1994 was a year of notable happenings. The world celebrated the election of Nelson Mandela. Gen Xers everywhere grieved at the loss of Kurt Cobain. Americans were mesmerized by shady doings in the world of of sports when a man attacked Nancy Kerrigan and squeaky clean O.J. Simpson turned out to be neither squeaky nor clean. A strike would put a giant dent in the popularity of baseball. Final Fantasy VI, one of the greatest video games ever and origin of the handle I’m using for SoSF, would be released for the SNES.
But who cares about any of that? We’re interested in the goings on in Westview, OH and what had been going on come the start of 1994? Well, not a whole lot. Les became a teacher, Funky began his long association with Montoni’s, Lisa returned, we got some school shenanigans with the early Act II generation of high schoolers and… that’s really it. The first couple of years of Act II are honestly little different from the last few years of Act I. The gags are toned down, there’s some more storylines but there’s also a lot of carryover from Act I that, given the focus of this series, we aren’t seeing much of. For one, a lot of what became Dinkle’s stock gags like Holtron poorly investing the band funds or Skip Townes’ shady dealings, are present. So too are some things like the weeks dedicated to test answers where the student drawn in the strip is completely superfluous to the joke. But the mid-’90s will mark the definitive end of the last vestiges of Act I as those hold out gags are swept aside for good.
I’ve found it interesting the way TB likes to tell the story of the strip’s transition into more serious material; away from gags and into soap opera. If you listen to him, you’d almost think that there was Lisa and she was pregnant and in 1986 she miraculously gave birth to the more adult and serious Funky Winkerbean; the mature comic that Batty had wanted to do. You’d also think that the time jump in 1992 would act as a clear divider between Act I comedy and Act II maturity. It’s an interesting bit of retconning that has nothing to do with reality as the truth is that the transition was much longer and it was close to a decade between Les showing up at Lisa’s door and screaming “What happened!?” and the final move to the version of Funky Winkerbean that fascinated people in a way not unlike a car accident.
But will this affect Sadie, a character who somewhat epitomizes that transitionary period? Let’s take a look as we begin to move out of the very early years of Act I.
When last we saw her, Sadie was screaming in agony thanks to dear big sis Cindy spraying perfume in her eyes. In 1994, Sadie’s first appearances are in early February objecting to Mickey’s new Chuck Taylors.
And Mickey, of course, is none too happy about it.
In spite of her objections, Mickey will apparently give into the crowd and ditch the shoes since the week ends with Linda now wearing them.
Stuff like this is probably the most Cindy-like that Sadie’s been so far and while it’s not quite at the level of how Cindy had generally been portrayed, for Sadie I feel like it’s definitely more than a little out of character. And speaking of Cindy, we follow it up with what’s actually a bit of a rarity: a week dedicated to the sisters actually interacting with one another with Sadie showing her glee at having to live with her older sister once again.
Sadie, in fact, gets quite a lot of play this month by following this week up with another week where she takes Les’ writing lessons to heart.
And she even finishes it up with a Sunday where she and Susan talk about dreams and nightmares.
Now I know that Susan’s expression is meant to convey, once again, Batty’s thoughts on Sadie’s shallowness but I mean really, just look at that. She’s tryng to connect with Susan by relating a similar sort of dream she’s had. Maybe it’s not even shallow. Maybe it says something about Sadie’s own psychology, the drive to maintain her popularity and the pressure of that comes with it represented by having to make sure she’s always looking her best in any situation!
After a good solid month of attention, albeit not in stories of any real significance, it’s not until the beginning of April that Sadie again shows up as the Poetry Club decides to start a literary magazine.
Perhaps Sadie is just being lazy, or maybe she’s just tryng to give Susan a little something since she knows Susan is the one actually into this. You be the judge. The week continues as we get more ruminations on popularity vs. unpopularity.
It would be easy to say that yeah, Sadie was just pulling her leg, but I mean look at all their other interactions so far. There’s no bullying towards Susan so if it was a backhanded means of insulting her it’d be wildly out of character so I’m taking that as an attempt at trying to boost Susan’s confidence a little. That Susan didn’t take it isn’t really Sadie’s fault.
It’s not until summer when Sadie gets another bit of focus with a week dedicated to her engaging in charity work.
By this point we’ve also hit another Funky turning point as August 1994 is when Tom Batiuk stops drawing the strip and penciling duties are taken over by Chuck Ayers.
In September Sadie is feeling rebellious by spitting on The Man and his oppressive dress codes.
She continues her antagonism of everyone’s favorite unfairly maligned auteur the next month by protesting his terrible, horrifically unfair and misguided grading practices.
