Happy Turkey Day! I hope your Thanksgiving Day is full of loved ones, great food, and thankfulness for all the blessings you’ve received. If you’re capable of reading this message via the Internet, and have time to spend on this dead newspaper comic, you have a pretty good life compared to most people on this planet. So let’s all be thankful today. I’m thankful to have all of you in my life.
We have some Funkyverse news, from an odd place. In an offhand comment in my last post, I mentioned the YouTube channel Mainly Facts, which is one of many channels that read and discuss Reddit posts. A recent episode has some themes that will be very familiar to observers of Funky Winkerbean. It’s the first story of this YouTube video, and is about 8 minutes long. (Embedding is disabled so I can’t directly post it here.)
You really should listen to the whole thing, but here are the key details:
- The male letter-writer was married to a woman named “Laura” (a pseudonym) who died of an aggressive form of cancer when they were 28.
- He and Laura had a 10-year-old son.
- He met a new woman named Kayla (implied not to be a pseudonym) at a “work event,” and began dating her.
- Kayla admits she feels neglected, and that the letter-writer is using her as “a replacement for his dead wife.” Letter-writer is shocked to hear this.
- Kayla begins wearing Laura’s jewelry, dies her hair like Laura did, gets clothes/piercings/tattoos matching what Laura had, and wants letter-writer’s son to start calling her “Mama.” Letter-writer finds this unnerving.
- Kayla confesses she “felt she had to live up to the memory of a ghost.”
- Kayla attempted suicide, later saying “maybe if I was dead too, (letter-writer) would love her even a fraction of how much he loves Laura.”
- Letter-writer’s family tells him he should have been more attentive to Kayla.
- Letter-writer wonders if he’s the asshole of the story, and if his family is right.
This is almost exactly Les Moore’s life story after Lisa died. He married a woman named Cayla, and then his dead wife became the centerpiece of their relationship. But in Funky Winkerbean, this was driven by Les, not Cayla. I think this story gives us some helpful insights about the Funkyverse:
It’s a great example of why Tom Batiuk’s approach to storytelling simply doesn’t work. Unlike stories in the Funkyverse, characters react to events in the story. Kayla perceives herself as being less important than the dead wife, and tries to rectify that. Funkyverse Cayla never does this. She’s perfectly happy to play second banana to Lisa, and indulge all of Les’ ridiculous demands. Even after Les’ Oscar “win”, which should have been the end of it.
This is unrealistic. Married people operate from the reasonable expectation that they are their spouse’s primary focus. Being a widower complicates things, but Les never made any effort to move past Lisa’s death. He wanted all the benefits of being married to Cayla, without any of the emotional commitment it requires. Which would ultimately cause problems in their marriage.
The real-life letter-writer’s story shows what a selfish craphead Les Moore is by comparison. If Les was a good person, this real-life story is what he would have done.
Unlike Les, the letter-writer comes off as pretty reasonable. He seems to have a healthy balance between honoring his deceased wife, and moving forward with someone else. The letter-writer’s story mentions going to therapy, and bringing his 10-year-old child as well, to deal with the shock of losing “Laura.” It’s not clear whether Kayla is overreacting, or if the letter-writer is inadvertently assigning too much importance to his dead wife. But you get the feeling there’s room for discussion, and that an otherwise good relationship can be saved.
The letter-writer is also genuinely concerned about people other than himself. He’s concerned about Kayla’s feelings. His child wasn’t comfortable calling Kayla “mama”, and he honored that. In the Funkyverse, Les did things like make his daughter read her mother’s rape journal, and forbade her from throwing out Lisa’s pointless VHS recordings. Ten years of not being allowed to move on from a parent’s death, and having no other adults in her life, would have damaged Summer. Not the “Lisa would be proud of the woman you’ve become” nonsense we got, as Tom Batiuk skipped ten years to avoid dealing with the situation he created.
CBH CUTTING IN HERE!
I second everything Banana Jr 6000k said about thankfulness. I’m so thankful for HIM. For his hard work while I’ve been busy with real life. And I’m thankful for this site. I’m so thankful for all of you commenters who have kept this place going. And I’m thankful for all your patience as harvest has pulled away my attention over the last couple months.
Also wanted to note that this year Cranky feels the need to name-drop Sam’N Ella’s Turkey Farm. Batty has spent the last year making a point of constantly name dropping old Funky Winkerbean references into dialogue with all the finesse of a bowling ball onto a egg carton. Like poor old Les constantly moping over Lisa and mulling over their past…he is tainting the living with memories of the dead.
ALSO also, the polymelic turkey joke is a rehash from 2016.
I leave it up to you guys if eight years is past the statute of limitations for self-plagiarism.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
Son of Stuck Funky 
The problem I have with Les is that he really never moved past being the clueless, envy-filled wannabe he was in 1972. There was never a social norm he understood or didn’t actively resent…..mostly because he wasn’t smart enough to do so.
This is it in a nutshell, Les NEVER grew up. TB never changed the way he wrote Les… he changed the way he framed Les. It’s an especially strange choice. Les’ behavior as a teenager was understandable, if off-putting and obnoxious, given his age. That same behavior as an adult is simply appalling. Such behavior exists in real world adults, of course, but it has consequences for the person in question and those they interact with… consequences never realized in Funky Winkerbean post-Act I, as TB increasingly bent his world to Les’ will.
