Son of Stuck Funky

The Littlest Accessory

I will be honest, once I finished the first part of this Summer retrospective I figured I would just take things up through the end or close to the end of Act II. See, it’s kind of hard to talk about Summer in Act II because she’s really not much of a character given that she only just starts kindergarten in the final few months of it. For most of it she’s just a baby or a pre-schooler and really doesn’t seem to exist as an actual character as much as she is a kind of thing that’s drawn into scenes with Les and/or Lisa.

She’s more of a living, baby-shaped accessory than anything else. She’s not a baby who’s secretly an evil genius or anything, she’s just kind of there to add color to scenes. There’s a part of me that wanted to just get through this period as fast as possible because of it but I just couldn’t do it. For one thing, I realized doing that would make this a mega-sized entry and we don’t really need one that’s as long as this insipid Larry Dinkle storyline over in Crankshaft. But I also realized that maybe there’s at least a little value in using Summer’s presence to give us a sort of quickish overview on the last few years of Act II.

By the by, Batty’s inability to keep to a timeline rears its ugly head once more due to a teeny tiny problem. That problem is, once again, the presence of Durwood and the rest of his high school class. Summer is born in summer 2002 and at the end of summer/start of fall in 2007 she’s entering kindergarten which would mean five years in-universe have passed. I’m sure the readers can already see the issue but just to make sure it’s clear to everyone, when Lisa said she was wanting to get pregnant she mentioned that Darin was a junior in high school. Even if we give that Batty doesn’t actually know high school grade names and Darin is actually a freshman, he still should have been out of high school by around 2005. Yet Summer’s entering kindergarten and Darin’s class graduating happens at the same time. So is the Class of ’07 just exceptionally slow? How did it take them six years to finish four grades in high school?

Ah well, there’s no use getting myself worked up over it. Let’s get to what this is actually about. Batty decides to open up the year with some biting humor about how guys like football and some times they get loud while watching it.

Les also shows that now that the new car smell is gone he cares about his daughter roughly as much as he cares about everything that’s not his precious writing.

*Haha, it’s funny because she’s suffocating!*

Now it’s around the period of John Byrne’s stint as artist and all the attempted dramatics of DCH John’s attempts at wooing Becky and getting tossed to the curb because Wally has shown back up in Westview, having survived being blown up in Afghanistan. Inbetween weeks where John’s mother sits forlornly with a Superman cake and John purchasing an engagement ring so he can ask Becky to marry him after like one or two dates, we get a week dedicated to Lesisa deciding to ignore Summer while she cries in the hopes of getting her used to sleeping normally.

With this hurdle cleared, Summer seems to be taking to other major infant milestones quickly such as hitting the point where she begins doing a Michigan J. Frog impression.

This is also the time period where Lisa was starting out as a lawyer with her first job being helping out at a women’s legal center to help deal with a guy who was going after an employee for having breast cancer. That job lasted for as long as Batty needed to do his “Lisa fights for cancer victims” story because the minute the case is over the legal center shuts down forcing Lisa to get a new job. A word is put in for her to work as a public defender in the state’s capital appeals division where she meets yet another sexist jerk when she’s forced to bring Summer along with her to her first day on the job.

She gets assigned to working on a case involving a death row inmate named Danny Madison, a Vietnam veteran who’s up for execution for a robbery and murder. Working with Misogynist Man — real name Mark Potter — we get the impression that he’s less a misogynist and more just an incredibly jaded guy due to the high failure rate of his line of work. I mean if your job was fighting losing battles to keep people from dying you’d probably have a case of the Mondays too, so his introduction kind of sticks out since these sexist tendencies never really crop up again.

For most of the rest of 2003, then, Lisa is busy trying to find any evidence to exonerate Danny. From statements about his PTSD from convenient war buddy and Westview High vice principal Nate Green, to shaky justification for unreliable witness testimony because one of the witnesses to the murder was a shut-in which I guess means her eyes didn’t function or something. So while this is going on, it’s up to Les to play Mr. Mom and take Summer on a playdate where he reacts to lady talk about the way you’d expect him too.

