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.
Outside the circumstances of her birth, life has been pretty simple for Summer. I mean true, she is a toddler so it can’t really be all that complicated for her but still, things have been going pretty well for the Moores and the residents of Westview in general minus the occasional hiccup. Sure, John got his hopes up that maybe the pretty one-armed pizza lady was going to give him the time of day only to have them cruelly dashed when that bastard Wally returned.
But Tom Batiuk is an artiste with a vision and soon the misery miasma will blanket Westview once more for he shall unleash upon it’s hatchet-faced denizens his masterpiece.
However at the start of 2005, things are going so good that after only their second date — which followed her being ghosted for most of the previous year — Funky and Holly get engaged! Wally and Lefty are as well so it’s going to be a double wedding at Montoni’s. This wedding stuff will take up well over half of the year and so for a lot of it Summer will only be making some token appearances. In fact it won’t be until February when Summer makes her first appearance of the year, starting to talk and being used to prank her Lego-headed father.
But February is also when we start getting the first hints that things will be taking a decidedly darker turn as Wally begins trying to deal with his PTSD and Roberta Blackburn appears out of nowhere to pester her daughter and son-in-law to be. But she’s also there looking for a gift for Becky’s cousin who just so happens to like comic books so Becky directs her moralizing mother down to Komix Korner where some Japanese works catch her attention and soon, the cops are taking John to the slammer. Presumably for having shit taste in manga.
“Sir, we’re taking you in on one count of actually liking Rent-A-Girlfriend.”
So Lisa’s got her big plot for the year, trying to uphold the sanctity of artistic expression and fight obscenity laws and you know… I really in a broad sense do agree with Batty on these types of issues whenever they do come up. After all, I live in the state that produced Jack Thompson and a lot of my formative and not-so-formative years involved hearing about his antics against music, video games and the like. But Batty makes it so damn hard when his arguments for them is delivered in a manner that tends to be overly self-assured in spite of their shallow insipidness. Like Les will go “These articles are important because free speech!” which… yeah? No shit. Or Lisa will stand in front of a jury and go “Comics… are art!” and yeah, of course they are.
But come on, Batty! This is an issue you seem passionate about so whenever you bring it up maybe show a little more fire than “[thing] is good, actually” and then leaving it at that.
With all of these events going on, it’s months before we see Summer again as she shows up during the Winkerbean double wedding in June.
Which then causes her to have marriage on the brain.
In the end, I don’t think he’ll have to worry about that.
But once again there’s no time in summer for Summer because it’s taken up by Wally and Becky’s honeymoon to beautiful Afghanistan. Which includes this rather bizarre strip just before Wally leaves.
In a case of Batty just grabbing characters from other works, the implication is that La Choi San — the outdated cariature who doubles as the grandmother of Jade Dragon owner Liu Lin — is actually the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates and is giving Terry’s flight jacket to Wally. It’s a jacket that Wally will wear all throughout the Afghanistan story that takes up a full two months of the strip’s focus, ending with he and Becky deciding to adopt Rana, the younger sister of the girl who rescued Wally during his original MIA phase but who was blown up along with the rest of her family by a car bomb.
Naturally, Lisa adds “adoption” to her plate of legal work to help them bring Rana over to the U.S. just as Becky’s taken the assistant band director job at the high school that was vacated when Kara became Big Walnut Tech’s band director.
Summer is still kind of there, hanging around during a multi-week story about Taj Moore-hal having bats in the attic… Batiuks, if you will hyuck hyuck.
John’s trial occurs and Lisa has her big success with the rousing argument that John can’t be guilty of breaking obscenity laws because comics are art and also the “child” that was in the store when Roberta purchased the pornography — part of the reason John was being charged with breaking obscenity laws — was really an adult midget. It sort of feels like TB wasted months’ worth of time just to get to that punchline too.
The year winds down with some ligther fare like a pun worse than my bats in the attic one.
Also, web blog? Where do you think the word “blog” comes from Batty?
And some Christmas shenanigans.
But poor Summer opens up the next year having caught some kind of bug leading to a week of Les having to care for his sick child.
After heroically puking all over her father, she again takes a backseat to Lisa and Holly’s cancer support group as well as Becky learning she’s pregnant. We do get what I believe is the first appearance together of Summer and Cory though.
But it’s the calm before the storm. Things look as if they’re going well and Les is even going to have his story published in the New Yorker which means Summer, and we, get to watch him do a dumb little dance.