At first, Les Moore was kind of like Beaver Cleaver, always paying a downbeat karmic price thanks to the cold, indifferent and hypocritical hand of the universe he could never hope to overcome. Then BatFace stripped away that detached irony, and turned his characters into “real people”. Les was no longer a caricature, which was the only thing preventing him from being absolutely detestable. And the rest is history.
Instead, the beating Life should have given Les for being a morose turd trying really hard to not understand How Things Work got handed out to Funky because Batiuk blames a silly name for his alienating people by not staying in his lane.
The impulse to blame “the cold hand of the universe” is so ingrained and powerful to Batiuk that he has to use it even it situations where it makes no sense.
Wanted to post this when it was originally happening, but I just never got around to it, but that was the main thing that struck me about Mopey leaving Atomik Komix for the totally secure and not-at-all-risky restaurant-owning-with-a-crazy-person business.
Batiuk forgets his own story in order to blame those nebulous “bad universe” forces. He forgets that he made Mopey a patron of the super-wealthy Chester, so that market forces and the health of the comics industry wouldn’t matter. He can stay in the comics business until Chester stops paying for it. (Nevermind going back to the movie business, which, again, was painted with this same “the evil universe destroys your aspirations” even though it made no sense in the Funkyworld context) It doesn’t matter how well his comics sold or how well the industry is doing because Chester wasn’t interested in making money from this endeavor. He just wanted those comics to exist. This was how Batiuk established Atomik Komix and the job Mopey had in producing comics for him. He ran an entire month’s worth of strips showing this.
And it would have been easy for Batiuk to put Mopey in the same situation of looking for something else to do for a career without violating the integrity of the story he established. He could have had an entire month’s worth of strips devoted to Chester becoming disenchanted by his vision of Atomik Komix. Hell, he could have had Chester die. He could have had Chester decide that with the 97 years-young Flash and whatever-his-name-was (Phil! I genuinely forgot) he didn’t need Mopey and Dopey anymore so he kicked them to the curb. He could have had Chester run out of money, or just decide that Atomik Komix wasn’t worth the money he was spending on it anymore. He could have had Chester sell out to the super corporate conglomerate Ney-Dis or something. He could have had Chester decide that he felt that his mission was accomplished and he no longer needed to make comics. Hell, he could have had Mopey just decide that he wanted more out of a writing career than writing the sort of inane pap that Chester had him writing for Atomik Komix, or rather, if he was going to have a writing career, he wanted it to be more than that.
It wasn’t hard for me to come up with these alternatives, all of which would have kept this new development of Mopey leaving Atomik Komix consistent with what Batiuk had already established. But Batiuk couldn’t manage to come up with one.
And I think the reason for that, simply, is that in all of them, this new negative development would have been initiated by an actual character. Chester (or Mopey) would have made a decision that forced Mopey to change. And this is just something that Batiuk can’t do. He can’t have one of his sympathetic characters do something that might screw one of his other sympathetic characters (and his rescuing Chester from villainhood by making him this insane, rich patron who gives money and careers to his favored characters definitely made him “sympathetic”). It’s got to be “the cold unfeeling hand of the universe”, or some smirking evil asshole he’s created explicitly for this purpose, or Roberta Blackburn. (I remembered her name but not Phil’s!) And since Mopey’s Atomik Komix career couldn’t be crushed by the latter two, it had to be the former.
It’s claimed that Faulkner said that a writer needs to learn to kill their darlings. With Batiuk, it’s less a matter of needing to kill his darlings and rather kill his, I don’t even know, stupid overpowering impulses or something.
This is what irritates him about the House Of Ideas. He can’t wrap his Flash-addles brain around the idea of Iron Man and Captain America having legitimate differences of opinion and taking different courses of action.
Excellent breakdown. Note also that it’s never the “sympathetic” character’s fault.
Montoni’s went out of business? Not Funky’s fault, even though he routinely makes idiot mistakes like forgetting to order cheese, and hiring way too many employees.
A store clerk racially profiled you? Not Malcolm’s fault, even though he gave her good reason to believe he really was stealing.
Movie theater went out of business? Not Max and Min’s fault, even though they show nothing but The Phantom Empire and fornicate in the seats.
Lost your mailman job? Not Crazy’s fault, even though he’s always goofing off when he’s supposed to be delivering.
Voters didn’t approve the school levy? Not the teachers’ fault, even though the entire high school is inept at everything.
Komix Korner can’t make the rent payment this month?Not John Howard’s fault, even though he gives away product to his friends, and is rude to every other customer.
Lost your arm and can’t go to Julliard now? Not Becky’s fault, even though she got in a car with someone who was in no condition to drive.
Your marching band isn’t any good? Not Dinkle’s fault, even though it’s his job to train them, and he’s clearly overworking them.
Didn’t get your money from the NFL? Not Linda’s fault, even though rejections are routine and she made no effort to fight for it.
Bull Bushka killed himself? Not his fault, the CTE made him do it, and the police will just cover it up anyway.
Forced into making a movie you don’t want to make? Not Les’ fault, even though all he had to do was say “no.” And he had multiple chances to do so.
And of course, the big one: got cancer and died painfully? Not Lisa’s fault, even though she was a friggin’ lawyer and could have at least gotten a financial settlement to take care of her family. And done better things with her time than making petty VHS tapes. And at least gotten some palliative care.
The telling thing is his reaction to the possibility of warning himself or Lisa about a possible danger. His stated intention is that he didn’t want to be a bring-down or to crush her hope for the future. The actual intention isn’t even being too chicken to want to change the past lest she leave him as much as it’s having to actually be responsible for something. If he does something, he has to own it. IF he’s a passive victim, it’s okay.