But he manages to overcome his fear of cooties and win the Mom Squad over with pretzels, beer and football proving that old canards about what planets men and women come from wrong (Les, for the record, comes from Hisanus). While Les is wooing the Westview MILF Brigade though, things aren’t going so well for Lisa. Her clever legal tactic of throwing agoraphobes under the bus fails to have much of an effect and it’s looking more and more like Danny’s not going to make it leading to this heartwarming Thanksgiving strip.

As time continues to run short for Danny, Les attempts to introduce Summer to sports.

April finds out that Kortney’s been using sex chatrooms while she’s supposed to be working but Ellie can’t bring herself to fire her, while Liz has started student teaching– wait, that strip’s got me all mixed up.

Anyway, all of Lisa’s efforts have failed which means Danny’s execution is imminent. This leads to the delightful Christmas tale of Lisa having to go to the prison and watch — at his request no less — Danny being executed. Misogynist Mark had told Lisa when she started that he thought she didn’t have the spine enough to stick with the job and after having earned his respect, Lisa decides to prove him right by immediately quitting.

Danny had learned of Summer when talking to Lisa a little before Thanksgiving and when Lisa had come in to tell him that they were out of options, he in turn tells her that he’d made Summer a Christmas present. After his execution we see that it’s a snowman carved out of what I presume is prison soap.

*I suppose it’s better than a shank or prison hooch.* Or a toy made out of the gun that killed your grandfather.

I get that Batty was trying to give a touching end to an otherwise grim story but man, that second panel there is just kind of weird and the emotion doesn’t come through at all. Maybe it needed Ghost Danny or something, I don’t know. But Danny’s more or less forgotten as soon as he’s gone and to start 2004 we see that Les’ inadvertant indoctrination is beginning to take hold and Summer is on the path to becoming a filthy sporto.

Batty also can’t help himself by bringing back one of his favorite tropes: dramatic irony.

*See, it’s funny because they are brother and sister!*

At this point, presaging her eventual future in Act III, Batty’s started getting bored of the little rugrat and so her appearances actually dwindle a lot. She gets some things like a customary appearance during Mother’s Day but she’s mostly just there to hang around as a prop for scenes. This includes a week in August about her birthday party — the prepartion and the actual party — where I’m pretty sure that Summer doesn’t actually appear because he’s more worried about sticking it to helicopter parents for some reason.

One of the big storylines running throughout 2004 is the Moores deciding that being well into adulthood with careers and a kid, they should start looking for a house. More precisely, Lisa decides this while Les pouts and grumbles the whole time. All of their initial attempts, including a crossover week with Crankshaft where they were checking out Lilian’s house, go nowhere. And then in the fall, they find it; the place of their dreams. A cozy little home in a cozy little neighborhood.

*I’m not passing up opportunities to see Les get hurt.*

The Taj Moore-hal has arrived and it hates Les because there’s a running joke for a while of him hitting his head on a low-hanging pipe every time he goes into the basement.

Of course come December, we also get the customary dose of Lisa pining for the son she had to give up while the daughter she actually has sits in blissful, childish ignorance of being Mommy’s Little Runner-Up.

I’ll end things here for now with the close of 2004. There’s some other events that take place this year too such as the start of Funky’s relationship with Holly, which means the first appearances of Cory Winkerbean, as well as the birth of Maddie Klinghorn in the summer. That last one is another thing that throws the sacred timeline off because she’s a full year younger than Summer yet is in the same grade when realistically she shouldn’t be. If TimeMop can’t even keep the timestream clean, I can’t imagine what a poor job he does with the floors and bathrooms.

As I said earlier, it’s a bit hard to write about Summer specifically in Act II because she’s just a toddling prop more than she is an actual character. So I think that next time, for real, I’ll try and get through the rest of Act II and all the fun times with cancer that made this strip famous.

Errors Were Made

Happy Father’s Day!

Big Daddy Batiuk decided that today, we get to create our own strip.

Here’s my version!

Okay. So it is really just an error that, as of the writing of this blog post, has been up all day and never corrected.

It’s not the only error born of laziness from this week.

For example.

Wait…

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiitttttttt…..

You mean to tell me, Summit Beach Park was…ALSO…a real place?

OH FOR PETE’S SAKE

Sigh.

I want this to be a lesson to all of you out in readerville: never take the apparent depth of the ad-hoc ‘research’ that we do on this blog as a completeness of perspective.

