Son of Stuck Funky

Fadeaway

2009 saw a decent amount of stuff for Summer, largely with her rivalry-turned-friendship with Big Walnut Tech transfer “Breakfast Cereal” Keisha Williams. It was a story that weaved its way into a larger one involving Les, Keisha’s mother Cayla and the beginnings of the love triangle that involved the both of them and Les’ former student Susan Smith. Lisa continued to haunt the strip both figuratively and literally in the forms of Les beginning to write Lisa’s Story — the Holy Bible of the Batiukverse — and the real ectoplasmic form of Dead Lisa, creepily watching her husband make out with his new gal pal.

The underage Summer also had to deal with getting sexually harassed by the much older and very creepy Pete as the year ended… and we’ve reached the point where things are going to start going downhill for Westview’s Messiah. Not in the sense of bad things happening to her but rather as we enter into 2010 we’re now about halfway through Summer’s time in high school and we’ve about hit the point where Batty is beginning to grow bored of her.

In a broader context, the end of 2009 and start of 2010 revolved around Les traveling to, where else, New York City to meet high-powered literary agent Ann Apple and Batty pulls the oh so hilarious (not really) trope where the reader knows that Ann is really Apple Annie, the homeless woman who’d found the manuscript for Les’ book about John Darling (whose murder would leave Jessica Darling fatherless), but Les is too much of an ignorant buffoon to put 2 and 2 together to make 4.

Summer gets that small cameo there but does get a more important role the next week in a series dedicated to Les and Cayla watching her play, with Les fretting over her driving because he’s worried she’s going to end up like Becky.

I get the intent is to show Les being overly worried as parents tend to do and in a sense I can even see where he’s coming from because I’m also the type of person whose brain goes to absurd worst case scenarios. To this day I’ve never been on a roller coaster because I’m completely convinced I’m going to get the one that gets stuck upside down in a loop for two hours or flies off the track or something. But most people would rightly see that as just ridiculous anxiety and so it is here. Although I suppose the prevelance of conveniently placed cliffs along the equally convenient narrow mountain roads that surround Westview makes this a slightly more understandable concern.

There’s also some ironic comparisons between Les the uber-geek and Summer the uber-jock.

*As the kids say, she got that dawg in her.*

I’ll give Batty some credit in that typically he does a good enough job of showing Summer as being confident, driven to succeed and enjoying finding herself in high pressure situations. She is definitely the type of person who would attempt hero ball stuff. At least her athletic prowess is something we get to see repeatedly so we understand why people would praise her unlike with things like Les’ writing talent or Funky’s ability to make a pizza or Pete’s… everything.

Summer ends up sinking the game winning shot and Les relents on his driving fears.

The next week is some nonsense about Montoni’s and karma that I’m only bringing up as it contains one very important debut.

Anyway, Summer does at least get the Sunday comic that week which is more gushing over her being the greatest white basketball player since Larry Bird.

Apparently the Lady Scapegoats have done well enough this season to make the state tournament or I guess this is to determine the conference champion who would represent the conference in the state tournament? I think Batty is confused about state and conference because Bull gives a pep talk to his team before the game against Big Walnut Tech saying they’d be champions after this but it’s also a tournament game somehow.

And naturally Summer gets to play hero again.

But in reality Summer and her on-court success is secondary to what the actual story of this arc is about which is Wally’s PTSD.

After having twice been shot down and captured, after losing a decade of his life to it the second time, after having his family stolen from him by a skunk-haired comic book shop owner, after having the love of his life cruelly cast him aside, Rana — the only person who seems to remotely care about him — invites him to come out to the game because it may be the last time he can watch her cheer. Why, I have no clue. Summer’s generation isn’t close to graduating yet so Rana isn’t going to stop being a cheerleader any time soon. All the excitement of the game causes Wally to freak out which leads to him getting chased down by Funky and Becky who drive him back to his apartment and find out he sleeps with a gun under his pillow. Funky then gets Wally set up with counseling.

All of this plays out over about a month and a half so Summer and her team’s (conference?) championship is really little more than window dressing.

But hey, they still did win which put them in the state championship game. Les goes back to playing the overly worried parent and acts as if Columbus is like Baltimore or 1980s NYC or something. My impression of Columbus is that it’s basically Blandville, USA based entirely on it being used as the ideal test market for stuff but maybe there’s lots of crime to worry about.

Westview’s opponent is a school called Our Lady of the Cedars which I guess is supposed to be Batty’s way of telling the reader that they’re big and bad and that’s why the She-Goats are so scared of them.

Their fear turns out to be justified because Cedars pretty much stomps them into the dirt. Not even Summer’s main character boost are enough to put a dent in them.

There was, then, no joy in Westview because the Lady Scapegoats got their asses kicked.

But like the savior figure she is, Summer vows to rise from the dead. Figuratively but you never know.

The team in fact are a bunch of masochists as the beating laid down on them has only fired them up. Summer and Keisha are named co-captains in an “unusual move” so the team is ready to go next season.

*Even more unusual, Bull is talking like a sideline reporter.*

Summer subsequently decides to get an early start on training.

