Son of Stuck Funky

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.

Rival Fools

It’s been another overly hot summer and where I am, we just got out of a heatwave. I’m sure plenty of readers know how muggy summers in the Southeast tend to be so compound that with even higher temperatures and a poor A/C that’s already not much of anything and the last week or so has been rather brutal.

And yet while summer is entering its end stage (come on, we all know that once the calendar switches over to September, it’s fall no matter what The Man says), Summer continues to roll on. When last we left her, she was spying on dear ol’ dad to see if he was putting the moves on that hot new secretary that replaced boring cat lady Betty. For the start of 2009 we pick up with her hanging out with Jinx in a strip which sets up a story where Rana spends a week freaking out over the fact that guys are going to be added to the cheerleading squad.

Yeah, it’s obvious Batty never had a clue what to actually do with Rana.

The next week starts the story arc that will be Summer’s big focus for the first quarter of the year.

Summer gets Dikembe Mutombo’d and is all out of sorts as she wonders just who could have done that to her. She’s surprised to see that it’s none other than her new teammate Keisha.

Summer seems kind of surprised by this and quite frankly so am I because look at that previous comic; that shot blocker was whiter than the audience of a Dave Matthews Band concert. If I found out that my teammate was a shapeshifter or racebender I would be pretty shocked too. Naturally this whole thing leaves Summer completely out of wack and she complains to Les about how Keisha made her look like a joke.

At the game the next night (?) Les and Cayla talk about how Keisha was the star which presumably has left Summer in a bad mood. Les decides to take Cayla out to eat at Westview’s fanciest restaurant. Not Olive Garden fancy, mind you, but close!

*Rachel then contemplated slugging Les for making her recite such a stupid motto.*

Les, by the way, is still doing this stupid song and dance of “Oh, uh, we’re totally not dating,” even though they went to the Winterfest together and he’s now taking Cayla to the holiest of Westview’s temples. We’ve seen this crap, we know how it goes. By bringing her to Montoni’s Les is practically proposing to her. But no, we’ve still got the world’s stupidest love triangle to deal with.

Back to the main, Keisha’s presence on the team has completely sapped Summer of her confidence and led to the team playing badly. So far, the Williamses are a complete net negative on things both in and out of universe.

At this point, Summer is a complete disaster and winds up being benched while Keisha continues to get all the praise.

Which then leads to this complete nonsequiter.

Now suddenly bringing up Dead St. Lisa could just be a sign of Summer’s depression, like she’s going to off herself over basketball or something. But no, it’s simply an excuse to then transition into yet another example of Les insisting that he and Cayla are NOT DATING SO BACK OFF AND SHUT UP SUMMER, GOOOOOD YOU’RE NOT MY MOM YOU HAVEN’T EVEN THROWN AWAY MY COMIC BOOKS!

Summer’s on-the-court woes continue and even at home she’s bricking shot after shot when she’s greeted with a surprise that’s pleasant to her but not to the readers.

Darin, unfortunately, makes another appearance to dazzle the readers with his sparkling personality and memorable traits like… uh…

Summer takes the opportunity to vent about how things have been going for her since Keisha transferred over and gives us a nice little Batiukism in the process.

Darin naturally does what any loving brother would do in this situation and gives his baby sister some advice on how to fix her shooting woes.

It’s a nice little moment, I guess, except for one tiny little insignificant nitpick: why is Darin giving Summer basketball advice!?

Darin, as established throughout basically all of Act II, is a grade A geek. He was a low-on-the-totem-pole loser and the closest he ever got to any athlete was whenever Jessica would throw herself at him. He was never hinted at having anything in the way of athletic ability so why, WHY, is he telling a basketball star who is light years beyond where he ever was what to do? And why is Summer even listening to him? I mean sure, okay, in real life you don’t necessarily have to play a sport or be an elite athlete to have some knowledge of things but typically those coaches who weren’t athletes were at least around the game all the time in other capacities, that’s why they’re good at what they do. Darin never been any closer to athletic competition than mocking it in his and Pete’s dumb comic strips.