Les just wants to encourage a student doing good work but Sadie is having none of it.
When doing this I’ve typically attempted to stick to a strip or two I feel gets across the week or stories the best. Really I could have just used one strip from this week and moved on but I mean, come on! How can I ignore Sadie calling Les a loser to his face? This isn’t lovable underdog nerdy high schooler Les Moore, this is smug-for-no-reason adult Les Moore! This one strip alone should be enough to put her near the top of any character ranking chart.
With that CMOA out of the way, Sadie finishes out the year with her sister in a few Black Friday strips that show just how far Cindy’s fallen.
Much like 1994 Sadie gets some early appearances in 1995 too with a Sunday where she butters up her dad for some cash which is followed up later in January by another week with Cindy.
That’s right, we’re well into True Act II territory now where Tom Batiuk can tell the types of hard-hitting adult stories he couldn’t tell in Act I like… balancing a checkbook. A whole week of Cindy lecturing her sister about it.
By this point the sibling rivalry is basically long gone; we’re far removed from the days of physical violence and attempted homicide. In fact, you’d think there’d be a whole lot more done with the two sisters and the way they interact and how their relationship might change — but nope.
In mid-March we return to the literary magazine which, after it’s introduction, had basically been sitting on the backburner for a year. But because this is the point where a lot of the plot threads that Batty had been weaving since 1993 start coming together, that means it was time to finally revist this one.
And of course, the magazine will need a name.
Not for nothing but I was definitely not into poetry. I was more the prime age for Goosebumps books (tangent within a tangent: I love going back through old Blogger Beware entries) and laughing at the off-kilter and slightly edgy humor in issues of Game Players that my 10-year-old self didn’t always completely get. A high brow kid I was not.
Anyway, Sadie’s name is the one that wins out and now that the magazine is all set up it’s time for all (both) members of the literary club to submit their first poems for the debut issue.
Yep, with this we’ve hit the point of the first truly big, truly dramatic and soap operatic story in Funky Winkerbean with Susan’s crush on Les. Her poem will of course cause a stir but what of Sadie’s poem? Likely a biting satire of consumerist culture I’d bet. She’s smart after all.
From there it’s getting the magazine actually put together.
And this just seems like more of Sadie’s flippancy but the very next strip…
Despite her declaring it only a “token offer” Sadie actually stayed and helped Susan put it together. And sure, Sadie isn’t cultured enough to know who Emily Dickenson is, big LOLs and LMAOs all around at her vapidity, but that betrays her apology to Susan. She does think that Susan had a real friend, that the friend died and her reaction is “Oh man, I screwed up…” and apologizing. And again… she didn’t blow Susan off in spite of what the previous strip said.
From here it goes into the the big story about Roberta Blackburn’s moral crusading against the magazine for it’s scandalous content and you’d think this would be a great chance to do more with Sadie, what with her being caught up in all of this. Yeah, you’d think that but Batty has different ideas because this is Les’ story so he, not Sadie and not even Susan, is the one who gets all the attention. The most Sadie can get is a couple of small appearances.
She then drops out of focus for most of the rest of the year until November. Susan had destroyed the tape of Les’ proposal to Lisa and in her guilt had attempted suicide. In November she returns to school and we get a mostly silent week of her walking through the halls, having to deal with the uncomfortable looks everyone else gives her until near the end of the week. Because one person is there for her.
Yep, Sadie’s there and what does she do? Goes over and warmly welcomes Susan back. It’s an unambiguously kind gesture and shows that Sadie is pretty definitively not the character her Act I sister was. And you know what? It’s good storytelling from Batty, not just this strip but the entire Sadie/Susan relationship. They’re friends and it’s easy to see why they are. They spend a decent amout of time together, Sadie never really disrespects or talks down to Susan, she helps Susan out when she could have easily blown her off and she’s the first person to not treat her with any awkwardness whe she returns.
The reader doesn’t need it spelled out, the contents of their strips together allows them to get the gist of it: Sadie, over time, has come to genuinely like and respect Susan and on some level does seem to see her as a friend. But it’s also a source of frustration because it’s something that could have had a lot more done with it because, SPOILER ALERT, this is Sadie’s last appearance in 1995 and from here her appearances are going to drop off dramatically. Sadie and Susan, as much as anyone in this series does, have good chemistry. The seemingly shallow popular girl and the shrinking violet geek is as much of a no brainer pairing of characters as any odd couple can be.