And that’s basically it for Summer’s relevance for the rest of the year. What I said earlier about what Summer’s stuff being mostly window dressing for Wally’s story? It’s basically going to be that on overdrive for the rest of 2010 because with Summer’s sporto BS over and done with, Batty can now move forward with what the readers really yearn for: Lisa’s Story and Les’ love life.

Most of the next month and change of strips is dedicated to Les and Funky going to New York to close down Montoni’s. But of course the actual meat of the story is Les meeting with Ann who’s set him up with a deal for Kent State Press to publish Lisa’s Story just like in real life because this is the point where Les has really morphed into Tom Batiuk’s avatar more than he already was. From this point on it’s book signings, shilling collected editions and collared shirts under sweaters for Les.

This actually gets into another irritating problem Batiuk has that I suspect Funky’s expansion of Montoni’s was a victim of. That being that things are only as important as they in service to the immediate plot needs of Les or some other pet character. That’s clunkily worded I’m sure so let me explain.

At the beginning of Act III, Funky has turned Montoni’s into a chain and expanded into New York City. Because Funky is busy all over Ohio and now New York, Les takes a second job at the original Montoni’s to help him out. He’s now a Montoni’s employee in addition to being Funky’s best friend which means that he now has a reason to travel to the NYC location. The first time is when Funky sends him to “put out some fires” there but do we ever actually see him doing any of this? No, he wanders around NYC, reminisces over Lisa, meets with Cindy and then has a revelation about his writing. The needing to constantly go to New York means that Les is able to keep in touch with Cindy who in turn connects him with Ann Apple which then gives Les further reason to go and meet with her. With Les’ book deal for Lisa’s Story secured, he no longer needs a plot excuse to keep going to New York and thus Montoni’s closes down because its only purpose for existing was as a plot device to facilitate Les coming and going from NYC to advance his writing career.

It’s quite sad when you think about it. Funky’s business success is pretty much a giant farce, existing only to prop up the second biggest loser in the entire strip.

With his book deal in hand and NYC Montoni’s consigned to the dust bin, Les finally returns to Westview. He’s met not by Cayla or his daughter or friends but by Susan who’s just over the moon. Summer, arriving back from something to do with softball, doesn’t seem overly happy to see her.

Les continues paying more attention to Susan than Cayla as Susan is, you know, actually helping him do work on his manuscript as opposed to sulking around like Cayla. Summer continues to be nonplussed about the whole thing.

Now you’d think that this would lead to a story where Summer confronts her dad about ignoring his girlfriend by paying attention to this horrible homewrecking harlot. But of course Batty is the master of going nowhere as slowly as possible so nothing ever comes of this aside from Summers’ disapproving looks. Who needs her having a talk with her dad about all of this when there are far more important stories to tell?

The next two months are taken up by the tragicomedy (unintended of course) of Funky having to move his dementia-addled father to a nursing home and then getting into a car wreck. The collision rockets him through time, transporting him back to the days of Act I where he wanders around town and tells his younger self to buy a Starbuck Jones comic because it’ll be worth a lot one day and that’s really it. It’s a story that meanders as aimlessly as the title character does and then eventually ends with Funky waking up in the hospital to discover it was all a dream… or was it!? Because at the start of the story Funky gave DSH a rare Starbuck Jones comic so he’d have the money to cover the Komix Korner’s rent claiming that “some old guy” told him to buy it when he was younger. The implication of course is that the old guy was in fact Funky himself per the events of the “dream” that we had witnessed and the whole thing was some kind of time loop.

Time travel stories and them being dismissed as mere dreams? I’m sure glad that will never come up again in this series.

That’s followed up with more Winkerbean wackiness when perennial scene filler Rachel starts dating the highly traumatized Wally beginning her journey to become what every Batiukian woman aspires to be: a mommy-wife who exists to solve her man’s problems. It’s not until the end of August, a full three months since her last appearance, when Summer pops in to remind the readers she still exists.

Around just long enough to tell her dad that it’s cool to start his literary career inside the sad remains of a once proud pizza empire, Summer disappears as quickly as she’d appeared so ~~Batty~~ Funky can say goodbye to his beloved PT Cruiser and Les can have a sitdown with Cayla and Susan to… help him choose the cover of his book. Because this farce of a story needs to be stretched out in increasingly inane ways. Cayla’s spent the last few months feeling left out in the cold by all the attention Les is paying to that little tramp and decides to do something about it. Does she confront Les and tell him how she feels about all of this directly? Does she maybe get into a catfight with the younger but far less athletic Susan?

No, of course not. She just changes her hair as some kind of weird passive-aggressive power move intended to one-up Susan which works, for now, because of course it does. Cayla: 1, Susan: 0, Readers: -500.

Summer makes her customary monthly appearance to go “WOW CAYLA, COOL HAIR!” and slink back into increasing irrelevancy.

And I do mean monthly because it’s about 1 month on the dot when she next shows up during the book launch to talk about Ann, inadvertantly creating jealousy in both Cayla and Susan.

Unfortunately this does not lead to an absurd story of the two love rivals teaming up to deal with a schizophrenic homeless woman masquerading as a literary agent. Missed opportunities, I say. Again, it’s another month before Summer shows up, throwing it down like she was Shawn Kemp.