Absolutely right, and I would add to it: he wants to be a passive victim. So did Lisa. Because the Funkyverse celebrates passive victimhood. It’s the most noble goal a human can aspire to. No matter how cruel, unfair, painful, meaningless, or easily avoidable your fate is, the best thing you can do is accept it with a smirk.
This is the opposite of how cancer dramas are supposed to work. We expect the sufferers to embody something positive. Like putting up a strong fight, living the best life you can, helping others, becoming an advocate, spending time with their loved ones, or just continuing to do your job like Alex Trebek did. Lisa did none of these things. She didn’t have a drop of interest in any of them.
Lisa’s Story is exactly what would have happened if Heidi Montag got cancer. And it’s exactly the book Spencer Pratt would have written about it. It’s mostly about his own ego, and a transparent cash-in on the last of her cheap fame. Except Spencer Pratt wouldn’t act like it was high art.
I really think that Batiuk thinks that what made his cancer story genius is simply that he had Lisa die.
It’s weird. He peculiarly set up this story such that Lisa could die passively without, you know, her deciding to die passively. He wanted her to be heroic, but he apparently couldn’t conceive of a way for this story to go that would show her heroically confronting her plight and still dying. So he had her not know about it until it was too late for them to do anything about it, conveniently resolving the question of how she’d deal with her fate without requiring her to do anything.
In a way, it does kind of have a twisted genius to it. How badly did Batiuk have to torture a “woman gets cancer and dies from it” story in order to have it end up like that?
Instead, she’s simply ushered into a blank void afterlife by Tuxedo Mask.
Few of the Act I characters did. Les is just the leader of arrested development gang. Holly tried to do a baton stunt she had no business doing instead of just marching on the field like a proud alumnus, & snobby Cindy is obsessed with her looks even though she’s drawn like she’s still 30. The one who had any character growth was killed off and remembered at his funeral soley for his less stellar moments, as opposed to honoring the fairly decent human being he became. And they all sat around at that 50th reunion frowning because they all felt awkward in high school, as if nothing in their lives afterwards-jobs, spouses, children/grandchildren, friends, travel-was worth celebrating.
Happy Thanksgiving folks! This one is also hits pretty close to an old story from one of my favorite RPG worlds, which included a far future possibly mutated 6-legged food bird. Legend has it the creator’s player group cooked up a 6-legged turkey for him one year to celebrate Thanksgiving (although it may have been apocryphal).
Let’s focus on the good times while we have them, i guess!
Apparently John Madden had stagehands prepare a four- or six-legged turkey as a gag when he did commentary for Thanksgiving Day football games. I don’t recall seeing it myself (didn’t watch that many Madden-era Thanksgiving Day games), but the internet insists it was a running gag for several years.
As for the “Sam ‘N’ Ella’s” gag, I am pretty sure I saw that in “Blondie” well before Tom started drawing comics.
I vaguely remember that. In the 90s, Madden had a shtick of presenting a turkey leg to the MVP of whatever Thanksgiving Day game he was broadcasting. I don’t remember a polydactyl bird being served, but it feels plausible.
John Madden doesn’t get enough credit for his role in the pop-culture importance of football. Football already has a lot going for it, but I think he was what Dick Vitale is to college basketball: enthusiastic, likable, and passionate about the sport. And he lent his name to the football video game, which is a whole culture of its own. He made the sport cool to young people, in ways that efforts like the “Toy Story Game” are trying to reproduce.
Today’s Crankshaft:
Jeff: Is it me, or do the turkey drumsticks feel radioactive?
Crank: Nah, the Sam’N’Ella store may be located near a nuclear waste site, but i’m sure it’s safe to eat.
(Crankshaft takes a bite of one drumstick and then turns into the Hulk from Marvel Ruins)
Ed, If the drumsticks are radioactive, then why the fuck are you eating them
No, see, Batiuk isn’t recycling his jokes, he’s making one of his patented obscure self-references. Seven years ago, Ed bought the mutant turkey. He then put it in the freezer, where it stayed until this morning, when he took it out and cooked it (because you can totally thaw and cook a turkey in less than a day).
(Wait… maybe the mutant turkey was what Ed was looking for in the freezer last week! Of course! It all fits! Batiuk is a genius, weaving the subplots together like that. We thought he was just haphazardly throwing crap against the wall to see what stuck, but he had this planned all along, I’ll bet. It’s the only possible explanation!)
THIS is how you thaw and cook a turkey in less than a day…
Happy Thanksgiving to SOSFers everywhere! I appreciate CBH diligent research and her pictures of her farming adventures, Banana JR’s insight, and everyone’s informative tidbits and well-worded critiques on all things Funky and way beyond. So thankful to be a part of this group! Be safe, well-fed and loved, everyone!
Let me just say I am thankful for CBH and Banana Jr. and the entire team for their good efforts in weighing in on a deceased comic strip. I always enjoy your insights and can’t thank you enough.
My local newspaper did not run Funky until the late 80s. Before then, my mother picked up a paperback–I believe the FW Yearbook but don’t hold me to it–which had a comic strip. Dingle was selling turkeys door to door for Thanksgiving and said he had a three-legged turkey–which was from Three Mile Island.
So basically TB has been making the same joke for 40 years.
Happy Thanksgiving and I wish you and yours the best for the holiday season.
