Sadie Sinks

Last time in this little retrospective on the life and times of Sadie Summers, we charted her journey as the strip entered the mid-1990s, exiting the wilds of early Act II as the comic that surrounded her would begin to settle into its more familiar form. By this point the holdover gags from Act I had begun to fade away as more dramatic storylines took their place. The period covered by part 3 saw the establishment of the poetry club’s literary magazine which would lead to a long storyline involving a suicide attempt by Susan Smith and, more broadly, a madcap trip across Europe for Les Moore tha would end in his proposing to Lisa.

Sadie was… involved in this but only just barely. A lot of her time during that period was spent either around the mall with her interchangeable friends or doing poetry club stuff with Susan but for the most part she never got deeply involved with the serious stories. It was that relationship with Susan which would be the most significant as 1995 had ended with Sadie being the one to welcome her back to Westview High in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness that Susan had received. After all, one can assume that the logic is that if the most popular girl in school is showing her support then everyone will have to follow suit. It’s an interesting and welcome bit of character development for Sadie. But sadly, like a lot of things with her it turns out to be a very stop-start sort of deal.

Much like most of the other years during the early portions of Act II, Sadie gets an early appearance in 1996 spotting Les at the mall.

She also complains about proficiency exams.

And has a sleepover.

You’ll notice that there’s not really much going on in these and it’s very frustrating considering how 1995 ended. At least Sadie’s making some appearances though because I believe Susan basically disappears for a while and it goes along with a problem that Batty will have in the transition to Act III. He wants to do these big dramatic stories with heavy themes but doesn’t want to do the follow up. How Susan readjusts to life is an obvious story to explore, how Sadie being there for her is an obvious story to explore, but these aren’t things that Batty is interested in doing. He wants to do emotional stories without focusing on the emotional fallout from them. It’ll happen with the death of Lisa, it’ll happen when Bull drives over a cliff and it happens here, too, in the wake of Susan’s suicide attempt.

So following the big story with Susan, we get Sadie there for a big emotional moment when she returns… and we get nothing else. We get some pointless nonsense where Batty continues trying to make Sadie into Cindy Lite. She does get a multi-week story in May regarding the prom where oh no, she doesn’t have a date!

It’s also at this point where Sadie gets a redesign as she decides that the prom is a good time to get a haircut that she frets over but ultimately can’t back out of.

As said she’d been fretting over not having a date and as Becky was still mostly a prop for her mother, she’d yet to be designated as Wally’s One True Love so that earlier appearance might have been set up for her having to settle to taking him. But no, Sadie just finds some random guy who breaks up with his girlfriend to take her.

In the fall, she makes a glorified cameo during a story where Batty, via Wally, tells us that tobacco is wacko.

This is the point where it’s clear that Batty’s interest in Sadie has really waned as it’s not until January 1998, nearly a year and a half later, that Sadie next appears, this time in what’s nothing more than a random one-off strip.

She next shows up for a two week story in March. Les’ class is going on a trip to Washington D.C. and needs to have the number 1 focus of Batty’s high school strips (school levies are number 2): a fund raiser. But poor Susan, finally getting some attention again for the first time in over two years, is having trouble selling anything. Sadie picks up on this and decides she’s going to help out Susan.

(By the by, the D.C. trip is the origin of one of my favorite Batiukisms: vendos!)

Naturally, this involves that apparent favorite of teenage girl activities, the makeover. Which means that Sadie, Tiffany and Courtney-Who-Is-Now-Brittany drag Susan out to the mall.

And by the time they’re finished, Susan is practically unrecognizable.

So Sadie’s given Susan a makeover, doing something to help her feel more confident, she’s also paying for it all herself. And it’s not presented as having any ulterior motive, like it’ll reflect well on Sadie. She seems to be doing it entirely for Susan’s benefit and Susan doesn’t reject it. She likes her new look and keeps it. And it even benefits her… kind of.

This whole thing will lead to another attempted prestige arc as Batty decides to tell a story about domestic violence as Matt Miller turns out to be a less than ideal boyfriend and we have yet another instance of Frustrating TB Writing. Because Sadie and Susan are friends, because Sadie has done a lot for Susan and because Sadie’s makeover is the genesis of this story one would assume she’d have a big role to play in this storyline. Her friend is dating the big man on campus, he’s being controlling and physically abusive. She should have a lot to say and a lot to do. But no, she has nothing to do with anything. All she can get is a background cameo during graduation.

That’s it, that’s all she gets in a story where her friend is a victim of domestic violence! But of course, this story isn’t actually about Susan because this morphs into a story about Les and Lisa where we get the first (I believe) of the endless retellings — either in full or truncated — of the Lisa’s pregnancy story as well as the first retcon where Frankie (named for the first time) is revealed to have physically abused Lisa and forced himself on her.