Since October, Les has been on a book tour because at this point while he’s still technically a teacher, his appearances actually teaching classes are largely over and done with. His real career of flying around to engage in book signings where he wryly mocks all the people taking time out of their day and money out of their wallets to support him has begun. Why Batty even continues with the charade of Les being a teacher is beyond me, he even calls attention to it by having Nate handwave it away.

*Maybe Nate’s just glad he’s not around.*

Summer gets slightly more to do for once with Les checking in on her…

…and having to deal with the dreaded task of talking someone through using technology over the phone, presumably because she’s considered tech savvy for knowing how to turn on and off a computer.

By the middle of December, the first of an unending parade of book tours is finished and Les is ready to head home but a mysterious voice from beyond the grave pleads with him not to get on the plane.

Les believes he’s being pranked and angrily walks — with anger — onto his seemingly doomed flight. Summer is supposed to pick him up from the airport but has yet to hear from him.

Tension builds as Batty ends the week with a cliffhanger.

But Batty does his best R.L. Stine impression and the cliffhanger turns out to be nothing as Les, unfortunately, shows up at the Taj Moore-hal fine and dandy.

Les explains to Summer and Cayla that it’s “a long story” of which we only catch the tail end of.

But oho! That’s not quite the end of it because TB has one final curveball to throw at us.

Yes, that’s right, Lisa used her ghostly powers to call in a bomb threat and commit (fake) terrorism in order to save the life of her still living husband either out of genuine concern for his wellbeing or simply so he doesn’t bother her for eternity in the afterlife considering he keeps summoning her to Earth for inane crap as is.

With Les’ life saved from another ValuJet incident, the family is able to celebrate Christmas together.

So 2010 turned out to be a pretty down year for Summer on the whole. Aside from the basketball stuff in the earlier part of the year she was mostly relegated to one-off appearances for the majority of the year… when TB could be bothered to actually have her show up at all. Even then, a good chunk of that basketball story is really just there to provide background noise in service to Wally’s PTSD story or to Les’ parental worries. It’s really only when the Scapegoats are getting destroyed in the championship game that it’s kind of about her and the team specifically.

Which really gets into the heart of the problem with Summer’s use while she’s in high school. As I’d mentioned earlier, Batty typically does fine (by his standards) in showing that Summer’s supposed to be a talented athlete as opposed to simply telling us she is and then leaving us to actually believe that it’s true as he does with so many other “talented” characters. The problem though is that’s all that she does. Think about it, since Act III has started how many stories has she had that were about anything other than her playing basketball? I don’t mean her being involved in a story, like where she’s the one who convinces Les to write Lisa’s Story, I mean stories that are about her specifically.

All I can really think of is the 16th birthday at the NICU for premature births, her wanting to drive and her being pissy over not having a date to the winter dance. Everything else is basketball and if she’s not playing basketball she’s playing softball. Otherwise she’s basically just there to hang around Les and encourage him or gush over Cayla, basically acting like a shipper.

For a character who was supposed to be so important to Act III she’s pretty quickly relegated to the sidelines and in a couple of years it’s only going to get worse.

What’s The Story, Morning Glory?

I’ve been updating the Act 4 section of this website, to write weekly summaries for all the post-Funky Winkerbean Crankshaft arcs. Here are the entries I’ve written about the past six months:

August 24-September 19: Montoni’s hires a robot waiter.
August 17-22: In the name of the Father reprise. Ed Crankshaft spots a photograph of Larry Dinkle at Montoni’s, even though they both would have known about it for decades.
August 10-15: Ed, Pam and Jeff visit the fair.
August 3-9: Ed runs over his own cell phone with his riding lawnmower.
July 27-August 2: A pair of 1970s-looking video game developers approach Ed about creating a game called Grill Blast. It flops.
July 20-25: Batton Thomas gushes about The Flash #123 again.
June 1-July 18: In The Name Of The Father. Eugene comes to tell Lillian he’s moving to “a place.” After a series of fetch quests, we learn about that Larry Dinkle, who is of course Harry’s father. Larry was exactly the same asshole his son is, but no one ever notices this. Eugene slowly says goodbye to Lillian, without ever addressing the issue of where he’s moving.
May 25-30: Ed’s grilling creates a black hole. It was all just a dream. Maybe.
May 18-23: Batton Thomas discusses his band director character Harry Finkle.
May 11-17: Starts out as an aimless week at Comics Corner, but Batton Thomas shows up on Wednesday and turns it into yet another book signing.
May 4-10: Miscellaneous gags.
April 27-May 2: Lillian has another book signing at the Ohioana Book Festival.
April 20-25: The Batton Thomas interview continues.
April 13-18: Ed buys more Bean’s End crap.
April 6-11: Emily and Amelia talk Lillian into opening a newsletter for her blog.
March 23-April 4: Miscellaneous gags.
March 16-22: Batton Thomas tells Skip about his drawing board.

March 2-15 was the wedding of Max and Hannah, whose backstory I explored here and here. At least this resolved a long-running relationship. But everything more recent than this is missing the same thing:

Crankshaft hasn’t told a story in six months.

Because I don’t consider any of the things in that list a story. There is no plot, no conflict, no action, no resolution, no theme in any of them. Act IV Crankshaft is almost 100% filler. It’s endless backstory that never turns into anything (Glup Shittos, most recently Holtron and Tony Montoni); excessive focus on small events that never turn into anything either (Eugene taking two weeks to not tell Lillian where he’s moving); gag-a-day strips, with their usual problems of being disjointed and inconsistent; characters smirking at each other about things that happened off-panel; and Tom Batiuk monologuing through one of his characters, usually Batton Thomas.

