained. You trust the venue to arrange a series of skilled performers that are worth $5 of your money, and two hours of your time. If they don’t deliver, you will be dissatisfied, and advise others not to visit.

The venue probably has expectations of you as well. They may have a dress code; rules about what substances you’re allowed to consume (or possibly required to consume, in the form of a two-drink minimum); and that you don’t disrupt the show to an unacceptable degree.

In comedy clubs, heckling is a part of the show, but there are well-understood standards about what’s too far. I’ve also known comedy clubs to forbid the use of certain words and subject matter. Because there’s a social contract between comedians and clubs as well: break our rules, and we’ll ruin your reputation.

Now think about newspaper comics. There’s a social contract here as well. If we turn to the comics page, then we, the readers, have the right to expect that the cartoonists have made a reasonable attempt to entertain us. We don’t pay that $5 cover charge, but we do invest a little time every day. But when we open the funny pages, what do we see? Roots country music. One man indulging his sexual fetishes. Incoherent sports drama. A parody of an 87-year-old movie. Millennial-bashing, raised to the level of gaslighting. NASCAR jokes that wouldn’t be good enough for a children’s joke book. Whatever Judge Parker is nowadays.

Who the hell is the target audience for any of that?

And I’m not even including strips like Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Curtis, Doonesbury, Garfield, Hagar The Horrible, Herb and Jamaal, Hi and Lois, the aforementioned Intelligent Life, and the many Z-grade Far Side clones. I’m not even including other strips I’m usually critical of: Luann, Mary Worth, and Pluggers. All these strips at least try to honor the social contract of being worth 10 seconds of your time. Though the word “try” is doing a lot of work here.

Now to Funky Winkerbean. It has three clearly defined eras: Act I, when it was a solid satire of high school life; Act II, when it shifted to drama but was still worth following; and Act III, when it became a self-indulgent shitshow about book signings, comic book covers, and multi-month self-interviews.

Who the hell is the target audience for any of those things?

I suspect most of us followed this pattern: liked Funky Winkerbean in Act I, tolerated it in Act II, and were disgusted by it in Act III. The social contract broke down in stages. It went from something that was pretty good, to something that was at least worth 10 seconds a day, to something that angers us so much that we spend a lot more seconds a day hating it.

And now Crankshaft seems to be trying to make people hate it.

Attack of the Not-So-Clone

We’re back with the second installment in the history and examination of Sadie Summers, the character who Tom Batiuk wishes we’d all forget, which is exactly why we’ll be remembering her. She’d shown up in the final year of Act I as a visual Mini-Me of her older sister Cindy and proceeded to drive her into fits. But with 1992 comes the jump four years ahead to Act II. Funky, at this point, is bumming around while Les has gotten a job teaching at the high school he hated so much that he spent graduation trashing it and everyone there.

But much like Les, Batty was unable to let go of the old high school so we’re introduced to the new generation of Westview High students which, at the start, is basically just Wally Winkerbean, his best friend Monroe Madison and Sadie. Demon Seed’s Act II incarnation first shows up in early September in the requisite introduction week.

A few things to note. First is that much like her sister, Cindy’s designated role is The Most Popular Girl at Westview HS, a role that will later be filled by Jessica Darling (whose father, Jon Darling, was murdered), Rana Howard (whose biological father was blown up, first adoptive father was also blown up, and second adoptive father was not blown up), Mallory Brooks (cannot speak on father status) and Maris Rogers (ditto) with each being more irrelevant than the last. Also much like her sister, Sadie will have hangers-on though unlike Cindy, who only had Carrie, she’ll one up her sister by having two of them: the girl with the tall hair is Tiffany while the one with the longer hair is Courtney but don’t get too attached because despite hanging around during all of Sadie’s high school time they don’t have much in the way of characterization. So little in fact that Courtney will wind up being an early victim — possibly even the first — of the Tom Batiuk Name Change Special when her name is randomly changed to Brittany a few years later.

The second thing is that we’re introduced to the idea that having to follow in Cindy’s footsteps is somewhat burdensome to Sadie. It’s something that seems tailor made for an easy and long running storyline where she does things like, I don’t know, try and find her own identity instead of retreading the same ground as her sister. But I suppose that if Batty were any other writer this site wouldn’t exist so I’ll leave it to you to guess whether or not Storytelling Rd. is long and winding or a one way dead end.