I was one quick Google search away from avoiding an unforced error. And for a moment, when I read iansdrunkenbeard’s post, the dumb egomonkey part of my brain wanted to smile and nod and play along like OF COURSE I knew that Summit Beach was also a real place. But I decided to fess up. Because it’s an important lesson.

I had taken what I’ve learned about the way Batty operates and my own experiences and presuppositions and decided that Summit Beach was fictional. Because from my more modern perspective it seemed far fetched to me that in real life, less than 30 miles from each other, there would be two waterside amusement parks, with roller coasters and midways and boat docks, and named dance halls that burned down.

But I was wrong. The 1900’s through the 1950’s was a different time. A time of more local amusements. A time when you could have a crowd of ladies dancing arm in arm with each other and no one would ever assume that meant the Wisteria Ballroom was a lesbian hotspot.

Does this mean that I was completely wrong, and that the Chippewa Lake Amusement Park was in no way an inspiration for all the Lucy/Lil/Eugene shenanigans? No.

Not according to this lovely little youtube video I found… (From the ironically tited DinkLife channel)

The location of Summit Beach Park was redeveloped as housing in the 60’s. So, unlike the Summit Beach of the Funkyverse, there was no abandoned park lingering on and decaying for decades that Lucy or Eugene or Lillian could wander around. That part of the afterlife of Chippewa Lake Park was stolen for the fiction.

But, while the Starlight Ballroom burned down in 2002, the real life Wisteria Ballroom met a firey end much earlier.

(Don’t think about how Pam is canonically 76. It will only hurt your brain)

And yes, the Summit Beach Dance Pavilion and Roller Rink looks much closer to the comics.

Interestly the entrance sign used for the park sometimes would revert to an older reference. An Ayers error!?

Also of note, remember a couple years ago, where Eugene went to a somehow now open Summit Beach and tried to drown himself with a dilapidated canoe?

That also is seemingly based on real life now. As just this summer, after years of planning and a couple seasons of construction, there is now a small park with concessions, a pavillion and complete with kayak rentals open at Summit Lake again.

That’s nice.

Making a Messiah

Over in Crankshaft, Batty is taking a trip into the distant past of the Funkyverse as three old farts stand around in a storage unit while one of them regales his enraptured pals and unenraptured readers about how his daddy played the trumpet and wore a suit. Larry Dinkle went all around the Great Lakes region but was never around the one place where — *sniff* — it mattered most.

But while Batty is looking back to reveal the Funkyverse’s past, we shall be looking back in order to reveal its future. So nestle in, dear reader, for this tale truly told…

It is late 2022 and Tom Batiuk has just dropped his bombshell via crotchety Golden Age relic Ruby Lith that it’s over. After fifty long years Funky Winkerbean would be coming to an end in but a few short weeks. A half-century of characters mugging at the fourth wall, life or death school levy votes, old men geeking out over even older comic books, Les Moore’s undeservedly smug face, cancer, alcoholism, band candy and murderous gun-wielding chimpanzees would finally draw to a close.

However there were still things to learn about Westview, OH and it was the job of one person to learn them. They had to, after all, for as it turns out only they alone could do this. Only they had the ability to sift through the information and see the patterns and find the clues that would allow us to become a better, more united people. And someone else was there to make sure that they did it.

Summer Moore had a destiny. She would write the book that would bring about utopia. The book that would help us realize that humanity was our nation. The greatest work of philosophy by the greatest one book author of all time. But how would she get to this point? What could have caused an otherwise innocuous young woman from a middling Rust Belt town to eventually become the Pattern-Finder?

In order to answer these oh-so-pressing questions, I’ll be starting a new series examining the twists and turns of Summer’s life. Because surely this will be a sensible and logical development and not just Tom Batiuk pulling something out of his ass at the last minute, won’t it?

But while the cat’s in the cradle over in Crankshaft, we’ll be starting with a different cradle entirely as examining Summer’s life means that we must first examine her pre-life which means going all the way back into the wilds of 2001. It was a year of great tragedy as Funky started it drukenly passed out on the sidewalk, his marriage rapidly crumbling around him. In these dark times though there was a bright spot as Lisa, cancer free and better than you, was working on her law degree and decided to let slip that there was something else she wanted.

The Moores decide to talk about Lisa’s sudden desire for a child with Les expressing his worries in his usual whiny and self-absorbed manner.

