So Tom Batiuk’s recent email newsletter started off with this December 2008 strip:
Comic Book Harriet wondered why Batiuk chose to highlight this seemingly random strip in his email newsletter. I have a different questrion:
Why did Tom Batiuk choose to include this absolutely disgusting strip in his email newsletter?
Harriet and I have talked about a potential series called “The Worst Of Les Moore.” If any of you are worried the blog will ever run out of things talk about, that topic will give us eons of material. And this strip is a great example. Let’s go through it bit by bit.
I’m only going to talk about panels 1, 5, and 6. Because, like, most Funky Winkerbean Sunday strips, it’s a three-panel strip padded out to Sunday length. To prove it:
The pacing and the joke work a lot better in my edited version. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.
In the original strip, the splash panel shows Les side-eyeing a high-slit dress. Clearly, the store sells this kind of dress, so he shouldn’t be surprised at what Summer comes out wearing later. If anything, her dress is more conservative than that. It’s the classic little black dress, and it’s been a fashion staple for decades. It’s nothing to get upset about. Of course, Les gets upset.
The strip is dated December 21, 2008. That’s 14 months after Lisa died. Lisa still being an active figure in Les’ life at this point is a problem by itself.
Les has prolonged grief disorder. This was added to the the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) in 2022. For a positive diagnosis, “symptoms must occur frequently (usually at least daily) and be present for at least 6–12 months.” Which qualifies this incident for diagnosis, even if you ignore the ten-year time skip. And if you don’t, this is how Les is acting eleven years after his wife died. That’s not healthy.
Lisa is telling Les not to overreact at the prospect of his little girl coming out in an adult woman’s dress. And Les completely blows her off. “It won’t be a problem! I’m cool!” Of course, he isn’t.
However you interpret Act III Lisa, this interaction makes no sense. Why does Lisa bother communicating with Les, if he’s just going to dismiss her? Why does Les imagine her giving him advice, if he’s just going to ignore it? It sure doesn’t reinforce the mythos of this being the greatest doomed romance in human history, as Tom Batiuk would like you to believe. And look at the “I’ve got everything under control” panel. Lisa looks genuinely hurt. What kind of person fantasizes about this kind of interaction with their deceased partner?
Les and Lisa remind me of a Zits character called RichAndAmy. They’re a high school couple that are so attached to each other that they fused into a single organism.
But you wouldn’t call them a great romance. They’re the embodiment of high schoolers who find their first real romantic partner, and are far more in love with the idea of having a boyfriend/girlfriend than they are with each other. We all knew this person in high school, or we were this person in high school. It’s part of growing up. Les and Lisa were both undateable geeks in Act I, so when they found each other, it had heavy overtones of this. Of course, they never matured beyond this phase.
Let’s move on to Les’ reaction. He’s being abusive in five different ways here:
Having arbitrary rules. Modesty has never been one of Les Moore’ core values. If anything, quite the opposite, considering how skeevy he could be in high school. So why is he yelling at Summer over a non-controversial dress?
Sending mixed messages. Les has been actively involved in Summer’s role on the Winterfest court, to the point of chaperoning the event and lining her up a date. He’s angry at her for choosing a dress that’s appropriate for an event he’s been urging her to attend. This is a classic double bind. Obeying Les’ first command makes you violate Les second command… and he just made up the second command on the spot. If Summer came out in some frumpy grandma dress, Les would yell at her for not taking the dance seriously enough. As in Full Metal Jacket, any answer Summer gives will be wrong.
Histrionics. Like almost everything Les does, this is straight out of the narcissists’ playbook. Even if Summer’s dress were problematic, this is a disproportionate response. And yet, it’s better than what Les usually does. His usual style is usually to silently fume at you and make you guess what you did wrong. Which is also straight out of the narcissists’ playbook.
And it’s exactly what Lisa warned him not to do. I can appreciate that seeing your own daughter in her first prom dress might be disconcerting for a father. But this is no way to deal with it. Especially when she’s not doing anything wrong. Lisa is absolutely right here, and is telling Les something he needs to hear. Which makes his smug rejection of that advice even more distasteful.
Authoritarian Parenting Style. You know people who say “my way or the highway”? I hate those people. They’re usually obnoxious Karens, asserting some kind of authority they don’t actually have. Les is that kind of parent. Authoritarian parents set rigid rules with no explanation, and expect their children to obey them without question, or face punishment. (This is not the same as “authoritative parenting,” where parents set boundaries and enforce them, but are otherwise loving and supportive.)