After the obligatory introduction week Sadie, unsurprisingly, next shows up at the mall after having acquired a credit card.

*If this story happened ten years later we’d be talking about the Sadie Dies of Anthrax storyline.*

Like any rational person she realizes that she’s been sent free money and uses it responsibly by buying the first thing to catch her eye and immediately maxing out the card.

Unfortunately for Sadie, TB will not forget as this more or less begins the one major storyline she’ll be the centerpiece of. But before that happens, she pops up during the oft called back to week where Wally lugs around a band turkey on a leash.

Thankfully this is 1992 so *Doom has yet to be released to* corupt The Youth… but wait, Mortal Kombat has! Oh no!

But that’s just a detour for in December her credit card statement arrives and is found by her father.

Deciding that she needs to learn some responsibility and pay off her credit card debt, he forces Sadie to find a job and like any other teenager she’s thrilled about the opportunity to wageslave.

In a twist you’ll never see coming, she winds up having to get a job at Burger Barn, the fast food place that I assume rivals the previous Act I fast food hangout McArnold’s (not to be confused with that anime favorite burger joint, WcDonald’s).

Of course, Sadie treats this as the height of embarassment and pretty much every strip in this story involves her seething such as when she’s unable to take off for New Year’s…

…and her subsequent rage against the heavens for the injustice.

*Poor girl doesn’t realize that as a young woman living in Westview she’ll be unable to defy Godtiuk’s will and escape her hand-tossed fate.*

Showing how ahead of her time she is, Sadie takes to the job with all the enthusiasm of a generation that has yet to be born as she hits her customers with the Gen Z stare.

*“No cap this stank ahh food ain’t bussin fr fr.”*

After a few months of this indignity she hits her goal and is free, having learned a valuable lesson along the way.

After this she generally stops being the sole focus of any major storylines herself but isn’t close to disappearing. She’ll continue to get the occasional week dedicated to her and a few months later in May 1993 she’ll share a strip for the first time with what will be probably her one real relationship throughout her time in school.

The favorite punching bag of Funky Winkerbean is introduced early in 1993 and a few months later she and Sadie interact for the first time in an otherwise inauspicious manner. We’ll have cause to revisit this pairing shortly but for now things continue to truck along as Sadie spends a week in June talking about her trip to the Mall of America.

*“I sure hope the malls don’t turn into the consumer equivalent of decayed Rust Belt towns!”*

She also tells Wally what his issues with the ladies are.

*That first panel is what we call grim foreshadowing.*

By this point One-Armed Beck’s introduction into the strip is still a few years away and Sadie, being the main high school girl, gets a few interactions like this where she basically calls Wally a dweeb. One gets the feeling that Batty had thoughts of perhaps doing an eventual romantic plot with the two of them; you know the whole pretty girl and schlub thing he loves. But similar to the couple of teased instances with Mopey Pete and Chien, if he did ever want to go with that then for whatever reason he got cold feet.

In November, Sadie joins the Poetry Club much to the surprise of Les though of course it’s simply as a scheme to try and get her grades up.

Being a woman of the people, Sadie has no need for high falutin language or fancy metaphors. Her poetry is blunt, showing her inner feelings with a refreshingly simplistic honesty.

She also makes time to talk with Susan.

*It’s the thing that drove Barry Balderman insane.*

A few weeks later Sadie and Mickey Lopez, the football playing daughter of Les’ work wife and eventual morose letter opener Linda Lopez, are at the mall when Sadie discovers, to her horror, that Cindy is working there and even worse is going to be moving back in with her family.

*She should be more embarassed of the fact that we’re now approaching the middle ’90s and Cindy’s still rocking a hairstyle straight out of 1988. But perhaps Sadie knows about pots and kettles.*

Act II (and beyond) Cindy is a far cry from Act I Cindy but there’s still a faint bit of that old sibling rivalry. Just with the roles reversed.

That closes out 1993 and with it the first couple of years of Act II. Sadie is a teenager and more of her own character so does Batty’s clone accusation stand up? While it’s obvious that he wants her to take the same mall obsessed queen bee role that Cindy had in Act I, at this point I’d say they’re still significantly different characters. Her popularity, beyond just kind of existing, comes off as being slightly less essential to Sadie than it did to Cindy. With Cindy the joke always feels like it’s just “She’s popular, isn’t that funny?” With Sadie, her popularity seems to be more about contrasting it with other things whether it’s putting her in situations meant to flummox her (like the fast food job) or by throwing her into something that otherwise seems at odds (the poetry club). Also, where Cindy was more vain and arrogant and cartoonish, Sadie comes off as a lot more low key. She’s a lot more deadpan and sarcastic than Act I Cindy tended to be.