I looked it up. It was the “You Know You’ve Got Trouble When Your School Mascot is a Scapegoat.” No extreme close ups of a smirking and punchable face ala Kent State’s books.
Les “Dick Facey” Moore, Act III’s smug, bearded dick with ears. I actually sometimes looked forward to getting a Les arc, as that special brand of seething hatred and disgusted loathing fueled more than a few creative (and cathartic) rants. I mean, when you got stuck with a Claude Barlow or a Linda arc, you would cringe and immediately wonder what in God’s name you were going to say about it.
But Les made it easy, as you could simply just point out how he was the single worst character in the history of fiction, with that smug beard and those irritating comma eyes of his, always blubbering about that cancer book Batiuk shamelessly shilled the living shit out of for fifteen interminable years. The rants basically wrote themselves. And on top of that universal hatred, you had the stories, which always centered around his tragic martyrdom, and his unique creative vision. For my money, the original book launch tour mega-arc was Act III at its rock-bottom worst. It went on forever, and spawned countless Les sub-arcs that likewise went on forever.
Don’t forget Les’ crippling case of Dunning-Kruger Disease. He’s a certain type of 9th grade English teacher: a pompous, condescending, sniffing pseudointellectual, who spends all morning getting his leather elbow patches just right. Then in class he humblebrags about the unremarkable books he reads, and his own book which is totally coming out any day now.
Les is kind of like Dinkle in this regard. Dinkle was originally a deft caricature of the worst qualities of band teachers. But by Act III, he was a guy we were supposed to root for and admire, even while he indulged in all of the same abuses. Act I Funky Winkerbean would have had a field day with Act III Les. He’s exactly what FW originally existed to make fun of. Instead he became Tom Batiuk’s Mary Sue, to the point of self-parody. Except that it’s so extreme that you know he’s not kidding.
Act I Funky Winkerbean would have had a field day with Act III Les. He’s exactly what FW originally existed to make fun of.
This is such a great point that I’m shocked that in the 13+ years of this community, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone make it.
Hear, hear!
Les: HUMPH! SOME CHILDREN WERE LEFT BEHIND!
(Les storms off and then gets hit by a truck, beat up by Cayla and the Ghost of Bull Bushka, squashed flat by a anvil, blown up by a nuke and finally peed on by Boy Lisa)
And there was much rejoicing. YaY!
Historically, it’s “Les waddles off”.
What makes the character truly rank is not the smugness. It’s not being slobbered over for being a pompous git. It’s not even the fact that when he can’t get his own way, he’s a passive aggressive whiner who could, as my late father used to say, be likened to a shivering pillar of $#!7. It’s that Our Heroic Author blames someone else for the strip’s decline.
There was a movie a few years ago titled something like “We’re Not Allowed to Be Funny Anymore.” It was interviews with comics from the 80s and 90s, whining how their imagined “Cancel Culture” killed their careers. Such comics as Gilbert Gottfried and Andrew Dice Clay, who had never changed their acts in 30-40 years. You can change with the times, guys, or you can watch it race on past you.
Did you know that there was a Black comedian who whined in the mid-60s that he couldn’t get work because Black comics like Flip Wilson and Dick Gregory ruined his career by making his humor seem dated? His stage name was Stepin Fetchit. He was minstrel show shit.
(Believe it or not, he had a contemporary named…”Sleep’n’Eat.” Boy, this cancel culture has always been out of control!)
There aren’t supposed to be consequences for stupidity. That’s how those dinosaurs think.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all!
Today’s “Shoe” proves it’s possible to pull off a homonym joke of the sort Batty flubs repeatedly. It’s still a little bit awkward, but the confusion when one character says “wait” and the other hears “weight” works well enough to produce a chuckle.
“I really think that Batiuk thinks that what made his cancer story genius is simply that he had Lisa die.”
That was his hook, the part of the story that generated that mainstream attention he so craved at the time. If she’d have beaten her cancer and lived, it’d have been just another predictable, happy-faced comic strip story, unremarkable and not worthy of attention. But having her die was “daring” and “bold”, and outside what people considered “normal comic strip fare”. Lynn Johnston loved doing that too. Batiuk had been amping up the tragedy for years prior to the Lisa Dies arc, and that was him taking it as far as The Syndicate would allow. “Can you top THIS?”.
I do have some sympathy for Kayla in the video. Some issues weren’t addressed by the letter-writer. Why did Kayla feel she had to live up to the dead wife’s legacy? Why did she feel as if she had to replace the wife? There’s almost a “Single White Female” vibe here, but we don’t get to hear her side. I have sympathy for the letter writer as well, but I’d like to know more. Why is the family constantly siding with her side of the argument? As the MainlyFacts host states, if this relationship is to be saved, there needs to be some understanding and resolution between the two parties.
On the other hand, I have no sympathy whatsoever for Funky Winkerbean’s Cayla. She’s not a passive victim, she’s an enabler. Not only does she put up with Les’s never-ending moping over Lisa, she encourages it with no benefit to herself. Enjoy that trip to China, Cayla? You know, the one where Les was to take you to see his Lisa book printed. Oh, you never went? I guess you’re okay with that.
Cayla, what an ineffectual character. In the mall racism story arc last year with Logan and Malcolm, they encountered an allegedly racist sales clerk. Perhaps the sales clerk was reacting to Malcolm’s suspicious behavior. He admitted taking a sweater and placing it elsewhere to bait her. Rather than confront the sales clerk and question her behavior, they quickly left the store and went to sooth their anger with ice cream. A story that might have gone somewhere petered out into “Ice cream solves everything.”