Being the insufferable turd that he is, Les decides to take this time to bust out his new character that he’s been working on — Armchair Freud — and begin psychoanalyizing his wife’s desire to have a child.

Of course Lisa did not decide on a whim that she wanted a baby. As we all know, Batty loves his meaningful anniversaries and in November 2001 it had been 15 years since the story that forever changed the trajectory of Funky Winkerbean and Tom Batiuk’s career. And what better way to call back to it than to get Lisa’s biological clock a-tickin’ and have her come down with a case of baby fever? For the next month then, the reader is treated to a complete retelling of the Pregnant Lisa Saga from 1986 and I suppose it’s a minor miracle that Batty got Ayers to actually draw the whole thing as opposed to taking the exceedingly lazy way out and just reprinting it.

Tangenting here, and there may be more tangents as this series goes, but we see here some of Batty’s patented ability to completely disregard his own timeline. Lisa states that “Dopey” Darin Fairgood is a junior in high school which would mean, given that this is set around the time of his birthday, he’s just about to turn 17 years old. You’d think that wanting to call back to his most important story, Batty would just say “he’s a freshman in high school” to line up with the story’s anniversary.

Yet for some reason Batty is basically acting as if the last few years have been happening in real time even though time in this strip has always been a fluid thing — For Better or For Worse this ain’t. I mean it won’t be until 2007 when Darin’s generation, having entered high school in 1998, graduates. So for Darin to be a junior in 2001, his birth would have had to happen in 1984 which I guess lines up with when he started school but would then mean that, if we kept the original 1988 graduation date that Act II establishes, then Lisa would have been a freshman herself when she was pregnant which okay, fine. But in 2002, for the strip’s 30th anniversary, Funky will also celebrate his 30th birthday. With the Act I crew graduating college at 22, that would mean that Act II would have had to have started in 1994 and Funky’s group graduated in 1990 not 1988 which means Lisa would have had to have given birth, at the earliest, in 1986 which means Darin should be a freshman and not a junior which means…

God dammit, why do I put more thought into this than him?

Okay, back to the actual important stuff. After the flashback to Lisa’s nebulously dated pregnancy, she’s feeling frisky and decides it’s time to get to babymakin’ with the most sensual of come ons.

Wooed by those romantic words, in February 2002 we learn that Les was successful at implanting his miracle seed within his ovulating she-bride and that she now carries Ohio’s most divine child inside her cancer womb.

With the divine child now growing within her, life continues as normal for Lisa and Les over the next few months. Les does… uh, something — Les-type things I suppose — while Lisa graduates law school. At the same time both Funky and Crazy Harry are going through their own significant life changes as Funky’s in the process of getting divorced while Crazy has gotten engaged to Donna who, you’ll be surprised to learn, was actually the Eliminator the whole time! Betcha didn’t expect that, did you? Because of all these changes going on in their lives, the guys decide to go on a camping trip as this may be their last chance to do so, while at the same time Lisa is in Columbus taking the bar exam.

Everything’s going pretty well which of course means it’s time for drama to rear it’s head. Which it does when Lisa arrives back at Montoni’s and to her surprise ends up in a confrontation with an old friend.

*Leapin’ lizards! What a shocking development!*

Yes, while carrying the holy child within her Lisa is met with the appearance of Ohio Satan who, while not all powerful in his devilry, is able to draw upon his hellish powers to engage in minor annoyance. This annoyance comes in the form of Frankie demanding Lisa take him to his son — who ironically is right there unbeknownst to any of them — and he won’t take no for an answer. Because he’s evil, you see. So evil that he manhandles Lisa a little bit with dire consequences.

The stress of the situation causes Lisa to go into labor… I guess? I would assume that’s the reason anyway but who can really know? Godtiuk works in mysterious ways after all. Frankie takes the opportunity to skedaddle on out of the comic for the time being. With Darin and Lisa being the only two in Montoni’s it’s suggested that an ambulance is called but like a true Batiukian Hero, Darin decides he can get her to the hospital faster than the crummy professionals whose jobs it is to do this and who are basically their own traffic laws.