It’s all premeditated. There’s no way on earth Les was actually shocked by this dress. The dress is inoffensive; racier dresses were on display in the store; Les has no predilection for modesty; and Les got sage counsel from his dead wife. On top of all that, he’s also a high school teacher!
By virtue of his career, Les would know what high school girls wear to dances. He would probably have seen it firsthand, as a chaperone. It need hardly be said this dress is far from “illegal”, making his reaction even more uncalled for. He’d also have to be pretty disinterested in Summer’s shopping to not see the dress before she took it into the changing room. Which is yet another indictment of his parenting.
The only plausible interpretation is that Les is intentionally overplaying his reaction, to manipulate Summer. He’s trying to frame himself as the aggrieved party, and make Summer the bad guy for breaking his heretofore non-existent rule. And it works. In the last panel, we can see that he drove Summer to tears.
Let’s move onto that panel. It’s unclear whether Lisa is really communicating from the afterlife, or exists only in Les’ imagination. But one thing’s for certain: Act III Lisa has never spoken to Summer. Summer can only hear from her mother via the endless collection of video tapes Les forces her to watch. She has never manifested herself, or taken real-world actions for Summer. Only Les. Even though we know from the “bomb threat” arc that Lisa can make real-world phone calls.
And Lisa chooses to not get involved. She should be more concerned about her adolescent daughter’s shattered self-esteem, than about smirking and eye-rolling at her husband’s crass behavior. If Les is the authoritarian parent, Lisa is the uninvolved parent.
Les seems to have realize he’s done wrong and is following her into the changing rooms. Which we’ll never see the outcome of, because Les can never be depicted as having done anything wrong. The strip will just move on to Monday, the characters will act like nothing happened, and the incident will never be addressed. Even though it would be a serious violation of a child’s trust in a parent.
So we have a strip where Les is imagining Lisa’s active involvement in his life 11 years after she died; he rudely dismisses her advice; Summer tries to prepare for an event Les was encouraging her to attend; he explodes with pointless random anger and drives her to tears; and Lisa monologues about her husband while ignoring her child’s broken heart.
Other than that, it’s okay, I guess.
Son of Stuck Funky 
I feel like Lisa’s death has fucked Les up much more than he realizes
What’s amazing is that no other character ever notices how fucked up Les is, and actively indulge him in his unhealthy grieving. Even the Hollywood people, who have no personal relationship with Les, enable this. They walk on eggshells around him Because Lisa Died. He’s turned her death into a permanent excuse for bad behavior.
And they also don’t notice because they started indulging him years before Lisa died, sometimes even in the latter part of Act I: Cindy at McArnold’s, everyone at his graduation speech, Bull after Les punched him, Funky countless times…
Even Lisa usually walked on eggshells around him after they got married. Her videos micromanaged Summer and even Cayla, but Les? She told Les to get his prostate checked… Back in Act II she once made the mistake of offering constructive criticism on his stupid John Darling book and (on the recommendation of Funky and DSH) came crawling back to apologize with pizza, comic books, and (ugh) foreplay.
No, really.
Great point about the fact that Lisa only speaks to Les, never her daughter. I’d never considered that but it’s a really big deal. And here, a tiny rewrite of her lines, spoken to Summer (“…so don’t be surprised if your father is shocked by your dress…”) would have done it – and been far more interesting and affecting. (Or – bringing along an actual woman who might have, I dunno, an actual interaction with Summer, person to person?)
On a crass note: the final panel is so sloppily drawn that although I know it’s her elbow, it does look like Summer’s boob fell out of the dress.
And if Lisa was really as exasperated with Les as she claims to be here, she’d know talking to Les is a waste of time anyway. Preparing Summer for his overreaction is a more effective use of her influence. Lisa needs to watch that Futurama episode that says “if you do things right, they won’t know you’ve done anything at all.”
We all see her tapes as an attempt to micromanage people’s lives after she died. But with better tactics, she could actually be doing that.
Even if she’s an actual ghost influencing his life, it says a lot that she wasn’t willing to do more for her daughter than record a stupid tape that allows Les to not understand who Oprah Winfrey is. It’s almost as if it’s Summer’s fault Doctor Stupid effed up the test results that led to the relapse.