I bet Batiuk pats himself on the back for being “so progressive” by entering Les into a mixed-race marriage.
Batiuk: Les Moore. What a guy. He’s the best. I love you, man! (wipes away a tear of joy)
I was originally going to get into how we’re hearing this story from the Les analog’s point of view, and it might be a dishonest retelling. It was more interesting to analyze at face value, so I did that instead.
But you’re right. There’s something driving this behavior, that the story doesn’t tell us. Maybe the man won’t let go of his dead wife (though it sounds like he’s trying, at least). Maybe real-life Kayla always turns herself into someone else when she’s in an relationship. I once dated a girl like that.
I don’t think we have enough information to know who is to blame. They need to talk it out and set some boundaries. But according to the story, the man already tried that once, and it didn’t help.
“I bet Batiuk pats himself on the back for being ‘so progressive’ by entering Les into a mixed-race marriage.”
April 9 2017. Les and Cayla are trying to come up with a new variant on “See you later, alligator”. As Cayla’s leaving (not for good, sadly) she says “See you soon, you cute baboon”, to which Les responds “Down the track, you hot macaque”.
Suffice it to say, that generated a few responses, so Batiuk issued the following:
So I think it’s safe to say you won that bet, bwoeh…
Sometimes I ask myself if I’m too harsh on Tom Batiuk. Then he writes something like this. What. A. Jackass. He’s fundamentally incapable of saying “I made a mistake” or “I apologize.” He acts like it’s your fault that he doesn’t know to avoid a common racist trope. And he doesn’t like you criticizing his work! He might as well have called us “beady-eyed nitpickers” again.
It’s just like the “women in comic books” thing. He claims to be so progressive about women, but you can see how the stories treat them. Same with the black characters, the handicapped characters, and the newly transsexual Roland, It’s obvious how unimportant these people are. The important characters treat them like children.
The simple fact that I have a biracial marriage in Funky speaks to where my head and my heart are at on this subject.
Yes, it’s obvious where Tom Batiuk’s head and heart are. They’re up his ass.
Admitting to being in the wrong is not something he and his peers are good at. At least he didn’t try to make not knowing the difference between a way station and a weigh station vanish like McElnazi.
I’ve posted about this several times. Batiuk was trapped into having a biracial marriage in his comic strip. It’s why he changed Cayla from the dark-skinned afro’d black lady to toasted almond Cindy. Once he made Cayla “white-ish” he could accept her marrying Les.
Because could you imagine how blatantly racist it would come off had Batiuk have Cayla and Les break up, with the explanation being that Les couldn’t say he loved her, only for him to meet a newly created white lady who he could say he loved less than two years later? After Les and Cayla hooked up, it would have been perilous for Batiuk to try even to pair Les with established characters like Cindy or Susan. He had to get them married, if he was going to have Les remarry, which, again, is why Cayla’s character design conveniently changed right when this development started.
And to circle back to the other point I made in this thread, Batiuk only trapped himself because he was constitutionally incapable of finding fault with Les and the way he behaves.
He could have gotten out of the trap he caught himself in of having to get Cayla and Les married by having Cayla say that she wasn’t interested in playing subordinate to a dead woman, whereupon she leaves Les because he’s too hung up on Lisa. Then Les acknowledges his unwillingness to confront his feelings in the aftermath of Lisa’s death and recognizes that it’s ruining his life. So he aims to do better and recovers, ultimately marrying the nice white woman Batiuk would have preferred.
But that would have required that Batiuk view Les’s devotion to Lisa as something that needed to be corrected, and that’s just not something he’d do. He thinks Les’s devotion to Lisa, even through his marriage to another woman, is something to be admired. It’s as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Batiuk doesn’t even notice how obviously damaged he’s presenting Les’s second marriage. He’s just too enamored of Les’s “heroism” to see what he’s actually created.
The thing about Cayla was that BatYam did a whole lengthy story arc about Les moving on and settling down with Cayla. It went on for years. And then he married her, which you’d think would put a cap on that whole story. But, Batty being Batty and all, he came back to it, like the previous events (sound familiar?) never even happened. He finally let Lisa go, he finally moved on, then BAM, secret diaries and VHS tapes. Once the Cayla character developed beyond being “the other woman”, Batiuk lost all interest in her. I doubt she had an arc to herself for at least the last eleven or twelve years of FW’s run.
It’s odd that I expect Cayla to be the least likely FW character to reappear, and if she does, it will be a silent cameo, and then she’ll vanish forever.
On the other hand, I fully expect to see canonically dead characters to come back. Idealized rotting corpses are easier to write for, I guess.
Les didn’t need to settle down with Cayla at all. Les needed to settle down with Susan Smith.
Susan’s submissiveness and low-self esteem make her the ideal second wife for Les. She’d be delighted to help build his Lisa shrine, and take whatever crumbs of affection he deigned to throw her. If Susan acted like Cayla does, at least it would have been in character.
Cayla was 180 degrees from that. She initially had a strong personality, and a backstory that suggested toughness. She was what Les genuinely needed: someone to help him move on from Lisa, or dump him if he can’t. Batiuk turned Cayla into Susan, because that’s what he wanted for himse– er, “Les. ” He wanted the sexy option AND the doormat. One or the other was inadequate.