Not only that, Batiuk seems to be going out of his way to avoid telling a story even accidentally. The Larry Dinkle arc – which I refuse to call by its pretentious title – is a pointless info dump about an irrelevant, never-seen character. The most compelling part of it was the part about Eugene having to move… well, somewhere, for some reason. People genuinely wanted to know the resolution to this, probably because it was the only shred of humanity to be found anywhere.

The arc had potential. It was begging for Harry to have an epiphany about how he turned into his father, despite his apparently ambivalent feelings about the man. Which we can only guess at, because they were never clearly stated either.

Ambiguous endings can work sometimes. Batiuk tries to do this, but he fails by making everything in the story ambiguous. There isn’t a single hint or clue as to where Eugene is moving or why, or how Dinkle feels about his father. And Lord knows none of the Greek chorus for his pity party is going to bring it up. Not even Ed Crankshaft, whose usual characterization is “easily-annoyed old guy who blurts out whatever’s on his mind at all times.”

Side note: this is why I’m not one of those “Where’s Crankshaft?” guys. When he is in the strip, it doesn’t help. Because Batiuk sacrifices his personality to the ancient god Finallygettingthatpulitzer.

Similarly, the pizza robot arc has been dropping “people don’t like AI” comments left and right. But it ignores the fact that this bland, unfunny robot is now doing a job that three humans used to do. And incompetently at that. Which is exactly the reason people don’t like AI! This massive story flaw is never addressed at all.

I fear this is the shape of Act IV. After Funky Winkerbean ended, Tom Batiuk moved in certain FW characters like he’s trying to gentrify Centerville, but also trying to better refine it for his incomprehensible purposes. Lord knows why Pete and Mindy, Max and Hannah, Mason Jarre and Cindy Summers, and Harry Dinkle made the cut, while more important characters (in terms of their genuine importance to Funky Winkerbean, and how much Tom Batiuk seemed to like them) didn’t. Just another baffling choice in a universe that runs on baffling choices.

On A Tuesday, In September…

Has it really been 25 years? Damn.

So strange for me to think about how there are bonafide adults with jobs, and mortgages, and college degrees, and marriages, and children, for whom that day in September is only history, not memory.

Those people will never really understand how all it took was one day to create an entire new culture overnight. Art, music, tv, movies, public events, everything became red, white, blue, and ashes and fire and heroic deaths. Twisted girders, plumes of smoke, big patriotic eagles. Sappy memorials everyone was stunned enough to accept without a hint of irony.

Or, as the comic artist would say,

“On a Tuesday in September, 2001, everything changed for everyone. On that day the entire nation was faced with the harsh form of reality to which I had become all too accustomed. And to show them we were all on the same page I published this strip…”

Oh. Wait. That’s not the September 11, 2001 Funky Winkerbean strip! That’s Skunky Funkybuns! An that’s not a Tom Batiuk quote, that’s Tim Negoda as played by the late, great, Dan Ronan.

THIS is Funky Winkerbean’s 9/11/01 strip:

Brace yourselves boys, your opponents are about to send a message or two. Or three. Kind of four. One message didn’t make it all the way there. Three and a half?

And THIS is a quote from Tom Batiuk.

“And then the darkness flew in like the Nazgûl of Sauron on 9/11. When the attack on the Twin Towers happened, like so many others, I wanted to speak to what had happened. My way of speaking was through my comic strips, so I wrote a week that expressed my thoughts and concerns, Chuck and I turned it around on a dime, and Jay Kennedy, the editor in chief at King Features, had our backs as he marshaled the forces at King to get the piece in the papers in record time. I’ll always be grateful for his support of those strips. “

Like Batiuk indicates, it took about three weeks to get the turn around on shoving 9/11 into the Funkyverse, displacing already written strips to put Cindy at ground Zero by October.

For the month of September 2001, Funky Winkerbean offered readers a reprieve from reality, even if worldwide context may have rendered some strips suddenly sinister.

By October 1 Cindy is ready for primetime.

Spoiler alert: It did not. In fact. Change Les.

“Allow me to use the news to brag about my hometown.”

Look. The Twin Towers were cool and 9/11 was really bad, yes. But they’re both miles away from the superlatives you’re using.

The Ground Zero survivor tree is a Callery Pear. It is considered an invasive species and its flowers smell like jizz.

Our nation will continue to grow? In population? In average adult height? In BMI? By annexing Greenland?

Ugh. What a load of dreck, eh? Batiuk is at his WORST spitting poorly worded platitudes. They’re always so empty and at the same time full of logical stumbling blocks.

A word of the wise to all writers. Only one in a hundred writers can pen a rousing speech, ala Independence Day 1994. The easier play is always, always to just show people doing things. Imagine a week of small kindnesses and experiences set in New York in the wake of 9/11, witnessed by Cindy, rather than a week of Cindy’s preaching.

But, sermon delivered, Batiuk had the rest of the year play out as he had earlier planned. The tragedy in New York took a backseat to other concerns. In the month and a half it took Les and Lisa to relive her entire teen pregnancy arc, there was a one panel mention of the attacks. I wonder if this strip was a rewrite?