Well whatever, I guess in the end it doesn’t matter because aside from showing up at her next game that’s really about all we see out of Darin. For as important as he was in Act II and as much as he’ll take over the strip in the 2010s, in the first few years of Act III Darin barely exists.

Anyway, it’s the final game of the season which of course is against Big Walnut Tech and Keisha’s former teammates are showing her how they deal with traitors while Cayla also shows the reader that she has her daughter’s raceswapping properties in what retroactively turns out to be a genius bit of foreshadowing of Cayla’s eventual visual evolution. Bravo Tom!

Summer decides she’s had enough and pretty much inserts herself into the game.

And then swoops in when Keisha’s in trouble.

Westview loses but Summer’s back to her old self and her and Keisha are now on the same page and bonding over their dads. Well, one of them has a dad anyway.

Which of course transitions into more Les insisting he’s not dating Cayla nonsense.

Which I think gets into the core of what Batty was actually doing with this storyline. It wasn’t about Summer per se and lord knows it wasn’t about Keisha who doesn’t have much of a character to speak of. It was mostly just flavor, giving Summer something to do, in service of the real story which was Les, Cayla, and the world’s lamest love triangle. That said, it at least is a story about Summer that’s based on something she’s into and that’s important to her and doesn’t end with her becoming the trophy for a lame nerdy male character like so many other female characters in this comic. So she’s got that going for her.

That love triangle is also where we’ll be detouring to for a little bit as well. After a month of shenanigans focused on Dinkle, Cory, and Funky’s suicide inducingly bad day, Dinkle’s comic opera (because it’s laughably bad you see) The Magic Flutophone is set to open and Susan decides that this will be a great date for her and the hunky English teacher of her dreams. Unfortunately, Cayla’s snapped him up first.

Summer teases Les over the fact he’s still insisting that going to a concert with Cayla is not a date and that he and Cayla aren’t dating.

Cayla comes by to pick up Les, because if nothing else Les is consistent in being a lazy jackass and making his girlfriend drive him around everywhere, and proceeds to have a little schizo break.

Cayla apparently doesn’t mind dating a lunatic who talks to the ghost of his dead wife and the two go to Dinkle’s undoubtedly awful concert and somehow enjoy themselves. At this point Les finally stops dancing around things and acknowledges that he and Cayla are indeed dating. The two lovebirds share a kiss in what is surely one of the most infamous and unintentionally hilarious strips in the history of Funky Winkerbean.

With Lisa the Ghostly Cuckquean’s approval, Les and Cayla are official.

As for the main subject of this series, Summer shows up for the requisite random installment of the Dead Lisa Tapes and also makes an appearance during Cindy Summers’ (who insists she’s going by Cynthia now but that doesn’t last long) return to Westview.

She also shows up for an insipid story where Cory attempts to cheat by writing his answers on his water bottle. Now that I think of it, I feel like the only times in Act III where Les is shown actually teaching his class is for these stupid “a student has cheated and Les puts them in their place” stories.

We then get another summer story of Summer and Jinx’s softball shenanigans.

But this was all light fare to relax the reader for most of the rest of the summer after this is taken up by what is undoubtedly the most infuriating story in the entire strip. Wally comes marching home to find DSH John has cuckoo birded his way into his nest, beady-eyed nitpickers complain, Wally walks off into depression. It’s called writing.

Batty bookeneds that story with another Montoni’s Softball one.

He seems to have quickly grown bored of this setup though for this is the last we’ll see of the softball team and poor Jinx’s relevance to the strip disappears with it. Her spot as Summer’s best friend (I guess? She sure seemed to be) has by now been usurped by Keisha and eventually Jinx will disappear so thoroughly from the strip that she won’t even make it to the St. Spires Christmas concert which features damn near every other Act III character.

By this point Summer has just turned 16 and drops the news to her dad that she wants to get her license and that Bull is teaching driver’s ed.