But we run into one of Batty’s big problems as a writer. Sadie is too different from him so the thought of him doing more with her or the pairing of her and Susan seems to be beyond him. Much like every Westview High generation has its Cindy, so too will it have its Funky and Les, the duo of lower totem pole male nerds who are also best friends and will thus receive the lion’s share of what little attention Batty gives to the high school students. For early Act II that spot is filled by Wally and Madison. But it shouldn’t have been and in fact, there was no reason for it to exist at all. Madison was a complete nothing of a character so I feel like there was much more to be mined by having Sadie and Susan as the core duo of the early Act II high schoolers with Wally around to fill the role not of loser but of the Gen X grunge slacker. You know, fitting in with what you’d expect his character to be given his design and interests, and you see how this kind of guy fits in with the friendless academic nerd and the image conscious queen bee.
So I like the relationship between Sadie and Susan as much as I like anything in Funky Winkerbean and I think that it’s one of the strongest parts of the comic. But Batty’s own indifference-turned-dislike of one of the characters means that after this moment it goes absolutely nowhere. It’s emblematic I think of one of his biggest issues when it comes to writing. There’s something easy, something interesting sitting right there and he refuses to even consider it because he’s so laser focused on his own ideas about what he wants that he’s completely blind to it. Sadie welcoming Susan back could have been the start of a long running story arc for the two that explores both characters, the ups and downs of their friendship and the way each changes the other. You know, very basic stuff; a slow pitch softball lobbed right over the plate.
TB claims that Sadie was just a clone of her sister but by this point that is clearly not true. Writers will like to claim that sometimes a character just sort of did things on their own and while that’s obviously not literal, a character can just seem to naturally move in a certain direction as you write them. With Sadie, it’s very clear what the natural direction for her character was but instead of going with it, Batty would stubbornly fight it. It comes off as if he wanted her to be nothing more than the clone, the pale imitation, of her sister that he claims she was because for him that was much easier to write. But that wasn’t what Sadie, removed from the confines of a gag-a-day comic where it’s easy to fit into a more archetypal role for joke purposes and now in a more dramatic strip that requires more nuance and depth from its characters, actually was. Any halfway decent writer would have realized this and thus gone with it.
Instead, Batty will continue trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and it’ll be well over two years before Sadie and Susan interact again. We’ll see that, the rest of Sadie’s high school time and indeed the rest of her time in the strip in general when we finish off this series.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
Days 2 and 3 of The Interview from HFIL
(Batton suddenly sprints out of the building. Skip is initially confused until he sees an irate Ed Crankshaft walking towards the building)
Ed: I wanna talk to him about that “The Smolderings” storyline in “The Wrinkles”!
The last part will put a button on his wasting a perfectly good character because he thinks of seeing through another person’s eyes is an act of bullying.
4/23: It’s so spooky seeing something about his failings on a day of “build up to something, never actually show it and then smirk about it.”
Note to TB: If you want to make a joke about a character not knowing who a famous person is, it helps if you, the author, know how to spell the famous person’s name. (Emily Dickinson, not Dickenson.)
Remember, this is the comic book connoisseur who once misspelled the name of Superman co-creator Joe Shuster.
It helps more if you don’t accidentally make it an indictment of the helmet haired monkey calling himself a teacher. No former teacher can not make a teacher look as if he should be executed for incompetence. Batiuk can’t. Greg Evans can’t.
Stupid autocorrect took out one of the nots.
4/23 Crankshaft: BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I like a lot of things about Narshe’s post:
This is what irritated me about Act III: no transition.
The move from Act II to Act III was driven by the death of a main character, who was also the wife of another main character. That’s a justifiable reason for an abrupt shift.
The bigger problem is something else that’s come up in this discussion: Batiuk running away from a story he went to great lengths to set up. Act III should have been about Les coping with Lisa’s death, learning how to be a single parent, bonding more with Summer, that kind of thing. The 10-year time skip let Batiuk throw all that away, in the name of not wanting to write stories about moping over a character’s death. Then Les spent the rest of Funky Winkerbean moping over/capitalizing on Lisa’s death.
My theory is that Jay Kennedy, Batiuk’s last real editor, wouldn’t allow this time skip. After Kennedy died in March 2007, and wasn’t replaced, Batiuk was free to make his own choices. The timeline adds up: Lisa died in October 2007. And she stayed alive for years after being diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer that had gone untreated for a long time. That should have ended her within a few weeks.
That was stupid of him to make him drag it out. It might be why Les behaved as if she’d just passed away despite ten years passing by.
He defeated his own purpose. He claimed the point of the time skip was to avoid a certain kind of story, then he turned around and made it a staple of Act III anyway.
He has no idea what story he’s actually telling so he doesn’t realize it.
