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.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Narshe,
Great job. Very readable. Wonderful style!
You made me interested in a character I knew nothing about, and I found out I wanted more. I am looking forward to 😛Sadie Part 2!🙂↔️
💝🩵💖😎🌺💐🌹
Narshe, let me be the first to welcome you to the team. I like your take on Sadie Summers and look forward to reading the rest.
Edit to the above: “let me be the second…”
And let me be the third! Great start, Narshe, and I cannot wait to read more. The fact that TB regards Sadie Summers as his great professional folly has long both morbidly fascinated me and greatly irritated me.
The start of a good retrospective for sure, fun to see other people taking the wheel. Still think about it myself from time to time since folks seem to enjoy my occasional larks, but with other writing obligations I’m working on plus not yet having a set up for reviewing the strip for a proper deep dive (either ponying up a few months on GoComics’s subscription or start rotating volumes through the libraries, both time and possible money investment). Still, one of these days I do want to say a piece of my mind in regards to Holtron.
Personally I continue to find Batiuk’s Dumb Character Phantom Zone comment funny just with the shade he tries to throw at Dick Tracy and Peanuts. I’ve not read enough of their Moon Maid strips to judge but they read as “funny products of their time” and “fun reintroduction in the 2010s” from what I’ve glimpsed, and while you can say what you want about Spike getting an abundance of strip time and getting a really weird live-action/cartoon hybrid film in the 80s I treasure that noodily desert dog too much to accept Tom’s slander (the others I think appear sparsely enough to not really merit much ire).
British cartoonist Luke McGarry dropped an unexpected Funky Winkerbean reference in a recent comic.
The funniest Funky Winkerbean has been in 15 years.
Brilliant first post, Narshe!!! So glad to have you aboard!!!
Dad/Farm/Cow update- Dad is home from the hospital as of yesterday, prognosis is good. He is already bossing me around, but he’s got to stay away from tractors, heavy machinery, and lifting anything heavier than a moderately stuffed burrito for several weeks. . So I’m still going to be on the grueling schedule of Eat, Sleep, Cows, Repeat.
Big round of applause to BJ6K for helping to get Narshe added to the crew.
You are all beautiful nitters, and I love you like a Westview manchild loves a Silver Age comic book.
Well done, Narshe. Feel free to run the imaginary bases. You’ve earned it.
I’ve probably said this before, but Batty, as the creator of Loathsome Lillian and Les Moore, has no place criticizing ANY of Charles Schulz’s characters. I mean it. I will even defend Charlotte Braun, Tapioca Pudding and Faron the boneless cat against any negative comments he might dare issue.
If we’re talking about comic strip characters who closely resemble their siblings and aren’t great additions to the strips they appear in, I think we would have to mention Rerun Van Pelt (whose name even indicates that he was supposed to be similar to Linus).
I was an adult when I learned that the kid who looked like Linus riding on the back of a bicycle was not Linus, but his younger brother Rerun … and that Rerun had been a character in “Peanuts” since before I was born.
What about Jose Peterson? Schulz seemed to think he was his Mercedes Summers, but he was content to sent him to limbo and not mention him again.
The whole post is Tom Batiuk’s idea of self-deprecation, but he spends more energy bashing Peanuts and Dick Tracy (which are much better comic strips) than his own work.
This is great way to make an entrance: revealing one of his flaws. He clearly doesn’t understand that Sadie is a wildly different person because she looked like Cindy.
4/9: They can’t tell Murder At The Vanity Press from AI slop now so the Doublemint Twins need some other way to be lame and annoying.
I appreciate all the kind words. Picking apart these characters and the ways they’re used, or not used, is the kind of thing I enjoy because I feel like it’s the easiest way to expose or explain Batty’s writing faults. There’s an old saying among comic fans (but I’m sure it exists for other mediums too) about how there’s no bad characters, only bad writers and I think Batty definitely exemplifies that in regards to certain characters.
Sorry about the accidental downvote. You knocked this one out of the park. The next part will of course further prove that the deluded sap doesn’t know his own characters.
To stay with Schulz a little longer: there are no bad characters, just characters that need to be shown a little love, like the tree in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” They need not suffer the fate of Poochie, returning to his home planet and dying en route. (Stop cheering, kids!)
It’s a sentiment I generally agree with although there are some character that I think require so much work that it’s almost not worth it. To take some examples from Funky Winkerbean, Jerome and Cliff are, I think, examples of characters where there’s so little there that it’s very easy to see why they were dumped so fast. Chester Hagglemore is another one where the effort that would have been needed to make him not suck wouldn’t have been worth it (but unlike others, he refused to go away).
There are only three character types in the Funkyverse:
OT, or maybe just late, but, ehh, downvote it then.
“Wow,” she said. “Our celebratory dinner…After coming home from the MOON. McDougals or McDingdong or whatever they call this place,” she said.
“It’s fancy!” he said. “There’s a pickle on there.”
“You know I’m vegan right?
Pete nodded. “There’s not a lot of cow in these things!”