In January, Batiuk introduced the biggest knock-on effect that 9/11 and its fallout would have on the strip. The beginning of the tragedy of Wally Winkerbean.

Batiuk had already sent Wally off to the military in 1998. Was he going to let an opportunity like trying to murder him in the middle east pass him by? No. You bet your ass he wasn’t!

And so, much like America, the fallout of 9/11 would have Wally stuck in a seemingly endless Middle Eastern quagmire. A heroic effort, suffering and sacrificing much, with only ephemeral accomplishments.

We did return to New York in January of 2002 so we could watch the news profit off of a hopelessly destitute woman.

Note: This story does not exist in strip form.

Which is a perfectly safe and secure way to transport fine art.

The Met also wanted to profit off of a crazy woman’s tragedy.

And Apple Annie can continue to rot in the street.

You couldn’t even get me a clean set of clothes to be in The Met on the News?

It’s all these dumb little morality stories that came out all across the US in the next couple years: the artless tributes by the well meaning, the slop peddled by grifters tugging on heartstrings to make a buck– all these planted the cringe seeds that would bloom into 9/11 being the go-to punchline to any absurdist humor.

Raising the Dolt

Over the last two weeks, “Terrible” Tom Batiuk and “Dangerous” Dan Davis have decided to bless us with another entry in the current passionate epic that’s been the main romantic focus of the post-Funky Winkerbean Funkyverse; a love that burns hotter than the stairs outside of Lizard Lil’s bookstore. I am of course referring to the love story between comic book writer-turned-screenwriter-turned-pizza shop owner Pete Roberts-Reynolds and Mindy Murdoch, granddaughter of Ed Crankshaft. The tale truly told of these two and Pete’s new pizza-serving robot has really showcased the chemistry they have. Just look at what has basically been Mindy’s default expression in most of the strips focused on the compelling and hilarious antics of them and their new robot pal.

Much like Stu Pickles dealing with his bratty niece, Mindy has spent most of the time — as indeed she spends most of her appearances — looking like a woman who’s lost control of her life. She seemingly regrets every single choice that she’s made that’s brought her to this point and undoubtedly is hoping that her fiance’s pizza serving robot will go berserk, and leave her with a fat insurance payout. BJ6K talked at length about just why Batty’s relationships don’t work and today I’ll be reinforcing the idea that he sucks at writing them by exploring the awful one between a woman who has at least nominally reached adulthood and her idiotic manchild boyfriend.

Mindy’s crossing over from Crankshaft into Funky Winkerbean happened late in Act II when she’d shown up to take the now open waitressing spot vacated by Becky Three Limbs. There she hung around as part of the Montoni’s scenery until she rather inexplicably became interested in sick twisted firestarter Mooch Myers. As ComicBookHarriet wonderfully documented this led to a story where Mooch discovered Lucy McKenzie’s comic book collection that, after some shenanigans, DCH John would use to fund the Komix Korner’s continued existence. That’s about all that’s really done with that relationship and by the time Act III rolls around Mindy and Mooch have broken up. So the relationship seems to have been simply to set up a story to explain how John’s shoddy business is still running after the timeskip in a story that was likely pawned off onto Crankshaft because between Lisa’s cancer and Darin’s search for his bio-mom, Batty had no space for it in Funky Winkerbean.

For the purposes of this entry, it also sets up that Mindy apparently has terrible taste in men. Possibly because her main examples of what a man are happen to be a self-absorbed old bus driver given to wanton acts of destruction and a nebbish Tom Batiuk self-insert.

After hooking up with Mooch, Mindy disappears back into the pages of Crankshaft and since I’m not really as familiar with that strip I’m not going to pretend to know what if anything she got up to over there; instead we’ll fast forward to 2017. Production on the Starbuck Jones film had wrapped and it had been decided to hold the premiere — as well as the Mason Jarre/Cindy Summers and Cliff Anger/Vera Nash double wedding that comes with it — at the Valentine Theater in Centerville because of Jff’s Starbuck Jones fandom. Pete, the film’s writer, is sent to scout out the Valentine for some reason (shouldn’t that be someone in the studio’s marketing department?) and comes across Mindy, showing up in Funky Winkerbean for the first time in a decade.

Pete’s immediately smitten and because for some reason he has tons of unearned confidence he decides to ask her out within seconds of meeting her.

For whatever reason Mindy accepts and unsurprisingly the date is at Montoni’s. Batty also cruelly subjects readers to the second of two vertical strips in a single week.

*Well why don’t you just date Jff then, Pete?*

Already Mindy seems to be regretting agreeing to do anything with this geek that’s not calling the cops on him for harassing her. But alas, she quickly gets over it when she detours from driving Pete to the airport to ~~drown him in Lake Erie~~ take him to Bedside Manor to meet her grandfather who is a quantum entity, simultaneously existing as a rotting husk in a Westview retirement home and a doddering, but still lively, old annoyance in Centerville.

Why does she really like him? Who knows. She only just met the guy, he acted like an ass and made bad jokes and took her to a crummy middling pizza joint that is an objective failure given what happened to it in Act III. None of it really matters of course. Batty loves using the red string to lasso his characters together so what need is there to explain it? Just accept it you terrible nitpickers!