As High School teachers go, I think Les is the equivalent of *Doonesbury’s* Roland Burton Hedley covering sports in Saigon.
Or, even worse, Second Lieutenant Hauk in “Good Morning, Vietnam” with his polka music.
Still, Hauk knew in his heart that he was funny, and we found him funny, too…but for the wrong reasons.
Funky Winkerbean is Good Morning, Vietnam if Bruno Kirby was the star. Imagine Hauk’s painfully bad comedy material, interspersed with the other men laughing hysterically at Robin Williams’ antics, so it looks like Hauk is making them laugh.
That’s the Funkyverse. It tells you who’s talented, and who you are supposed to praise, even though the story itself leads you to very different conclusions. The second act would be the creation of the Hauk comic book cover. Then the third act would be Hauk winning the Ohio Book Fair award for Best Foreign Military Radio DJ.
You know, a casual Sunday comics reader not familiar with FW history would have looked at this strip and thought it was just a typical “parents vs. teen generation gap” joke, taken another sip of coffee, and moved on to see what “Mary Worth” was up to.
Given what we know, however, very little here makes any sense. Is Les actually seeing as well as hearing Lisa? Why does he turn his head as if he’s looking back at her in Panel Four? And if she’s a figment of his imagination, why is she standing off away from him, talking to no one in particular, in Panel Six? Also, “Styles have changed from when we were young”? What did you wear to school dances, Ghost Lisa, poodle skirts and saddle shoes? You all were in high school in the late ’70s and early ’80s (Timemop be darned!), maybe 20 to 25 years before this strip takes place. I’m no fashion expert, but the standard LBD that Summer tries on looks as if it wouldn’t have been out of place in any part of that time period.
Right, I am a regular reader and initially I thought this strip was from before she died….then I realized it had to be ghost Lisa due to Summer’s age.
I guess it doesn’t matter, all Lisa’s suck.
I remember going to prom in 1990. At which time my high school had a rule against Simpsons t-shirts. For real. And yet, Summer’s dress would have probably passed muster. Maybe it’s a little short, but this wasn’t Catholic school. It was a large, public high school.
Which is another thing: the prom dress code isn’t a state secret. Rules for school events would be published. A small-town dress shop almost certainly knows them, because prom drives a lot of their business. Les, being a teacher himself, would know how to look them up. But Les would rather appoint himself judge, jury, and executioner. Which is a sixth form of abuse I could have listed: being a false authority.
“You know, a casual Sunday comics reader not familiar with FW history would have looked at this strip and thought it was just a typical “parents vs. teen generation gap” joke, taken another sip of coffee, and moved on to see what “Mary Worth” was up to.“
This is a point I was making on an earlier thread. Viewed in isolation, without context of any character’s previous (or subsequent) actions, most individual FW strips would give you the impression that FW is merely a mediocre comic. Not brilliant, certainly, or even anything too much north of “meh” … but also not worthy of the snark it gets here.
Looking at this particular strip, for instance, if you came into it with no history?
Well, a man and his wife (there’s no way to tell that Lisa’s a ghost or a figment of Les’ imagination) are out shopping with their daughter. The husband, clearly a bit of an arrogant doofus (look and listen to him in those opening panels!), smugly inmates he’s got everything under control. Turns out he doesn’t, and he makes an ass of himself. Whoops! The kind-of-more-sensible-but-sassy wife points out what a jerk the husband is. Ha ha!
And, scene!
Sure, it’s not great stuff, but it’s clear what the joke is supposed to be. Even more germane to the point, it’s also clear (if ONLY looking at this one strip) that the husband IS a jerk, and we’re not supposed to sympathize with him — he’s obviously a complete failure at this parenting thing. Thank goodness the more sensible mother will be there to give her daughter some support, advice, and encouragement! The one-strip reader is pretty sure that everything will be okay in the end, and Doofus Dad will probably get his comeuppance in some future strip.
It’s only if you know the larger context that you know the husband is NOT supposed to be a jerk. We’re somehow supposed to like and even admire him. Oh, and the mother will NOT be there to help the daughter through this. And that far from getting any comeuppance, Doofus Dad will for some reason be rewarded over and over again for his utterly appalling behaviour.
_______
Reviewing his work in that larger context is part of the awful fascination of reading Batiuk’s attempts at ‘serious’ writing. In fact, it’s kind of an achievement that his works are considerably less than the sum of their parts. Individual FW strips are mediocre … but put them together as a connected narrative, and they’re bile-inducing.