But as Lisa’s expression in the last panel indicates, something is wrong. She’d gone in to participate in some genetic testing but something came up and she gets the confirmation just as her and Les are heading out on a vacation to New York.
Thanks Dr. Dickhead.
That’s right folks, it’s been twenty years since The Story That Changed Everything and with his creative fires fueled, Tom Batiuk has decided to give us The Story That Changed Everything II: The Lady with All the Cancers. Les and Lisa go on their vacation but of course the shadow of cancer looms over everything. When they get back, Lisa makes sure to give her daughter a hug and give the audience one of Funky Winkerbean‘s patented cursed close ups.
I would assume that deciding to bring back Lisa’s cancer is when Batty decided to do a second timeskip and it seems to have really put him in a mood because this is when we’re getting all the stuff that seemed to catch the attention of the broader internet in the mid-2000s, making people fascinated by how damn miserable this strip was. Because this is also the same timeframe where Wally gets dragged away from his family and back into active duty in Iraq which, spoilers, will not work out well for him. At all. This is right after construction on the street in front of Montoni’s forced the Jade Dragon to close as well.
But it’s not all bad, at least in-universe, because this is also the period where Darin and Jessica Darling, Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered, become an item when she’s impressed by some quick thinking he pulled to unforunately save Pete from getting his ass kicked by the Rough Riders from Crankshaft. And this is when Bull Bushka gets married to walking buzzkill Linda Lopez, who’d hooked up during summer break the previous year. It’s the kind of story you think we’d actually see but no, because Batty loves his shocking twists and so figured it was best to have everything happen offscreen so he could randomly spring it on the readers.
Why let a story get in the way of a good surprise?
A lot of the rest of 2006 goes back and forth between Lisa’s cancer — which includes repeated appearances by the worst doctor on Earth and a trip to the Grand Canyon — and the stuff with Darin and Jessica. Interspersed is also a goofy story about Montoni’s being profiled by the Food Network which culminates in some kind of Iron Chef style pizza cooking competition show.
Summer’s last significant appearance of 2006 and her first one since showing up in the background before Les and Lisa leave for Arizona isn’t until December.
Batty was too busy with other things to deal with Summer. There’s Becky giving birth, John continuing to pine for her and setting up things that will have zero payoff by establishing Mooch’s relationship with Mindy Murdoch and Crazy Harry’s second kid, both of which will disappear shortly into Act III.
But 2007 starts off with a seeming bright spot for Lisa.
Joy of joys, Lisa’s results are looking good and she’s in remission which seems to be putting her in a much better mood as she can actually appreciate having a kid again. The one she actually has mind you, not the one she gave up and pines for.
Unfortunately for Lisa we’re in the misery porn era of Funky Winkerbean so it’s not long before she learns that her doctor has in fact been utterly incompetent and that they’d mixed up her results with someone else’s.
Now given all of this — that Lisa had gone off her chemo and other treatments for a few months because of their screw up, the fact that said screw up even happened at all — you’d expect the Moores to do something right? I would guess that they probably have a pretty clear case for a malpractice lawsuit. But nope, they just throw up their hands and say nothing can be done. There’s a constant thing whenever Lisa is brought up about what a strong fighter she was right up until the end but no, not really. She immediately gives up and just allows herself to rot away over the next few months.
Because as we all know, Lisa is destined to die and it’s in the summer when she gets the news, delivered to her by Dr. Screwup in the most tactful and courteous manner she can muster.
Fuuuuuck you!
Now let me digress a bit here to ask, what was Batty’s intention with this character? Was it to portray someone who was ultimately a good and caring doctor who made a little whoopsie doodle because we all make mistakes? Or was she intended to be representative of the real or perceived cold indifference of the American healthcare system? I suspect something closer to the first one given that neither Les nor Lisa treat her with the scorn she rightly deserves for messing up in such a massive way.
And that response? “Months… but don’t ask me how many.” Double fuck Dr. Dipshit. It’s easy to want to criticize various characters for various reasons in Batiuk’s works but I don’t really think any of them are as bad as Dr. Hallet. It’s not just the incompetence but the callous flippancy with which she tells Lisa that she’s going die that makes her so unbelievably repugnant in a setting filled with repugnant jackasses. Les at Bull’s funeral comes close but really, she might be the absolute worst person in the history of the strip.