How little does Batiuk care about Cayla? If you go to his blog and run a search on “Cayla”, you get four hits. That’s it, just four. One of them is the Lost Finale, so it’s just the list of characters’ names (including Cayla’s daughter “Kesha”, because Batiuk doesn’t care about her, either). One is the above-quoted response to the “macaque” strip. One opens by thanking “everyone who sent in good wishes to Les and Cayla for their wedding”; I’m guessing he’s making a sarcastic, passive-aggressive dig at the fact that only, like, three people said anything at all about it, but I could just be making that up. That entry then goes on to talk about other things, including – believe it or not! – Lisa’s Story. (He refers to a “coda”, involving a “flashback/prequel”, a Crankshaft crossover, and “a long-lost character”, so I’m assuming this is about the Frankie story with “Pm and Jff”.) And then there’s a Flash Fridays, about Flash #164. That issue advertised an upcoming issue with an “invitation” to the wedding of Barry and Iris, which Tom says may have subconsciously influenced him to do the same thing for Les and Cayla’s wedding.
And that’s it. That’s all the mentions of Cayla across his entire blog. Four entries, three of which only mention her in passing. Only one could even remotely be considered “about” Cayla, and even that’s a stretch, since it’s more about Batiuk responding to the criticism of a strip.
Now let’s do a search on “Sadie”. FIVE results. Okay, the last one doesn’t count, as it contains a reference to Sadie Hawkins, not Sadie Summers. (Though that’s a whopper of its own: “I’d always admired running gags or situations that would appear annually such as Sadie Hawkins Day in Li’l Abner and Charlie Brown kicking the football in Peanuts, so when Funky started I was immediately on the lookout for a recurring bit of my own.” He decided that the mass registration for classes would be his recurring bit, but “The premise never really quite caught on with readers the way that I’d hoped, but I accidentally found what I was looking for with a silly bit that never failed to garner a response… the talking leaves.” You’re so close to a revelation here, Tom…)
Anyway, back to Sadie. The March 5 2020 entry is titled “Match to Flame 116” and is taken from the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 7, wherein he calls Sadie “the worst mistake I ever made in creating a character”. Feel free to make your own jokes about that one, they’re pretty easy. That gets continued in the March 19 2020 entry, also titled “Match to Flame 116”, because proofreading is for chumps. That one goes into detail about why Sadie was created, and why Batiuk thinks she was such a mistake, so it’s actually about Sadie, not just an oblique reference. Which means that his “worst mistake” has now gotten more significant coverage from him than Cayla (to bring us back to the original point of this post).
(Though to digress again, Tom says that creating Sadie “brought about character confusion, redundancy, overpopulation, and just about everything else that Flash [Fairfeild, his former editor] had warned me not to do.” Again, feel free to make your own jokes here.)
The other two Sadie mentions are from “Match to Flame 127” and “Match to Flame 128”, although both entries have the exact same text, because proofreading is for chumps. They’re actually about the introduction of Susan Smith, but refers to her as being created as a contrast to Sadie specifically (Sadie being the popular girl, Susan being essentially invisible), so at least it’s not just a name-drop.
So there we go. How little does Batiuk care about Cayla? In his own blog, she gets mentioned as many times as Sadie Summers, the character he outright regrets creating. And Sadie actually gets a real write-up, whereas Cayla never gets more than a passing mention (and almost always as part of the phrase “Les and Cayla”).
And just for fun, we’ll run a search on “Lisa”. Hm, it shows 12 entries, with a “load more” button at the bottom. Those 12 entries only cover from May to October of this year. Hitting that “load more” gets us 12 more entries, going back to last October. So basically 24 entries over a year, as opposed to Cayla, who gets 4 entries across 10 years.
I suspect if we do ever see Les again, he’ll be hawking his new book, Lisa’s Story 2.0: I Think Her Name Was Cayla This Time But I’m Not Sure, his memoir about losing his second wife to cancer.
(Dang, this one took up a lot of space. Sorry, didn’t mean to turn this one into a blog post of its own.)
So little that she appears on the cover of a book that TB subtitled “Lisa’s Story Concludes”.
The fact that TB believes that Sadie Summers is his greatest professional folly (and slags the work of Chester Gould and Charles Schulz in the process making that point) says a lot about him, I think. I have strong opinions about Sadie built entirely around the fact that TB thinks she is the one thing he’s ever screwed up.
Strong…
Opinions…
Above all else, I cannot stress enough the fact that TB believes recreating Cindy at the start of Act II was such a huge mistake despite recreating Cindy in every subsequent generation of students he showed at the high school (Cindy -> Sadie -> Jessica Darling -> Rana Howard -> Mallory Brooks -> Maris Rogers). What else can I say?
(said with Les smirk): Actually, Al Capp did Sadie Hawkins. Although Dick Tracy’s Chester “Ghoul” doing Hawkins would’ve been great. Imagine the carnage!!
The slagging on Gould and Schulz refers to the end of the blog post, where he says that Sadie “was eventually banished to the Dumb Character Phantom Zone, where she could pal around with the Moon Maid from Dick Tracy and Snoopy’s brothers Andy, Marbles, Olaf, and Spike.”
(However, forgetting to properly close the italics tag was 100% me. Sorry ’bout that.)
The fact that TB believes that Sadie Summers is his greatest professional folly (and slags the work of Chester Gould and Charles Schulz in the process making that point) says a lot about him.
It says exactly this:
GL:
“Dick Tracy and Snoopy’s brothers Andy, Marbles, Olaf, and Spike–with their pal Moon Maid!”
Like you wouldn’t read THAT more than we read THIS!