This stuff happens all the time in the Funkiverse. Les, Crankshaft, Lillian, Funky, et al engage in behavior that is objectively abominable, yet the other characters in the strip shrug it off and find it endearing somehow. TB seems to think that’s part of the joke. It might have worked in Act I when all the characters were caricatures, but it fails miserably when you’re doing a reality based story.
I’m working on an article about how this ties into Batiuk’s “tell don’t show” tendencies.
Batiuk *can’t* show his stories actually happening, because it would show how completely horrible his “good” characters are.
This week is a perfect example. It’s about bus drivers blowing off schoolchildren and setting their grandparents up for severe injury. But if they show Crankhole even attempting that, it would be appalling. Constantly cutting away from Les’ abusive behavior and the consequences thereof, as he does in this strip from this post, is another example.
Yup.
The wacky, over-the-top, cheerfully exaggerated near-sadism of Dinkle or Crankshaft was appropriate in a comic strip about trying to get through high school. These authority figures could be either hopelessly out-of-touch and ineffectual — or complete obsessives whose mission was to make kids miserable. Or sometimes both! Either way, they were recognizable as burlesques of the types we all had to put up with as we navigated our way to adulthood.
But Batiuk doesn’t seem to understand — or is incapable of understanding — that burlesques stop working in a realistic setting.
I’m reminded of M*A*S*H, which started wacky and developed into a more serious show (although still with leavening humour). Though you may personally like one iteration of the show more than the other (in fact, most folks who have seen it have a favourite M*A*S*H period), I would hope you could see that they really tried to get BOTH tones right. To that end, even though Col. Flagg was a hilarious character, he didn’t fit the tone of the later seasons, so he didn’t appear. And when they’d exhausted the completely bungling, impossible-to-respect Frank Burns character, he was replaced with the supremely competent, much more grown-up Charles Emerson Winchester. Both characters were funny, but in different ways. (Same with the laissez-faire, in-over-his-head Henry Blake and his replacement, the canny, authoritative military vet Sherman Potter.)
It’s possible to go from wacky to serious. To me, M*A*S*H was a little too self-consciously ‘zany’ at the very beginning (and the show’s casual sexism is especially infuriating), and a little too self-satisfied in its serious posturing at the very end. But in the middle, and for several years, they found a sweet spot where funny and serious worked very well together. It CAN be done.
Not by Batiuk, though.
Les wants to think that he’s being a dedicated dad. He is not. There is another man like him: John Patterson from For Better Or For Worse: perfectly capable of having an orgasm on the spot when seeing his son’s prom date in a far more conservative dress than Androgyny Golightly is wearing but still mutates into Timmy Taliban if his kids show some skin.
I’d still pick John over Les for someone to hang out with. At least John is into Model Railroads like I am.
Also. when you piss him off, he tells you what you did wrong. Granted, it’s usually framed as a deepity but at least he says something within striking distance of what’s bothering him. With Les, you get the passive-aggressive crap you get from Elly where you’re supposed to walk on eggshells around a total moron.
Also, there is a stupid way in which Saint Dead Lisa did speak to Summer: as a bald, cancer-ridden face on a videotape that spouted nonsense that was somehow meant to be oracular because either Asimov or Winfrey. It’s almost as if it were too much like work to be the child’s mother so, well, she might as well die futilely and accomplish nothing.
Today’s Funky Crankerbean:
Crankshaft: I want you to pour grease upon the back of my bus.
Depressed Mechanic: Why?
Crankshaft: So that Grandma Johnson dies a brutal death.
Depressed Mechanic: Christ, what an asshole.
Mechanic: Okay, I put the grease on the back of your bus like you asked.
Crankshaft: No, I asked you to lube my rear!
(I apologize for any scarring mental images that may have induced.)
Today’s Crankshaft/Funky Crankerbean:
Crankshaft, why do you hate Grandma Johnson so much?
Crankshaft: I enjoy being an asshole towards other people that aren’t me!
Meanwhile in Big Nate: Day 3 of “Daphine Breaks Up With Nate”, and I’m fucking sick of waiting for the ending
Was there context to the Sunday strip? Those are almost always stand-alone, and have been for decades. Because more people read the Sunday edition than the weekday ones, and don’t follow the weekday continuity. Did the Sunday readers just get this “My Invisible Friend” stuff thrown right in their faces? There is no context here that would say anything besides “Who the hell is this lady?” or “Oh god, he’s hallucinating again!”