In March 2018, Chester Hagglemore makes his non-anticipated return to the comic in order to announce that he’s reviving the “spirit of Batom Comics” by starting a new company called Atomic Comics — later chaged to Atomik Komix. As part of it he wants to recruit superstar (used very loosely) writer Pete to be his flagship (and seemingly only) writer, as well as Darin to do art. Pete tags along on Darin and Jess’ trip back to Westview and Pete laments the whole long distance relationship thing.

Of course it’s not helped by the fact that Pete basically blows her off for days at a time and she’s apparently just supposed to accept this as an amusing little quirk of his.

*My girlfriend wants me to pay attention to her!? Needy, needy, needy!*

He also claims that they’ve been moving so slow and old-fashioned that they’re still only emailing one another which is immediately shown to be a lie when Mindy texts him.

Now the context is, as said, that they were taking things slow and old-fashioned and given that third panel, the implication that what was sent is anything but. So that to me reads like Mindy is sending him some pretty naughty stuff which means either she’s sending Pete erotic pictures of herself or some pretty spicy texts, like erotic roleplaying. Either way, the heavy implication is that she’s sexting her boyfriend who then shows it off to his own friend for… what? To brag, I guess, because look how goddamn smug Pete is in that third panel.

Seriously, what a rotten little creep.

Since he’s in Ohio, Creepy Pete naturally takes it as an opportunity to see Mindy again taking her out to a show at the Valentine (because they can get everything comped and he’s a cheapskate) and dinner at… well, guess. They’re celebrating their seven-and-a-half month anniversary and Pete is so excited because this is “usually” when he gets banished to the Friend Zone.

*You can see the interest die and regret settle in in real time.*

Mindy, of course, is not amused by this at all since the implication is that Pete is a terrible boyfriend which… yeah, no shit. He’s Pete. But the natural urge to devour his head as if she were a praying mantis passes and Mindy stays with him, apparently cool with the fact that he’s giving up his Hollywood job to move back to Westview and write comic books.

Maybe she just takes pity on him. Perhaps that’s the secret, she looks at morons like Pete and Mooch as if they were the person version of a stray animal and feels compelled to take them in and fix them up. But perhaps the real answer is that she’s a pretty (per the standards of this fictional universe) blonde which means that charmless dorks are deserving, nay entitled, to her. Whatever the reason, she deigns to give him a goodbye kiss before he flies back to California. No doubt she’s also secretly hoping that his plane crashes into a mountain on the way back.

Pete and Darin take the job of course which means that he and Mindy are able to see each other. Pete shows more of his trademark charm and once again Mindy must fight back the understandable urge to toss Pete and his eyebags into Montoni’s pizza oven.

*“Well Min, I’ll tell you that mine is 69420.”*

With Atomik Komix now up and running — taking months to produce nothing but covers — Mindy decides to pay a visit to Pete at the studio. Pete proceeds to respond to her knowledge of comic book minutiae by acting like a patronizing dickhead.

Why is Pete surprised? He’s been talking to Mindy for about a year at this point. Mindy knows he writes comic books and likes comic books. Wouldn’t her knowing and liking comic books too be something that’s brought up early on as an interest both share and a common point of connection between them? Maybe Mindy just decided to hold that back otherwise Pete would have been proposing to her on date #1 ala DCH John and Becky. Or maybe it came up and Pete, being the unaware cretin he is, just ignored it because getting to know his girlfriend isn’t something he actually cares to do. He’s too busy creating bizarre fantasy scenarios in his head where he self-inserts into the lives old comic book creators after all.

Pete had been doing this thiking/fantasizing on the replica Cosmic Treadmill that had been lugged over to the studio and while Mindy waited for him to actually acknowledge her existence she’d also idly decided to color in an unfinished cover which Darin is flabbergasted by and lands her a job as Atomik Komix’s official in-house colorist thus proving that she has slightly more talent than her useless boyfriend.

Doubling down on being more useful than Pete, she comes up with the name Atomic Ape for the publisher’s trademark character after the boys have been tearing their hair out coming up with one. She also casually comes up with a sidekick for the character — Charger Chimp — when Chester suggests “the Lone Ranger needs a Tonto.” Pete responds to this like an absolute baby, throwing a giant bitchfit over her having the temerity to try and create a “cute and cuddly” sidekick for Atomic Ape (even though his boss is the one who suggested it) because he hates sidekicks.

*May as well have added a “You dumb broad!” somehwere in there.*

*“Wow, this guy is a total nitwit,” she thinks; stunned by his complete childishness.*

Mindy once more overcomes her urge to shove the stupid little hobgoblin out of the window and the two continue on as normal. The next big moment in their relationship occurs in the summer of 2019 when Pete takes her to the county fair but fails to win Mindy a prize. Showing that he’s not allowed to suffer any setbacks, the carny (a folk known for their kindness and honesty) gives Pete a giant stuffed tiger out of pity.

*It’s at least better than a ring made out of an I.O.U. paper?*

How the hell did Pete blow through his savings at a stupid carnival game? God, what a dumb putz. Anyway, after the first of their engagements the next year Pete invites Mindy and Jff out to Los Angeles for the premiere of the new Starbucks Jones movie. The urge to drop Pete out of the bucket of one of the helicopters helping to put out the giant fire that Pete has kindly invited her to see likely crops up once more when she has to remind him that instead of visiting caves where they film old B-movie quality pulp serials, they should be spending the day together. Like adults in a relationship tend to do.