Les spends the next week fretting over this showing that everything Bull has done for him since high school has been for naught. And with school starting up again, Batty also begins seeding the post-Summer class with the first appearances of Funky and Les IV: Owen and Cody.

In October, Keisha learns the benefits of being “part of the family” when it comes to the Moores: acting as free labor for Les’ ego stroking charity event.

Summer also engages in some practice driving and Les acquiesces to her desire to stunt all over Maddie.

Summer also wants to be able to get a car once she has her license and Keisha pushes her to get a job. Oh no. Summer and Keisha are female. They are young. They want jobs. You know what that means…

Say hello to the newest residents of Westivew’s Home for Wayward Young Women. Because Pete sure as hell is about to.

Just in case he wasn’t clear enough…

Yes, here is Pete trying, like the creepy little dweeb he is, to flirt with Les’ daughter and the half-sister of his best friend. Let’s ignore how awkward and nonsensical his flirting is and focus on what’s important. He knows, he fucking knows how old Summer is and still he’s trying to put the moves on her. Let me reiterate this: Pete Roberts is a man of around 30 trying to flirt with an teenage girl roughly half his age. A girl that he undoubtedly knows is underage because she’s the half-sister of his best friend.

What the hell was even Batty’s intention with these two strips? Was he trying to make Pete come off as cool and confident? Because he not only failed, he backfired in spectacular fashion. Pete looks like a giant tool. He looks like a creep. He looks like someone who buys a lot of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

I hate Pete. I really, really detest him. Darin is the world’s most boring person to be sure. Les is a punchable smug douchebag. Dinkle is an unbearable egomaniac. But Pete is something else entirely. He’s an annoying gnome who gets constantly rewarded for no real reason. At twentysomething he was the top writer in the comics industry. He bounces around from publisher to publisher, being given opportunity after opportunity and when he inevitably fails out of this or that one — because he’s a talentless hack — he fails upwards into better jobs. And it’s not just jobs. By the end of Act II he has Chien interested in him though thankfully Batty jettisoned her before he could shackle Pete to her.

Later on he’ll have poor Mindy enamored with him because… well, I don’t know. And how does he treat Mindy? He whines and berates her for daring to create a character he doesn’t like for his stupid comic book. He quits his well-paying and seemingly dependable screenwriting gig to force her to help him run a pizza restaurant and live in the shitty small apartment above it. There’s a strip later on in Act III where it’s heavily implied that Mindy is sending him erotic photos of herself and what does Pete do? Like the giant irredeemable asshole that he is, he shows them off to Darin as some kind of flex.

But it’s okay because Pete is a wish fulfillment self-insert for Batty in a way that not even Les is. He can never fail even when he objectively does and he can never, ever face a negative consequence for any action he undertakes. He can do stupid and despicable things, he can be the shittiest writer of comics this side of Chuck Austen and for some reason will be rewarded for it. He can be a giant creep and still get women way out of his league and everyone treat him like he’s just such a lovable cool guy.

Calling him a tool would be understating what a rotten ugly little troll man Pete is. I hate him. I loathe him. And I can only hope the end of Crankshaft is a nuclear missile striking Montoni’s after Mindy has finally wised up, grown a spine and locked him and his precious comic books inside.

Moving on to actual matters, we close out the for Summer with a family gathering.

That will likewise close out this entry. But while 2009 may have been a down year for our budding little savior, 2010 will be a year that’s looking much brighter. Probably because I won’t have any more reason to rant about how much I hate Pete.

An Ultra Lazy Interlude

Full confession time. I planned to get Part 4 of my stupid fanfic out to the literally half dozen people here interested in heartfelt Crankshaft AU. But I’m going on vacation in like….five hours, and I’m worse with deadlines than GRR Martin. But I thought I’d whip up some lazy history to tide you guys over, Fire and Blood style. So enjoy a trip down memory lane, back to a time when Batiuk was just as long winded, but the art was nicer I guess.

Strap in for long dead famous people, off the shelf stock characters, love at first date, and back alley torture scenes.