Yeah, I kinda harp on this trope, one that seems to only happen in the Funkyverse. Every reader remembers something that he talked about once 10 years ago, but no one remembers yesterday. Did you catch how this week’s antagonist is Grandma Johnson? Probably not; it’s only been said 3 times in 3 days. Don’t worry–you’ll get 3 more reminders by the end of the week!
Screw “Beetlejuice!” and “Bloody Mary!” Saying “Butter Brinkle” 3 times *in the same sentence* should’ve invoked The Famous Silent Movie Star. And his Demon Familiar, Zanzibar.
When I saw Crank’s gargoyle wink/leer last week, I wondered: Is this a warning from Tom? “The syndicate wants just CS? Then DAMMIT, THAT’S ALL THEY’RE GETTING! JUST BUS JOKES AND CRUELTY”
Says a character’s name three times in a single sentence, still randomly gives that character a different name for no apparent reason.
That’s Our Tom!™
I think that Les and Lisa are around the same age as me. I’m not sure what Lisa means when she says that “styles have changed since we were young.” Girls in their teenage years during that time wore swimsuits that were even more revealing than the dress that Summer is wearing. Out of curiosity, I checked my class yearbook. Yep. Some girls at the Prom and the Homecoming dance had dresses that were low cut in the back, similar in appearance to Summer’s dress.
Les’s reaction, considering his character (a clueless asshole), is to be expected. What bothers me more is Summer’s overreaction. I’d expect a crying fit like that from a 7-year-old.
The function Summer is attending is the WINTERfest dance. If she wears that dress, I hope she takes a warm sweater with her. I bet the school gym gets mighty chilly.
Why wear a sexy dress like that if she is going to the dance with Cory Winkerbean? If I was going with a creepy bastard like pre-military-service Cory Winkerbean, I’d definitely choose a dress that could be classified as “Victorian.”
I cannot imagine taking my father with me to select a dress for a fancy dress function. He wouldn’t have the patience for it. Dad: I’ll wait in the car. Come get me when you choose something.
For our prom, my friends and I went shopping for dresses together. We valued each others’ opinions. Either Summer doesn’t have any friends, or Les insisted on coming because he enjoys ogling the mannequins.
I’ll talk about it anyway. I must say, your edit is much better than the original. I completely missed the McEnroe joke in Batiuk’s version. The two panels that follow Lisa’s warning to Les not to “go McEnroe” spoil the joke. By the time Les reacts with his “You can’t be serious” expression, it was already too late for me to make the connection.
Odd how Batiuk chose McEnroe’s Wimbledon outburst. That was in 1981. 27 years before Batiuk used the reference in his comic. 27 years!
BTW, it’s “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!” Not “can’t”. There was heavy emphasis on “CANNOT.”
I still get a kick out of this. “That ball was on the line! Chalk flew up!” McEnroe’s uses gestures to mimic the chalk dust flying up.
Who wears short shorts?
There was a brief thread about Ohio music here. What song inspired TB to skip Kent State so he could buy it? General consensus was No Way it was the Pretenders. Tommy is so bland I doubt it was even “Four Dead in O-HI-O.”
Of course it couldn’t be THE OG Rust Belt Hell-Hole Northern Ohio Band, DEVO. I discovered them in 1978 in Lorain County (my college was Oberlin), from a guy from Manhattan. (My college was Oberlin; I had weirder connections from there)
Here’s one of Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO’s songs about Ohio. The lyrics aren’t clear–He may be singing “People there have chips on their shoulders, and insult you in your space,” not sure. Plus, the story around it is weird. It involves Opie.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/my_home_town_the_unexpected_union_of_devo_and_the_andy_griffith_show
Maybe Tom’s fave band was Pere Ubu?
If so, then I can only echo Alfred Jarry, who had Pere Ubu say in his play, “Merdre!”
It’s the first line of *Ubu Roi,* in fact, whose premiere William Butler Yeats caught in 1896, leading him to think “after us the savage god.”
Jarry puts in a brief appearance in Andre Gide’s novel *The Counterfeiters.*
I’ll be listening to five Pretenders CDs soon, between Edith Piaf and the Rascals.