The biggest difference between the two is that Sadie comes off as a lot nicer. Cindy in Act I is an absolute terror, one of the meanest and nastiest characters in the entire strip. This is the same girl who wanted Funky to admit that he was gay for breaking up with her (a joke that would not fly today and I’d bet was skirting the line even back in the late ’80s) and who had zero issue with trying to ruin anyone she saw as beneath her. Sadie, though, is a lot different. Granted she’s not necessarily nice to Wally as Wally was intended to be the lower rung loser of his generation but she’s not excessively nasty to him either. Nothing like Cindy basically treated Les as if he was a completely separate species as her.

Then there’s Susan. Not once does Sadie ever treat her with the level of disdain that you’d expect from an otherwise stereotypical alpha girl towards a friendless nerd. When she’s talking about how she doesn’t see Susan doing anything or asks her if all she does is poetry it never comes off to me as if she’s doing it out of any sense of meanness. It’s never done as a set up for her to put Susan down or anything like that, it just comes off as a blunt way of getting to know her. The worst you can accuse Sadie of in their interactions is being flippant but she doesn’t seem like she’s attempting to denigrate Susan or anything like that. Act I Cindy definitely would have but not Sadie. And as shown, Sadie is also friends with the ultra tomboyish Mickey, someone the Act I incarnation of her sister would have never been caught dead with. So while on a superficial level they can be similar, I still don’t feel that Sadie deserves TB’s dismissive classification of her.

That finishes part 2 of our Sadie retrospective. Next time, we’ll cover the middle years of her time in Act II to see whether or not any of this holds up.

Happy Sweet 16!!!

Son of Stuck Funky turns 16 years old this week!!! Celebrate with me that a child born when this shitposting haven started would now be legally allowed behind the wheel of a vehicle without adult supervision!!!

And what an auspicious start to our 16th year of nonsense. A brand new driver to take the wheel on posting duties and guide us through a scenic bus tour of Sadie Summers. Amazing, that this late in the game we’re still adding new crew to our roster. Narshe, we look forward to whatever you have in store for us.

Four years ago, when Funky Winkerbean was ending and Epicus and TFH were indicating they’d said pretty much everything they wanted to post about Batiuk’s silly universe, I had a big decision to make. I knew they’d let me truck on, but did I feel up to continuing?

I decided to keep the ball rolling, and I’m glad I did. You all have made it worthwhile, with your comments and engagement. New people keep finding this place. Old friends check in from time to time and make me smile. It is undoubtedly worth it.

But, let it be said, that I would have burnt out long ago if it weren’t for Banana Jr. 6000 stepping up to the plate and taking an equal, and sometimes outsized share of the workload. He’s the best. The bad cop to my good cop when it comes to prosecuting Batiuk. And taking the lead on some behind the scenes tech stuff I’m too analog brained to understand.

Thank you all for being here. And thank you all for the well wishes in the comments about my dad. He had a minor setback this week, a micro stroke which put him back in the hospital and made his projected road to recovery a bit longer. In some ways I’m back to where I was four years ago, with a big, long-running operation I have to keep rolling and decide what the future will bring.

But until all the grumpy old men in my life are ready to retire: Batiuk, Dad, Sorial Promise, I’ve decided I’m gonna keep it rolling, keep it Funky, keep it Cranky, and nitpick on!

Thanks for being here for the journey!

Car Season

Newly minted SoSF contributor Narshe here with my first post and I figured what better way to start off my career in Funkology than by diving right in… archive deep diving right in, if you will. Today, we’ll be taking a look at Tom Batiuk’s biggest mistake.

That’s right, the subject of our deep dive will be the character that TB has hated and despised like no other. The character whom he considers to be the biggest albatross hanging around his neck: none other than Sadie Summers! But why, oh why, did he end up disliking Sadie so much? Let’s let the man himself explain it.