*Yeaaaaah. Okaaaaaay. God I really wanted to see those rocks.*

But somehow, like usual, she’s able to push down her disgust at the fact this idiot nearly got her father killed (her idiot father’s own stupidity not withstanding) and continue with the relationship. By this point, Mindy has also become the protege to Golden Age has-been Ruby Lith who’s regaled Mindy with stories about what a sexist hellhole the comic book industry is. Thus when a beady-eyed nitpicker wanders into the Komix Korner and begins to criticize the work of her and Atomik Komix as a whole (in a story that is totally not Batty venting), Mindy is ready to push back while Pete stands around like the useless turd he is.

Jumping ahead to the next major stop on the Pete & Mindy Romance Express, it’s now late 2023. Funky Winkerbean has been done for just about a year but Batty has decided he’s not quite done with one aspect of it. Thus Batty inexplicably has Pete decide to get out of comic books, where he’s paid by an immature man with infinite money to do nothing but come up with characters and ideas for terrible covers, in order to resurrect the Sacred Temple with Pizza Box Monster helping to foot the cost.

*Yes, Batty fills this storyline with muliple “raising the dough” jokes. Of course he does.*

Mindy, naturally, is so thrilled at the prospect of Pete leaving behind his relatively stable career for the notoriously easy business of running a restaurant, a business that is not at all prone to failure. Really, why the hell would she stay with him after this? He quit his job and decided to take his savings, their savings really at this point, and buy into a pizza restaurant that closed due to bad business. All without consulting her about it beforehand. He just does it, then tells her after the fact.

Mindy should have left him then and there but she at least does immediately point out how stupid and poorly thought out the whole thing is.

Pete decides to spring one more surprise on her when he proposes to Mindy. Mindy, of course, accepts (despite already having been engaged for four years at this point) but inwardly she knows she made a mistake. Apparently she’s trapped in her own body, unable to control her own actions and thus is unable to stop herself from marrying the eyebagged munchkin. How terrifying for her.

So terrifying she’s apparently suffering some kind of psychotic break.

With Montoni’s successfully (?) reopened, they do what all young (??) couples living in Westview are expected to do and move into the apartment above Montoni’s. Once more, Mindy realizes that she’s got her work cut out for her with this doofus.

That more or less brings us up to the present. Most of Pete and Mindy’s appearances in Crankshaft basically fall into this category. Some crap happens at Montoni’s, Pete looks like a jackass, Mindy looks as if she’s hoping to come back as something other than a blonde woman surrounded by jackasses in the Greater Akron area in her next life. For a romantic couple they’re not even doing much coupley things as they seemed confined entirely to the space in and around Montoni’s — as if some kind of magic barrier has been erected that prevents them from leaving the immediate area — to engage in whatever wacky BS Pete’s dreamed up this week.

Pete and Mindy’s relationship is just really bad even by the standards of all the other bad relationships Batty’s forced readers to endure over the decades. There’s is nothing to show why she likes him and half their interactions are Pete being an annoying asshole while she contemplates if the negatives of a jail sentence will outweigh the relief of a little “accident” lifting the gun-wielding chimpanzee off of her back. And then in the end she swallows it down and resigns herself to having to play mommy-wife to an idiot manchild who may or may not even be able to tie his shoes without her help. Mindy herself doesn’t even seem to know why she’s going along with all of this half the time, it’s as if she has some vague awareness that her actions are being guided by outside forces and that she’s merely an action figure to be moved around to enact the childish scenarios this god has dreamed up for her.

It’s a truly awful relationship the embodies all of Batty’s worst traits in writing them. No reason for the characters to be together, no actual romance or chemistry or anything. The guy is a man who is broken or deficient in some way who’s essentially taken care of by the woman who somehow puts up with all of his crap. It’s like a whole “women are wiser” thing or the cliche sitcom set up of a schlubby moron and his pretty and smart wife but done in a way that feels even more outdated and lame. As if Mindy’s (or Rachel’s, Cayla’s, Lisa’s, Holly’s, etc.) role is to be a minder more than an actual wife or lover. Pete is just such an unlikable manchild even by the standards of the other manchildren in Batty’s work that it really makes the whole thing even worse than normal.

Really, if it’s possible to feel bad for a fictional character then I feel bad for Mindy. She’s not really all that interesting but she’s also fairly inoffensive which, for the characters occupying the Funkyverse, is usually the most postive thing that you can say about them. She doesn’t deserve to be shackled to such a failure and she herself seems to know it. Pete is not just an annoying twerp, he treats her like garbage by ignoring her, talking down to her and engaging in major life altering decisions that affect both of them without once ever talking to her and making sure she’s actually okay with any of it. Never once does he act like someone who’s actually in a relationship with another person who may have her own thoughts and feelings on things. He’s a selfish bastard who treats Mindy as someone who just kind of hangs around and who he occasionally gets to sleep with (unless she hopefully shuts him out when it comes to that) and for some reason Mindy is forced to go along with all of it, beholden to the whims of an immature moron because Batty has decided that she is to be Pete’s reward.