And it really damaged any chance (if there ever was one) of Les being a sympathetic character. Les’ grief was written as if it were fresh and no time had passed. As a result, he comes off as someone who clearly couldn’t move on and acted like an ass instead. That would make sense if he were lashing out immediately after Lisa’s death-I’m sure his friends would have extended him some grace-but definitely not ten years later. And I know no one ever truly “gets over” losing their spouse-it would be cruel to suggest otherwise-but much of Les behavior in Act III indicates that he had made no headway at all in moving forward.
The problem is that The Delicate Genius has no idea that he wrote Les this way.
Considering he works ahead a year of the publish date I don’t really know if that timeline lines up since that would have meant that the decision to kill St. Lisa would have likely happened some time in early 2006 and the scripts for her death would have been written in late 2006.
Batty’s said the inspiration for it was his own prostate cancer and I have no real reason to doubt that but I also suspect that a big part of it is, as I stated in the entry, his complete inability to write people who are too dissimilar from himself. Batty was hitting 60 while the Act I gang was still in their mid-30s or thereabouts so he was no way older than them and unable to relate to them much like when he decided to age them up originally he was far removed from being a high schooler or having anything to do with school in any capacity. So much like how it feels like the Act I gang in Act II are twentysomethings coming off a decade older than they are, the timeskip for Act III ages them into their 40s but they act — and are drawn — in a manner closer to Batty’s IRL age. That’s ignoring how he screws everything up by only moving up the actual ages of the characters while the actual timeline shifts backwards.
With regards to Les the Single Father, the easiest thing would have been to just split the difference and do a 5 year jump. It’s far enough to get past the extended grieving process thing he said he didn’t want to do and Summer’s old enough to be more of a real character but not so old that it’s skipping past her entire childhood or Les having to raise a kid on his own. Summer gets all this build up and then 5 or so years later she’s effectively out of the strip so the whole thing is effectively made pointless because Batty never really had interest in it.
I can’t help but compare Les to… the protagonist of a certain anime series, although mentioning which one would necessitate spoilers. (Although anyone who would be likely to watch it probably already has, since it’s almost 20 years old at this point, and based on a visual novel even older than that.) Like Les, the protagonist suffers a devastating personal loss, followed by an immediate time skip (only five years in this case), but the point of the skip is to show that he’s NOT better, even years after the fact, and what happens to help him accept the tragedy he suffered. (It only ends up taking six episodes, but it managed to handle the topic far better than Batiuk did in 15 years worth of comics.)
(Sorry for the vagueness, I can give more details if wanted, but, again, it’s pretty major spoilers for the series.)
I can’t help but compare Les to… the protagonist of a certain anime series, although mentioning which one would necessitate spoilers. (Although anyone who would be likely to watch it probably already has, since it’s almost 20 years old at this point, and based on a visual novel even older than that.)
I kinda want to know what anime you’re talking about
@csroberto2854: Clannad (but it’s a MAJOR spoiler for the end of the series).
You said it, BJ6K! Thanks, Narshe! I really enjoyed learning about Sadie. Unlike one-note characters like Dinkle, Sadie was more complex. She was even likable, so I don’t understand…oh.
*TB does something interesting*
TB says “I’ve made a huge mistake…”
Repeat until about 2002 or so.
Also, Sadie talking down on Mickey’s Chuck Taylors while wearing a pair of shoes she stole from Peter Wolf during the Freeze Frame tour is some bold work.
Seriously. Look at today’s Crankshaft. Look at yesterday’s Crankshaft.
Tell me Dan Davis isn’t having some fun by showing Batton blathering on to the embalmed corpse of Skip, propped up in a chair.
I mean, c’mon, Davis has to do SOMETHING to keep himself amused. Certainly Batiuk’s writing isn’t going to do it for him.
This is my favorite version of That Song From Toy Story:
4/24: He’s drifting off topic again.
There was ever a topic?
It was supposed to be him fanboying about Fascist Police Theatre.
The topic is how it’s the haters’ fault that he feels like a fraud.
Also, you just know he’s going to get his bowels in an uproar about fan works despite having created one.
Both Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
Days 4 and 5 of Interview from HFIL week
(Batton keeps talking, he doesn’t notice that a horde of flies is now hovering over Skip)
Incidentally, the bit about Susan destroying Les’s proposal tape — and then the summer of Les chasing down Lisa all over Europe and missing her by ever-more-Zeno-paradoxically-small moments — is when I ragequit Funky Winkerbean the first time, and I didn’t pick it up again until I wanted to join in all the snarking everyone on Usenet group rec.arts.comics.strips was doing.