*How are EMTs even going to compete with a pizza delivery car?*

I mean how else was TomBa going to give us some hilarious dramatic irony and Teen Pregnant Lisa callbacks if the characters just left things up to the professionals like reasonable people? Don’t they know that there’s awards to be won? And oh man was Tommy Boy really in love with the dramatic irony for this story because he was practically ODing on it.

*It’s funny of course because he’s just reenacting his own birth.*

Okay, what the hell? Darin was canonically born in 1986 so he, if this took place in real time, cannot possibly be in the 11th grade. Unless I’m discounting the possibility that TB doesn’t actually know the difference between freshman, sophomore, junior and senior which maybe I shouldn’t be.

Anyway, the whole situation means that that the Annointed One was born a little earlier than normal and so she’s put on a ventilator to help her survive.

While talking with the doctor, the Moores realize that with all the craziness going on this summer they forgot to decide on a name for their little girl. Lisa decides that craziness means that Summer is the name that they’ll be going with which means I can finally start calling her by her actual name too. With the newborn Summer now clinging to life in Doctor Depresso’s Breatheinator 5000, Lisa fills in Les — who’d zipped back from the camping trip because he somehow felt that “something was wrong back home” — on the events that led to their kid’s premature birth. Les comically threatens to kick Frankie’s ass if he ever shows up again.

While you’re thinking of people more qualified and able than Les to beat up Frankie — the newborn Summer for instance — our hero decides to start making a list.

Batty, of course, is milking the apparent touch and go nature of Summer’s situation for everything it’s worth.

But fret not for this is but a fake out and these are happy tears! It turns out that Summer has gained a pound and Les is overcome with joy, huzzah! Things are going well and Summer’s about ready to leave the hospital, so Les goes out to buy a fancy new digital camera so he can get Boy Genius to explain to him and Lisa how uploading a picture works.

By the way, giving me vibes similar to this gem.

But even back in 2002 uploading pictures of your kids onto the internet for the whole world to see could lead to some suspicious characters coming across them. Characters you might not want.

*I bet he also evilly narrates putting jelly on his English muffin.*

Who could this be? Frankie? Or someone even more sinister?

Why it’s just another fake out as Lisa’s dad and/or mom were sinisterly and dramatically narrating their every action for our benefit simply to fool us. Perhaps they’re aware they’re characters in a comic strip and understand dramatic tension. Who can say? Regardless of any potential medium awareness, they’ve decided to move back to Westview to be closer to their family and so Lisa can have a convenient babysitter. Summer soon after has her first Christmas and Les decides to end it with the type of uplifting positivity that only he can provide.

*The world’s crummy and maybe it’ll be slightly less crummy for you but still crummy. Merry Christmas, kid.*

With that I’ll close things off here for the time being. The future Messiah has been born and all is right with the world for now. There will be plenty of time for Batty to screw up his handling of this most important of all Westviewians later but next time we may possibly rocket through a good chunk of the remaining years of Act II. Or we may not. But there will be a next time because we’ve got a long way to go.

Through the Wood Chippewa

Yes, yes, I haven’t posted in forever, many thanks to Banana Jr 6000 and Narshe etc etc…

More importantly what the hell is going on this strip?

That is NOT the Starlight Ballroom in Chippewa Lake Park. THAT is an amalgamation of two different comic panels drawn decades apart, one of which included a different fictional band leader and band.

And the other, is a panel from Lillian’s imagined afterlife for Lucy. So don’t ask me how Eugene was able to pull a photograph from purgatory itself.

What unites the two, other than the copy pasting work of some poor computer intern posing as Dan Davis? They’re both supposed to be in the Wisteria Ball Room at Summit Beach Park!

This:

Is not Eugene and Lucy dancing at Chippewa Lake. Because it’s them at Summit Beach.

A location established as so important to Lucy that in the throes of dementia she somehow found her way there!

A location established for decades and decades. 30 years at minimum!

Now it’s pretty obvious, with only the barest bit of research, that Summit Beach Park was always based on the real life Chippewa Lake Park in Ohio, just south of Medina, which closed in 1978 after a hundred years of operation.

The grounds sat abandoned, the play place for vandals and urban explorers, slowly being consumed by nature and burned by arsonists for more than 40 years, providing reference photos for Batiuk to pass on to Ayers.

The ride track in the foreground was the Tumble Bug. Only one ride of its kind remains in operation at Kennywood.