Chien gave her signature Are You Kidding Me? stare. She looked around the food court. “Maybe Sbarro’s sells a cheese-free pizz-“
WHAM! It exploded through the ceiling, 50 tons of robot death machine! It waved its machine gun and cannon arms around. “ALL BOW BEFORE YOUR NEW FOURTH PERIOD ENGLISH TEACH–umm…OVERLORD!” someone bellowed from within. “YOU MAY CALL ME–LES MAXIMUS!”
They were both on their feet, guns drawn–Chien, her grandma’s trusty old MAC-10, Pete, some weird huge thing he called a “Kirby Cannon.”
Pete yelled “I know my paper’s overdue! But I was on the MOON!”
“Your paper is late–AND NOW YOU WILL BE, TOO! Late–as in DEAD!”
They rolled their eyes. “We GOT IT, Mr Moore!”
“It’s LES MAXIMUS!” His robo-form stepped forward, and, as mall food courts floors aren’t designed for 50-ton robots, fell right through to JoAnn Fabrics. Fortunately, no one there lost their lives, but some old ladies lost their knitting!
Half-crushed on its back, the LesBot raised its mighty arm. “Umm–little help here, granny?”
Three old women walked up, knitting needles in hands…
“NOT THE FACE!” he shrieked.”YOU COULD DAMAGE MY SMIRK!”
Chien and Pete holstered their weapons–where Pete kept THAT thing I’d rather not know.
“Cold Stone Creamery? His treat!” ” she asked. She’d stolen Les’ wallet.
“Not saying no!”
“AAAAH!” yelled Les as the old ladies laughed. “MY PRECIOUS PRECIOUS GONADS!”
I think most of Tom Batiuk’s behavior can be chalked up to masking. He’s mimicking a behavior without really undertanding it. He’s seen other writers do it, so he should too. And that applies to his dislike of Sadie Summers.
Sadie wasn’t a clone of Cindy in any way. But Batiuk recognizes other creators’ characters that were clones, so he thinks this criticism must apply to him as well. Then he gets it completely wrong, by singling out Sadie when almost every woman in Act III was identical.
There’s also an element of Batiuk’s desire to be self-deprecating. He’s seen other writers be self-deprecating, so he figures he needs to as well. But self-deprecation doesn’t work when you’re unable to admit any actual flaw, which Batiuk absolutely cannot do. This is also a form of masking.
It’s one thing to copy the techniques of other artists without really understanding why they do things. Copying other people’s complaints so he can fit in is something else entirely.
Batiuk in love with the idea of being a great writer, but has no clue what that entails. And it shows up in his work.
This week, Lillian is being pressured into writing a newsletter, which she somehow can’t do despite being a published author. Nor does she realize that it makes no sense for her to have a newsletter. And this is the same woman who needed outside help from Pete to write her own biography.
Skip is a newswriter, but Batiuk thinks his whole process is to sit around and let Batton Thomas drone on for years about every random thing that pops into his head. And that the rest of his job is thinking up goofy headlines.
Les Moore supposedly wrote the world’s greatest memoir about love and loss, but he couldn’t bring himself to read Lisa’s own diary.
The Jack Kirby and Stan Lee of this world spend weeks bickering about comic book covers, never once talking about the role the story should play.
There are dozens of writers in this world, and they’re all frauds. So it’s no surprise that Batiuk himself can’t recognize his own flaws as a writer, so he just copies what he’s seen other writers say about their own work. And still gets it wrong; there are actual examples he could have used.
What I see happening is his not being able to read people. His inability to, say, understand that a person would object to his cannibalizing their belongings explains a whole lot about the terrible writing about terrible writers.
Also, his not understanding the role the story should play informs his fixation on takeout cover art. He’s always unpleasantly surprised that he kept getting taken in like the chump kid he kind of still is.
And yes, I meant fake out.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of Lillian Week
Emily: I don’t think AI is gonna salvage that shit. Just tell Ms. McKenzie to publish it as it is.
Today’s Crankshaft would have been a reasonably funny strip if it had just been one of his standard two panel ones instead of having a pointless third panel. Leave it to Batty to ground out on a pitch right over the plate.
And it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Thanks Narshe for the great post, it was interesting and entertaining. You guys put more quality thought into Batty’s work than he does. Too bad he has such a giant ego, he could come here and actually have some fun.
If he didn’t have the narcissistic ego, he’d do one of three things: a) turn over the strip to someone who can write (and Batiuk would still make some $$ on the copyright); b) keep the strip going himself, but work hard on improving his writing skills; or c) shut it down and retire.
In other words, if he didn’t have the ego, there’d be no reason for this snark site to exist.
Also about today’s strip, it’s almost as if he forgot the snarky computer again.
Nice kickoff post, Narshe!
I wish I had even rudimentary photoshop skills to illustrate my point, but doesn’t Sadie look a fair bit like Alannah Currie of Thompson Twins?
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 5 of Lillian Week
(Lillian’s Computer then grows legs, walks outside and immediately gets run over by Ed Crankshaft driving in his bus at 140 MPH)