On the bright side, all of that regret and doubt that she’s forcing down into the deepest recesses of herself will eventually morph into cancer and allow her to ascend to sainthood. But as we’ve seen, not even death will free you from being trapped in Westview.

That about wraps it up for this timely little interlude into current Batiukian events. I’ll be getting back to the main event after this because there’s still so much more of Summer to see.

Glup Shitto

In the Star Wars fandom, Glup Shitto is a general term for any small character with its own goofy name, home planet, job, species, and way too much backstory for the minor role it plays.

Think of some of the minor characters from the original 1977 movie, like the weirdos in the cantina. Thanks to the sequels, prequels, spinoff movies, TV series, animated series, novels, comic books, and the Star Wars Holiday Special, you can learn way more about them than you ever wanted to know.

You can understand why Glup Shittos exist. There was an insatiable demand for more Star Wars content, but the movies were very expensive and time-consuming to make. There was also a need to explain continuity problems, like “making the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs” when a parsec is a measure of distance, not time. Now there are all kinds of explanations about how the challenge was to get from Point A to Point B via the most hazardous route possible. I think the movie Solo also expanded on this, but I might have fallen asleep during that scene.

The Funkyverse is full of Glup Shittos. But Tom Batiuk misses the point of them.

Harry Dinkle has become a Glup Shitto, especially recently. In the original trilogy — Acts 1, 2, and 3 of Funky Winkerbean — Dinkle was an important character with an important role to play. When the main cast graduated from Westview High School at the end of Act 1, Dinkle could no longer be an effective antagonist. His power to bully the main cast ended when they were no longer his students anymore.

But of course, Tom Batiuk doesn’t realize this. So he started inventing more and more convoluted ways to write Dinkle stories. In Act 2, these were pretty reasonable. They centered on his interactions with his wife, later high school students, their parents, the targets of his door-to-door selling, the increasingly strange products he sold, and the Claude Barlow gags.

By Act 3, Dinkle was going deaf (but not really), anointing a successor in Becky (but not really), retiring (but not really), leading a nursing home band on a recording contract and a tour (yes, really) and weaseling his way into being a choir director (really). This was all a blatant attempt to keep writing Dinkle gags. Because, as we all know, Tom Batiuk is a serious artist and not a gag writer. Nope. He’s definitely not that.

Those were all bad stories, but at least they were stories. Which is more than you could say about Glup Shitto in Act 4 (post-2022 Crankshaft).

The recent In The Name Of The Father series explored Harry Dinkle’s upbringing, then never did anything with that information. We learned that his father Larry was a selfish, insufferable bandleader, so obsessed with music and fame that he was indifferent to his performers, and to his own family. It’s obvious that Harry Dinkle is a chip off the old block, but this was never acknowledged. Not even by his current performers, who are frequent recipients of his abusive behavior. One of whom is Ed Crankshaft, who’s supposed to be the guy who speaks his mind at all times.

It added additional information to Harry Dinkle’s life, like Glup Shitto stories do. But it never did anything with that information. It didn’t tell a new story, or even give us any new insight into the character. And there were a lot of tacked-on, irrelevant details, like the fact that Larry Dinkle loved noir movies, and died when he crashed his bus due to a heart attack and/or alcoholism. Batiuk couldn’t even be bothered to clarify which it was.

So we have the hallmarks of a Glup Shitto story — additional backstory for a minor character in the major story — but none of the benefits of it. Least of all, fun. Which is another reason stories get written about these minor characters. Often by unsanctioned writers:

Richard Pryor’s “Star Wars Bar” skit would have been very NSFW. It’s on Youtube though. Hint.

Last week, we had a Glup Shitto experience with Pete and Mindy. Their stories in Funky Winkerbean were bad enough, but they were more or less stories, like “awkward nerd hooks up with out-of-his-league attractive girl.” You can do this kind of story, but Batiuk botched the details.

Pete ran out of money at the county fair despite being a highly-paid, world class writer in this world. He also treats Mindy like garbage, a topic my friend Narshe will be exploring on Wednesday. And the fact that Pete and Mindy are both in their 50s by now, and it’s way too late for the “young kids just starting out” shtick.

Pete and Mindy have become relevant characters in Crankshaft, all to tack on a bunch of unnecessary backstory that goes nowhere. They revived Montoni’s! And the whole town brought all the decorations back! And they teamed up with the Pizza Box Monster! And they have a robot waiter! And… that’s it. Nothing was ever done with any of this. Montoni’s itself hasn’t even been the town hangout it used to be, which was at least a narrative purpose.

Act 4 has been running on Glup Shitto stories for a while, without those stories ever serving the unifying or narrative purposes they should. And we don’t see stories about minor characters that might be interesting to explore. Whatever happened to Chien? Why weren’t Cory, Rocky, Wally, Rachel, and Adeela rehired when Montoni’s re-opened? What are they doing instead? What effect did the short-lived strip club era have on Centerville? What happened to Cindy’s pregnancy? The sheer number of loose ends Tom Batiuk has left over his career should be a gold mine of material to explore. But it isn’t being used that way.

Tomorrow, we’re probably getting another deep dive into a character nobody cares about, and which serves no storytelling purpose. And that character is way overdue for an appearance.