I will say that the Wisteria Ballroom and the Starlight Ballroom don’t share much resemblance on the outside. Artistic license perhaps? After all ‘arcade’ literally means a whole bunch of arches. Wisteria looks more early 20th century amusement and looks less like a two story Village Inn.

Inside The Starlight Ballroom looked like this:

Until it looked like this:

And then in 2002 it looked like this:

(The Wisteria Ballroom was confirmed burned down in strips dating back to the 90’s btw. Did the Crankshaft strips inspire an arsonist? Was the arsonist Batiuk himself? Questions!)

Still, the most important question remains, what the heck is going on here?

A few possibilities.

1.) It’s an error. Batiuk is going senile, and is mixing up his fictional locations with the real world locations they’re based on.

But in Sunday’s strip we get those stupid ticket stubs in the title panel.

Lovingly copied from an Ebay listing photo.

Seems pretty specific and high effort to have ‘Davis’ pulling up. So what is going on? Gleeb over in the GoComics comments section may have figured it out.

So I’m putting my money on gleeb’s notion that Batiuk is choosing to muck around with 30 years of continuity and water down Summit Park as a place of importance to Lucy and Eugene in order to crowbar in a current local Ohio event. Banana Jr, put me down for betting that this whole stupid arc ends with Harry Dinkle directing his choir/band of geriatrics at the opening of the new Chippewa Lake Nature Park. Eugene will shed a single wistful tear as he watches on TV from the comfort of his prison or nursing home or anchorite’s cell or desert island or wherever he’s going.

Funny that Batiuk would look back so fondly on The Starlight Ballroom. That is where, in 1937, Lawrence Welk made his first radio broadcast. And Batiuk’s relationship with Welk is…fraught.

Funnier still that Ed Crankshaft is acting like he’s never heard the name Larry Dinkle before. Because his best friend for life, Ralph Meckler, played trumpet in his band.

lol

Where Is Eugene Moving? Who Cares? It’s A Dinkle Story!

This is the photograph Lillian is looking at in today’s Crankshaft:

Okay, it’s not exactly the same photograph. Today’s version has what appears to be entrance doors where the text appears in the above image. But it’s now obvious where this week’s heavily padded story is going. Lillian is going to notice the name of the bandleader, and connect it to her choir director/former Bedside Manor band director/former Westview High School band director/fascist dictator/World’s Greatest Asshole Harry Dinkle.

It also explains the cryptic, pretentious introduction from Monday’s strip:

We all spent a week wondering what the hell that could possibly mean, in the apparent context of a very old man being forced to move somewhere unpleasant. It means we’re going to explore Dinkle’s daddy issues!

Oh boy. Where to begin?

This is so obvious I’m embarrassed to write it. But one-time Putlizer nominee Tom Batiuk apparently doesn’t know it, so here it is: A very old man awkwardly telling a lifelong friend about “moving to a new place” is a serious topic. It is not a benign piece of information you use to fill space while you get to the more important matter of yet another found photograph of yet another dead person.

I’ve used the word “tonelessness” to describe Tom Batiuk’s writing, and this is another manifestation of it: not knowing what’s important to human beings and what isn’t. This week appeared to be setting up a “move to the retirement home” story. Which can be played for dark humor. But that didn’t happen here either. Nor is Tom Batiuk even remotely capable of this.

It was also unclear why this would have been a bad thing for Eugene. Bedside Manor is a recurring location, and is never depicted negatively. Not even when it should be.

But the uncertain future of a 99-year-old man is irrelevant. Or the reveal is being pushed to the end for some reason that makes sense only to Tom Batiuk. It’s a coin flip whether the story even bothers addressing the matter later on.

The story didn’t even need the tired “found photograph” mechanism, because Eugene’s sad little shoebox also contained this:

That appears to say “Sunrise Over Kilimanjaro by Larry Dinkle.” Lillian could have found this sheet music almost anywhere, recognized the surname, asked Harry about it, and the same story could have progressed from there. This also could have been done in two days, tops. (On a personal note: my first ever blog post complained about Batiuk using days to set up something he could have opened with. It’s filler all the way down.)

I have a lot more thoughts, but let’s take a moment and enjoy what we’ve got here: a genuine Funky Winkerbean Act III-style prestige arc! Have fun in the comments!