Other great r.a.c.s. snark targets were Liberty Meadows, Opus, and the Granthony era of For Better Or For Worse. And Luann but that’s still with us.
It had what I call Batiuk Angry Woman face.
4/25: He choked because he didn’t feel like he was a published cartoonist. Big bleeding surprise there, eh?
“So, yeah, in the end I was too scared and nervous to tell “Chet” Gould how groundbreaking and important his work was Isn’t that a great story? What a memorable twist! I’m sure your readers will get a kick out of it!”
“But, hmmm…do you suppose this is why people never tell me how groundbreaking, important and just all-around wonderful MY work is? I mean, think about it. It must be! People would be coming by in droves to pay tribute … but I’m just too darn intimidating! How ironic! Despite my humility and knack for putting people at their ease by spinning my complex but engaging tales, clearly my innate awesomeness causes an unavoidable level of tongue-tied envy! Like with you! You’ve just been sitting there for days now, not reacting, not moving, not even blinking or breathing!”
“Y’ know, it kind of reminds me of the time I met Winthrop cartoonist Dick Cavalli. He looked at me in that same way you’re looking at me now. What a story that was! I was looking for some mailing envelopes to send my cartoons to the syndicate in. I heard Milton Caniff used USPS #8A Legal Size with Air Mail stickers, but all I could find was the #8B Letter Size. What to do? Trust me, you’re never gonna guess…”
It can’t possibly be something like “I have no idea who you are,” “You mean Funky Winkerbean is real?,” or “Why am I supposed to care?”
Narshe,
Excellent work on the Sadie revisit! I missed a lot of Act II so I really appreciate the deep dive here. That final strip with Sadie welcoming Susan back to school is fabulous. The wordless panels are perfect. You provide mounds of evidence that Sadie was not a carbon copy of Cindy; she was actually nicer. She recognized that she and Susan were totally different personalities but never treated her as beneath her. Sadie may have had her self-absorbed moments, but she wasn’t mean.
If Sadie had made it to Act III, I like to think she would have been the one to call Cindy out on her “Poor me, I live in California with a hottie younger husband but I don’t look 25 anymore” silliness.
I feel like Saturday’s Crankshaft is the most perfect, almost too on the nose, summation of everything wrong with Batty’s anecdotes and stories about himself and his storytelling more broadly. Something interesting could have happened… but then it didn’t.
I think the best interpretation is to assume that he wants to assume disinterest is actually fear.
Is it too late for Lillian to write “Murder at the Centerville Sentinel”? Someone just needs to break Pete Moss out of prison and the rest writes itself.
I like cartoonists who are plain spoken and less bullshitty.
I’m trying to control myself, and please believe me — this is in no way intended to be one bit “political.”
But I’m afraid I’m starting to crack. Mr. Batiuk’s unwarranted preening and self-glorification over nothing is approaching Donald Trump levels.
And I don’t know if I can handle the two of them at once.
Guess I’ll have to either give up the comics or move to Canada.
I hear the Yukon territory is beautiful this time of the year.
4/26: Something about Murder At The Remainder Bin.
Crankshaft, 04/11/2026: “The book… and the cover… were created by AI? What? The devil you say? This is dumbfounding! This is preposterous! This is an affront to the entire writing profession and creative process! This is scandalous!”
Crankshaft, 04/26/2026: “Yeah, this book here? I wrote it. Yep. No, no, AI had nothing to do with it. All me.”
Book readers are attentive to details, Tom. Book readers read books for the purpose and enjoyment of discovering and discerning the subtle details. Anyone who gives the slightest whiff of shit about a book festival would notice the fundamental contradiction between these two strips, Tom.
… or no, perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps all the participants involved are all acting performatively and nobody really cares about details or consistency. Perhaps Tom did not perceive any possible issue between the two strips. Perhaps nobody at Ohioana cares about what Tom’s strips actually say at all, and are OK with anything as long as it has the logo there. Perhaps, while reading books, all of them merely stare at a page for ten minutes and allow their brain to tell them that what they have just read is what they wanted to read, regardless of what was actually written. Perhaps they and all the book festival patrons merely do want to just buy books with pretty covers and pretty spines so that they have a pretty bookcase filled with pretty books that they have never actually read. Maybe this is the actual truth of it all. It seems ridiculous to me, but, based on the facts at hand, what other conclusion can be drawn?
All of this has angered me enough to write the Ohioana festival email. I have led with a simple question regarding featured authors and AI use. I imagine that they do not receive more than a dozen emails per day. I wonder if they’ll simply ignore me. Probably. Let’s find out.