Cindy, the most popular girl in the school, was coming on like gangbusters at this point, and I felt that I had barely scratched the surface of her potential as a character. I didn’t want to lose all of that, so I did something stupid. I cloned her and created her little sister/doppelgänger Sadie. Flash Fairfield, the editor who way back when had tried to school me on character development, would have been spinning in his grave at that move, and, if he weren’t in his grave, that would have probably finished him. Mea culpa, Flash. It was a totally misguided reason for creating a character. It was dumb, stupid, boneheaded, half-baked, ill-advised, risible, and done for all the wrong reasons. In an effort to not lose big-haired Cindy, I created her big-haired little sister and in doing so brought about character confusion, redundancy, overpopulation, and just about everything else that Flash had warned me not to do. And I paid the price. Sadie would limp along for a while after the time-jump, but she was and would always be a pale imitation of her big sis until she was eventually banished to the Dumb Character Phantom Zone, where she could pal around with the Moon Maid from Dick Tracy and Snoopy’s brothers Andy, Marbles, Olaf, and Spike.

Yes, in his own words she’s nothing but “a pale imitation of her big sis” but how fair of an assessment is that in reality? My belief, however, is that Sadie does indeed represent failure on the part of Batty but not for the reasons that he thinks but am I more correct than Batty is about his own character? By taking a look at Sadie’s history and with the distance afforded by both time and not being Tom Batiuk, that’s what we’ll try and determine.

Sadie first shows up on September 25, 1991 during a week where Ginny Wolfe has decided that the students in her class should bring in their siblings as part of a discussion on family units. This is basically done as preparation for Sadie showing up in Act II so we don’t skip ahead four years to suddenly see Cindy’s previously unknown and never mentioned sister. I mean look, she was introduced about nine months before the switch over was done so see, she’s definitely a pre-existing character! By the by, Les is in this class as well and there’s a strip way back in the ’70s where he mentions having a sister. You’d think that Batty would have used this as an opportunity to introduce her as well but I guess that obscure callbacks was something he wasn’t interested in until Act III.

Anyway, the Summers girls have the type of normal and healthy relationship all siblings have. Some times they fight…

*We’ve all tried murdering our brothers and sisters right?*

And some times they mess with one another.

This is largely going to be Sadie’s role throughout her handful of Act I appearances. Less than being a clone of Cindy, she exists pretty much entirely to troll her sister and drive her into near homicidal rages. After her introductory week, it won’t be until December 1 when Sadie next appears.

*Good old State U., the Typical Ohio College that TB used before he decided that 99% of the characters would instead attend his alma mater.*

A few weeks later she gets a Christmas themed strip on December 26.

*Batty will later reuse this strip/joke with Cindy having replaced Sadie.*

And… that’s about it for her in 1991. The next time she shows up is on February 10, 1992 for a week of strips where Cindy is forced to bring Sadie along with her to the mall.

In true bratty little sister fashion, Sadie decides to take the opportunity to embarass Cindy in front of a guy she likes.

Cindy, of course, responds to all of this in a manner most calm and rational.

*Remember that this woman is going to go on to be a respected (?) journalist.*

Sunday gives us the reveal of how Sadie was able to engage in such targeted annoyance.

*“The actual writing though? Four thumbs down! It’s as bad as that Three O’Clock High comic in the newspaper!”*

The next time she shows up is in March being the instigator in Cindy losing her credit card privileges.

*Learning tech simply to screw with your sibling is some high level trollery.*

This will also be Sadie’s final Act I appearance as soon after is the prom, Barry’s freak out, Les’s downer graduation speech and the shift over to Act II.

At this point, outside of her actual visual design there’s not really anything about Sadie that I’d say qualifies her for the clone designation that Batty had given her and really, there’s not much of anything wrong with her. Her role is to act as an annoyance for Cindy by flustering and embarassing her and you know what? It works. Sadie’s appearances in Act I are amusing. The mall week is genuinely, with no qualifications, pretty funny. Yes there’s Cindy’s physical abuse but we’re still in the cartoonish period of sentient Star Trek obsessed school computers and Dinkle’s band candy sales propping up the economy. It’s in line with everyone’s favorite running gag of Homer Simpson strangling Bart. Cindy and Sadie’s relationship is typical sibling rivalry stuff but taken to absurd extremes which is what you’d expect from a gag comic so it all works fairly well.

But how will this carry over to when Sadie’s on her own, having to be more of her own character instead of being the person who winds up her older sister? That’ll have to wait until next time when we jump back ahead to the past future present of 1992 and take a look at the first few years of Act II.