(Unless it was good; then we’d just go back to pickin’ our nitty eyes on CS)
Also, while we’re on the subject of Sadie…
First off, in case anyone didn’t know, there’s a Funky Winkerbean CafePress store! Yes, really. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone’s updated it since 2002 (that’s the copyright date on the few items whose copyright date I’ve looked at). And one of those items actually has Sadie on it! Specifically, it’s this design:
Yeah. “Thank’s”. Because proofreading is for chumps.
(I apologize if this is old news to everyone else.)
Oh, that’s a fantastic find. I want to read the book that image is the cover to. It looks like a Christian storybook that’s been languishing in a pediatrician’s waiting room since 1978. And it’s about teaching kids with Down’s Syndrome how to use the Photoshop Blur tool.
I’m also imagining the creative process behind it. I imagine that in the late 90s, Tom Batiuk had a phase where he was going to write the new Highlights For Kids. He had John Byrne draw this concept art to pitch the series, and signed his own name to it. All he ever made was the comic book cover, because that’s all Tom Batiuk ever does. After the idea flew like a lead balloon with the publisher, he re-purposed it as a t-shirt design when he discovered CafePress in 2002. (Which is honestly earlier than I would have expected.)
“And that was the exact second…I realized Sis was going to strangle me…**sob**”
“COOL! We have a t-shirt JUST FOR THAT!”
I just have one question. When has Cindy Summers ever done anything worthy of thanks? She’s one of the most selfish people in a universe of selfish people.
If anyone had Pmm saying “What are you doing, Dad?” in P1 of the Sunday Crankshaft on your Bingo card, you just won.
Like you do every week.
Greatly enjoying the discussion about precisely why Les is so odious, and why Cayla became CauCayla, and why the whole Funkyverse is so detached from both reality and humor.
And there’s also the other patented Batiuk Sunday tradition: taking seven panels to tell a three-panel joke. For today’s strip, only panels 4, 5 and 7 are necessary.
I tossed out the idea this morning that maybe we are working up to a Big Reveal that Pmm is in fact blind, and that’s why she must always ask Ed what he’s doing, even when she’s in a position where she can clearly see what’s on his screen.
Of course, maybe she’s just learned to never look at Ed’s screen from that incident when she found him updating his OnlyFans page. Or maybe that’s what caused her blindness.
Droop Dawg is back to buying Montini’s, failed rust belt pizza place noted for its grease. Because he makes so much moolah writing comics!
Google:
“How much money do comic book writers make?
Comic Book Writer Salary
Annual Salary Hourly
Top Earners $75,000 $36”
Well, he sure makes more than I do! I’m on Social Security!
A failed pizza place that almost certainly has decades of black mold in the vents. Oh, yeah, the rats? Just get a cat! What? NO, you can’t have the snow tires we used only once! I wrote those off as my last business expense, like the bribe I gave the fire marshal!
Smartest investment since MC Hammer bought himself some friends!
There is nothing to “buy,” though, unless it’s the building. The business is defunct and has been for a year.
A cursory search reveals that turnkey pizzerias in midsized towns sell for about 200-300K. Turnkey means that they’ll come with all the equipment, all the permits and inspections, all the gas and electric hookups, printed menus, and an active staff and customer base. They will be making money and functioning 100% from day one.
Montoni’s is nothing but a name. Everything was sold off. No ovens, no permits, no gas or electric. It’s worth about a buck fifty. If Pete can’t afford it, Ed’s moldy penny sock should cover it.
The idea that Pete almost but not quite enough money to buy Montoni’s makes no sense at all. If Pete is the highest paid writer in comic books, then he has plenty of cash on hand. If Pete is the guy who couldn’t afford a wedding ring because he spent all his money playing games at the fair, then there’s no way he can afford this venture at all.
And if Pete has Pizza Box Man as a partner, then PBM should be contributing some of the capital, rendering the premise of today’s discussion moot. Never mind all the problems with that arrangement that i previously mentioned. And that we don’t know how open or closed Montoni’s really is, and what Pete’s buying exactly.
To say nothing of his statement “*I’ve* determined that *we* can afford to buy it.” This is what Les Moore would have said to Cayla about that sign he wanted to buy at the auction because it reminded him of Lisa.
Tom Batiuk’s writing not only contradicts itself, it contradicts all its prior contradictions.
<i>Montoni’s is nothing but a name.</i>
But it’s a name that would have some value. It was once a multi-state chain, albeit a crappy one. And it was in Westview for so long that the name has goodwill with consumers there. Remember when those random people went to their long-closed location on Halloween, hoping to somehow catch a glimpse of their stupid Pizza Box mascot? That’s a sign of a valuable brand.
Realistically, the rights to the name “Montoni’s” would have been sold off when it closed. And somebody would have bought it. Expiring company names are sometimes bought by larger competitors, just so they can’t come back under that name. And by people who want to piggyback on the reputation of something established. Which is basically what Pete is doing.
I don’t know about that; “Montoni’s” is not such a unique name. For exampls, there’s a “Luigi’s” pizzeria a few blocks from me, no relation to the one in Ohio that Montoni’s is based on.
I don’t know what the legal issues would be. On one hand, it’s not a unique name; on the other hand, it’s in the location of an older restaurant there, which could lead to confusion; on the third hand, that business was dissolved, so do they have a basis to sue?
I’m no Amicus Breef, so I won’t opine on those matters. But how much could a name alone be worth, especially one for a bankrupt, failed restaurant in a hick town?
