Son of Stuck Funky

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.

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.

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.

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.

Died on the 4th of July

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.

They grow up so fast… sniff.

Sunrise Over the Chippewajaro

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.

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.