Car Season

Newly minted SoSF contributor Narshe here with my first post and I figured what better way to start off my career in Funkology than by diving right in… archive deep diving right in, if you will. Today, we’ll be taking a look at Tom Batiuk’s biggest mistake.

That’s right, the subject of our deep dive will be the character that TB has hated and despised like no other. The character whom he considers to be the biggest albatross hanging around his neck: none other than Sadie Summers! But why, oh why, did he end up disliking Sadie so much? Let’s let the man himself explain it.

Cindy, the most popular girl in the school, was coming on like gangbusters at this point, and I felt that I had barely scratched the surface of her potential as a character. I didn’t want to lose all of that, so I did something stupid. I cloned her and created her little sister/doppelgänger Sadie. Flash Fairfield, the editor who way back when had tried to school me on character development, would have been spinning in his grave at that move, and, if he weren’t in his grave, that would have probably finished him. Mea culpa, Flash. It was a totally misguided reason for creating a character. It was dumb, stupid, boneheaded, half-baked, ill-advised, risible, and done for all the wrong reasons. In an effort to not lose big-haired Cindy, I created her big-haired little sister and in doing so brought about character confusion, redundancy, overpopulation, and just about everything else that Flash had warned me not to do. And I paid the price. Sadie would limp along for a while after the time-jump, but she was and would always be a pale imitation of her big sis until she 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. 

Yes, in his own words she’s nothing but “a pale imitation of her big sis” but how fair of an assessment is that in reality? My belief, however, is that Sadie does indeed represent failure on the part of Batty but not for the reasons that he thinks but am I more correct than Batty is about his own character? By taking a look at Sadie’s history and with the distance afforded by both time and not being Tom Batiuk, that’s what we’ll try and determine.

Sadie first shows up on September 25, 1991 during a week where Ginny Wolfe has decided that the students in her class should bring in their siblings as part of a discussion on family units. This is basically done as preparation for Sadie showing up in Act II so we don’t skip ahead four years to suddenly see Cindy’s previously unknown and never mentioned sister. I mean look, she was introduced about nine months before the switch over was done so see, she’s definitely a pre-existing character! By the by, Les is in this class as well and there’s a strip way back in the ’70s where he mentions having a sister. You’d think that Batty would have used this as an opportunity to introduce her as well but I guess that obscure callbacks was something he wasn’t interested in until Act III.

Anyway, the Summers girls have the type of normal and healthy relationship all siblings have. Some times they fight…

And some times they mess with one another.

This is largely going to be Sadie’s role throughout her handful of Act I appearances. Less than being a clone of Cindy, she exists pretty much entirely to troll her sister and drive her into near homicidal rages. After her introductory week, it won’t be until December 1 when Sadie next appears.

A few weeks later she gets a Christmas themed strip on December 26.

And… that’s about it for her in 1991. The next time she shows up is on February 10, 1992 for a week of strips where Cindy is forced to bring Sadie along with her to the mall.

In true bratty little sister fashion, Sadie decides to take the opportunity to embarass Cindy in front of a guy she likes.

Cindy, of course, responds to all of this in a manner most calm and rational.

Sunday gives us the reveal of how Sadie was able to engage in such targeted annoyance.

The next time she shows up is in March being the instigator in Cindy losing her credit card privileges.

This will also be Sadie’s final Act I appearance as soon after is the prom, Barry’s freak out, Les’s downer graduation speech and the shift over to Act II.

At this point, outside of her actual visual design there’s not really anything about Sadie that I’d say qualifies her for the clone designation that Batty had given her and really, there’s not much of anything wrong with her. Her role is to act as an annoyance for Cindy by flustering and embarassing her and you know what? It works. Sadie’s appearances in Act I are amusing. The mall week is genuinely, with no qualifications, pretty funny. Yes there’s Cindy’s physical abuse but we’re still in the cartoonish period of sentient Star Trek obsessed school computers and Dinkle’s band candy sales propping up the economy. It’s in line with everyone’s favorite running gag of Homer Simpson strangling Bart. Cindy and Sadie’s relationship is typical sibling rivalry stuff but taken to absurd extremes which is what you’d expect from a gag comic so it all works fairly well.

But how will this carry over to when Sadie’s on her own, having to be more of her own character instead of being the person who winds up her older sister? That’ll have to wait until next time when we jump back ahead to the past future present of 1992 and take a look at the first few years of Act II.