While this has been going on, the other major story running through the year has been Darin, at Jessica’s urging, searching for his birth mother. There were some starts and stops but eventually the information is released and he learns that Lisa is his bio-mom and decides to convey this via creepily watching Lisa and Summer play in front of Taj Moore-hal.
Maybe someone can tell me whether I’m right or not but I get this feeling that this is a go-to Batty likes to employ as part of his forced dramatics. The whole shot of someone staring at others from their car. I don’t think this is either the first or last time this type of thing occurs but maybe I’m wrong.
From here Darin basically plays real big brother to Summer who now has to face her dying mother though of course is still to young to fully grasp what’s happening.
Shortly after this she enters kindergarten as well.
Lisa’s state is rapidly deteriorating and by September she’s hit the point where she can’t go up and down the stairs and so effectively enters hospice care in the living room.
Batty decides to get in one last minute instance of both closing off a plot thread and setting things up for Act III by having Bull and Linda pop by with the kid they’ve spent most of the year trying to adopt. At that point it’s pretty much the endgame for Lisa. Her parents show up one final time so her dad can apologize for not being there for her even though they’ve been around plenty the last few years.
Finally Masky McDeath appears to usher Lisa into the Great Phantom Zone Beyond and it’s over.
And we immediately smash cut to a goateed Les lying on a couch, speaking to a therapist as it flashes back to him dropping off Summer with the Winkerbeans while he heads to New York to spread Lisa’s ashes in Central Park.
Now Batty’s rationale for fast forwarding through and past everything was that he didn’t want to turn the comic into an extended grieving process but given what happens in Act III that’s obviously a load of crap.
The simple fact is that he wants to tell this grand ongoing narrative but is incapable of thinking of stories as existing beyond themselves. When the Flash beat Weather Wizard that was the end of it, it didn’t affect the next issue and it’s the same approach that Batty likes to take with his stories. Which is fine if you want to do a bunch of loosely connected but self-contained stories but that isn’t what he’s doing. We can see that in the currently ongoing Dinkle Pity Party in Crankshaft where 50+ years of Harry L. Dinkle, the World’s Greatest Band Director is brushed aside as a mere persona created by a man with daddy issues. All the haranguing, egotism, band turkeys… it was just an act to hide Dinkle’s insecurities. None of it was mentioned before this story and I would bet that once it’s over it’ll go in the same box and shoved into the same closet as all the other important stories and revelations like Danny Madison or Bull’s having protected Les from even worse bullying.
Or like Lisa’s death and the fallout from it. A story this big needs to dive into what happens afterwards, how the characters react, how Lisa’s passing affects them. But Batty is incapable of thinking about any of that and to him it’s not important anyway. Lisa dying was what was important and once her life ended so to did the story and it was time to move on to the next one. So the two weeks that TB allots for the story of Les’ NYC sojourn is all we get. This was his big masterpiece of a story and it’s treated with all the gravitas of the ending of a Silver Age comic book as that’s what his storytelling sensibilities are stuck in.
And back to the actual story, we get a little bit with Les returning to tuck Summer into bed and stare forlornly at his now empty bed.
Don’t worry, Lisa will quite literally be there with you in spirit.
And, uh, sniff Lisa’s clothes like a giant creepy weirdo.
No, seriously, what?
He finally sits Summer down to explain death to her and that Mommy isn’t coming home at which point we get one final Sunday that transitions to older versions of Les and Summer.
With that, Act II officially closes and we enter into Act III starring the middle-aged Les and the teenage Summer… for now, anyway. We’ve jumped ahead ten years but not really as infamously the timeline was instead shifted back by a decade because I guess TB is so lacking in imagination that he was unable to think of what life would look like in the far off year of 2017. Perhaps it would have had flying cars and ray guns and look like something out of an atomic age sci-fi comic book but maybe not. Best not to risk being wrong.
What will the future of Funky Winkerbean and Summer Moore look like from here? Next time we’ll gaze into tomorrow to look at the future-present of Westview and Batty’s attempts at making Summer into an actual character.
Man, I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our nation’s birthday than by dragging a small cadre of elderly people through the dilapidated remains of a defunct amusement park, to the jagged, tetanus riddled shell of a dance hall, and then making them listen to a trumpet solo squeezed out between the withered, puckered, trembling lips of a fat, retired, band director.