I’m more interested, anyway, in the fact that Jessica has consistently shown nothing but horror/disgust at the idea of running a pizzeria, and Pete keeps steadfastly ignoring this reaction in his fiancée. For any other writer, this would be foreshadowing a major conflict to come. For Batiuk, it’s another case of Batiuk’s Gun*: Always insert tantalizing information that seems as if it will ultimately upend your characters’ world, but that you never use or refer to again.
*(the diametric opposite of Chekhov’s Gun)
I think this one is Mindy, not Jessica. Jessica is the one who gave her adolescent son the same gun that was used to murder her father; whether that makes her more or less unhinged than the one who agreed to marry Mopey will be left as an exercise for the reader.
When will I just learn to write “Generic Blonde” so I don’t have to try to tell these placeholder characters apart?
“Jeannie Rikblond” is gonna be my new name for all of them. And for the older ones, “Potato Female.”
<i>But how much could a name alone be worth, especially one for a bankrupt, failed restaurant in a hick town?</i>
I never said it’d be worth much. The appeal isn’t the value, but the utility in owning it. DC is a great example of this. They bought up a lot of IP from their failed competitors like Charlton, just to add the characters to their world, and benefit from the built-in lore.
(<i>Watchmen</i> was originally supposed to be this. But the story rendered the characters useless for anything else, so they invented Doctor Manhattan, Rorshach, etc. just for the story.)
And in the context of Westview, Ohio, the name Montoni’s has genuine value. It has immediate credibility that “Pete’s Pizza” wouldn’t. It’s why so many pizzerias in New York are called “Ray’s” something or other.
It’s an interesting legal question. But lord knows we’re not going to get any specifics out of this comic strip.
You bring up a good point about the profusion of “Ray’s Pizza”s in NYC. What’s more, they are commonly called “Famous Ray’s,” “Original Ray’s,” or “Famous Original Ray’s.” And even New Yorkers argue about which is the original, if there even is a single original. Why are so many pizzerias with different owners, recipes, etc, allowed to be “Famous Ray’s” etc?
Genuinely not trying to be argumentative here, BJr6K — I can’t argue anything, actually, since I know nothing about the law in this area.
I’d also argue that if Montoni’s went bankrupt — because of the pandemic, of all things, history’s biggest boon to pizza delivery — maybe it wasn’t beloved for its pizza, but for its alleged kitschy charm, with its band box and Pizza Monster. Even if somehow the town did love the actual pizza, if Pete doesn’t have the recipe and the correct ovens and ingredients, he won’t be duplicating Montoni’s, leading to disappointment and (hopefully) utter failure, bankruptcy, humiliation, and bitter divorce.
Of course, any time spent analyzing this stupidity — as if it were actually 1/4 inch from anything but a dumpster — is time wasted, so the joke’s on me.
Speaking of jokes, it seems like those merry tricksters at WordPress have changed the way html is coded. I’m not sure I understand how it’s done now, but let me check. Does this show up as bold?
Speaking of jokes, it seems like those merry tricksters at WordPress have changed the way html is coded
I think so, because there’s an interface now, so you can just click what you want and not have to type the HTML Tags. You can see the altered text in the preview. Also makes things like links easier.
Why are so many pizzerias with different owners, recipes, etc, allowed to be “Famous Ray’s” etc?
I would wager that a court ruled that “Ray’s” is generic enough not to be copyrightable. Which you alluded to with an earlier comment, about “Montoni’s” being similarly generic.
Another example I know of is video games with the word “Tycoon” in them. Some big fish like Railroad Tycoon (one of my all-time faves BTW) tried to copyright the word, but lost in court. So anybody can make a videogame called Something Tycoon, just like anyone can make a videogame called Something Football or Something War. It’s a generic enough concept that can’t be owned by anyone. (I’m conflating trademarks, copyrights, and business names here, but I’ve been taught similar principles apply.)
I can also give you an example from my hometown. We had a wonderful little place called Johnson’s Catfish. After the founder, a Mr. Johnson, died, people opened various “Johnson’s Catfish”es in its (very unique) location. None of them were the real thing, or even any good in their own right.
One day it became “John’s Catfish.” As I understand it, the descendants of Mr. Johnson (who otherwise weren’t interested in running the restaurant) sued the copycat restaurant over the name. They won. The court ruled the Johnson descendants owned the rights to the name, and the new crappy place couldn’t be called that anymore.
If the very common surname “Johnson” can be ruled copyrightable, in a town that’s much larger than Westview, then I would argue that the owners of “Montoni’s Pizza” have a very strong case that the name belongs to them. Pete would have to negotiate with Funky (or, more likely, Tony Montoni) over the rights to use the name. Which they may or may not be inclined to grant. And which also wouldn’t give them any trade secrets on top of that.
But we all know what’s going to happen. Pete will “buy” Montoni’s, even though there’s nothing left to sell, and it’ll reopen and be just like the old Montoni’s. Tom Batiuk is amazingly uncurious about stuff like this.
When will I just learn to write “Generic Blonde” so I don’t have to try to tell these placeholder characters apart?
“Jeannie Rikblond” is gonna be my new name for all of them. And for the older ones, “Potato Female.”
Reminds me of the character “Jenn Erika” in Phil Dunlap’s sadly discontinued strip “Ink Pen” (still in reprints on GC). She was a regular character whose job was to play all the non-specific female characters in comics.
Did WordPress change the way comments are formatted?
Yabba!!!