When placed my bet that this would end with a musical performance at Chippewa Lake, I was picturing an official performance of both of Dinkle’s elderly musical groups at the grand opening of the Chippewa Lake Nature Park. A celebration of the community coming together to honor the past while creating a safe and clean space for future generations to enjoy. But no, in the Funkyverse Chippewa Lake is still a ghostly wreck.
Why are you so hung up on squatting in everlasting ruins, like a maggot in a corpse? Go ahead and honor what your local community is doing, Batiuk. Please. They’re even opening a little museum on the park grounds, you should be all over this shit!
While the train crash of this story has been miles more entertaining than endless Skip and Batton arcs, and I will never turn down a Batiuk prestige arc inanely told, I still wish we were getting some traditional 4th of July grill explosions. With all the fuss being made over the 250th, I’m surprised Batiuk didn’t cook up some shenanigans like he did for the Eclipse.
Fifty years ago he was all over the Bicentennial. He milked it for gags for more than a year. From one off gag strips starting in 1975, to an arc starring Dinkle, a leading up to a two week honeymoon to Colonial Williamsburg in July of 1976.
Last known appearance of Livinia Swanson.
I promised Sorial Promise a SnowBelle update. Here she was on 7-3, just before being loaded up and taken out to pasture to meet her first boyfriend.
Is that members of the St. Spires choir wandering into some kind of abandoned location? Banana Jr! I’ll take the payout for my bet.
And to answer this question.
Let me pull up the handy guide I use when tallying up year end appearances for Awards Season.
So from left to right we’ve got Pat, Mary Jane, Lois, Lil, Ed, Nancy Harriet, and Harry. No sign of the Bedside Manor band yet. And what a choir is going to do with sheet music intended for a big dance hall band is still a mystery.
‘In the Name of the Father’ has been a real treat for me in the way a decaying fever dream of a wannabe auteur can only be. Weirdly ambitious, disjointed, and with all the artistic merit poorly implemented cut and paste technology can provide.
As in so many things Batiuk tries, there’s a kernel of a solid idea inside the poorly processed shit. Elderly man connects with the memory of the long dead father with whom he had a complicated relationship. Making Larry Dinkle a sad drunk who never really achieved his dreams might be considered unnecessarily maudlin by many. But can you imagine this story if there WASN’T any hint of tension or conflict? If Larry was just a perfect and perfectly happy Harry clone in a different decade? This story would go from laughably bad to mind numbing.
Of course it doesn’t work, because the Crankshaft audience doesn’t care about Dinkle’s journey and has no investment in his feelings toward his dead dad. Lillian and Eugene’s feelings about dead Lucy have been done to death, and no longer carry any conflict to resolve, and using them as the launch pad to get this tour through Larry Dinkle’s history has no thematic cohesion to it.
Why doesn’t Batiuk give Cranky himself some old arcs like this again? I’d love for the old coot to DO something for once. It’s not like the old geezer doesn’t have history you could mine for some bittersweet end of life stories. Have him find his dead wife’s diary! Dead people apparently always have diaries hanging around in case you need narration over panels, ideas for your next novel, or blackmail material for wannabe reality TV producers.
But I’d still take this over Skip and Batton any day of the week.
Why did Batiuk even attempt something this borderline ambitious so late in the game? Well. I have another error that needs retracting.
Both Banana Jr, and I, had misremembered and misread this strip.
Batiuk’s mouthpiece says, “I love writing, and hate having written.”
Batiuk loves writing. He hates NOT doing it.
I still say that what Banana Jr. and I used this as evidence to argue is still true. Batiuk does love the idea of being a writer. His ego wants that identity label, and it’s more important to him than the actual stories he creates.
But it’s hard to read something like what we’ve gotten the last month and assume that Batiuk doesn’t also have some weird compulsion to weave together these nonsensical narratives. He loves writing. His brain craves the process of creation no matter how demented and lackluster the final results. It’s what makes him who he is. It’s why Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft didn’t become a Family Circus like zombie strip with no passage of time, only rotating around the same 20 safe jokes with all the regularity of a church liturgy.
Yeah he’s also only got those 20 jokes. But between them you sometimes get something like ‘In the Name of the Father.’
I poked around in the archives just a little bit. I was hunting for an arc I remembered when Harry’s daughter, Halle, visited him and he talked about how he regretted how much band directing had taken him from her. I couldn’t find the exact arc, but I did find a couple fun strips nonetheless.
Son of Stuck Funky 