Because that’s what this story needed. Not Sadie acting as someone her friend could confide in or maybe using her position as the most popular girl in school to stand up to Matt. Nope, it needed the Moores hijacking it and adding rape to the comic’s lore.

But let’s move on from that unpleasantness to something more, temporarily, happy as soon after graduation it’s the wedding of Funky and Cindy and given that her sister is getting married, Sadie will surely play a role right? At this point, I assume our collective naivete has been thoroughly washed away as she gets another glorified cameo.

At this point, Sadie is reduced to bit character status as it’s not until May 2000 when she next shows up with Cindy getting her a job at Westview’s Home for Wayward Young Women during breaks from college.

As is to be expected, this goes absolutely nowhere and Sadie won’t show up again until early 2002 when she talks with Wally before he takes the ROFLcopter to Laughganistan.

A few things, first that first panel in the first strip (firstfirstfirst) is wildly out of character and another example of Batty writing the character he thinks Sadie is versus the character that she actually is. The second is that this is a pretty radical change in direction for Sadie who’s gone from (as Batty sees her anyway) vapid popular girl concerned only with her own image to a conscientious peacenik.

Sadie will actually get the most attention she’s gotten in years in 2002 as she shortly afterwards hears the news of what happened to Wally and is obviously deeply affected by it.

And then shows up for Monroe’s brief return when he reads a letter that Wally had written shortly before his ROFLcopter was shot down by a LOLcket.

But looks are deceiving and like usual this is yet another false start as it’s close to a full year later, during the John Byrne illustrated story of Wally’s return in 2003, that she next shows up snarking about Becky’s taste in animal-haired men.

Now this is definitely the judgiest we’ve seen her in a long time but given that eternal Montoni’s waitress and Wally’s future Mrs. Fix-It Mommywife is joining in I guess we’re not intended to find it too bad. Or maybe we are as Rachel’s only real character at this point was “hot tease”, I don’t know.

It’s yet another year before she shows up again, this time in 2004 for a week of her reflecting on being a student in Les’ class.

She gets another appearance that year talking to Rachel about Becky finally escaping Pizzacatraz to take up the job as the WHS assistant band director.

By this point she’s been reduced to what are pretty much cameos as in 2005 she gets some wordless appearances during a week dedicated to Tony trying to teach his employees, including new waitress and Crankshaft guest character Mindy Murdoch, proper etiquette.

And also makes a background appearance during the double wedding for Funky/Holly and Wally/Becky.

Sadie gets her first speaking role in well over two years in a November 2006 strip as she and Mindy complain about Rachel getting all the tips.

The next week, Sadie appears as background wallpaper during Becky’s baby shower.

That 11/25/2006 strip will turn out to be Sadie’s last appearance. 2007 is basically all Lisa, all the time between her cancer and Darin searching for his bio-mom so Batty has no time for anyone else, especially not for characters he doesn’t like. She did get an Act III character design sheet however.

But if Batty ever had any intention of using her then he quickly discarded those ideas to cast her into the, as he called it, “Dumb Character Phantom Zone” and she was neither seen nor even so much as mentioned again. What happened to her in the intervening decade between Acts II and III? Who knows? Maybe she got out of Westview, got a decent job somewhere working in, I don’t know, marketing or HR or something. That seems like the kind of thing she’d do.

So that’s it, with Sadie’s final appearance we’ve come to the end of this examination and history lesson. But what was the point? As I said at the start of all of this, Sadie definitely is a failure on Batty’s part but it’s not for the reasons he considers. Rather, it’s because Tom Batiuk failed to ever properly realize her actual potential.

TB complained that Sadie was a clone, a doppelganger and a “pale imitation of her big sis” but she was that only because that’s what he wanted her to be. He wanted her to be Cindy Jr. because he enjoyed writing Cindy in Act I but the problem is that Cindy only worked the way that she did because she was a cartoonish character in a cartoonish setting. Act II clung onto a bit of the cartoony wackiness for two or three years but the very nature of what Batty wanted to do meant that the more absurd tone just wouldn’t work in the more serious and dramatic setting he was trying to create. This means that the bits of Cindy he wanted to carry over with Sadie were completely inconguous with what the comic had become as they were made for what was effectively a different comic entirely.

And when he realized it wasn’t going to work, what did he do? He gave up and declared her to be stupid and ill-conceived. Instead of taking that mistake and working with it he simply threw up his hands as if there was nothing that he could do. This is in spite of the fact that, as I’ve hopefully shown, there were myriad directions to take her character that worked into that whole pale imitation of Cindy things. Plenty of stories that could have been done, ways to evolve and explore her character. The worst part is that it seems as if on some level Batty actually knew this. There are countless examples shown of Sadie having more below the surface, or of interesting directions she could have gone only to just never amount to anything. Her friendship with Susan is the most glaring one, but why give her that connection with Wally before he ships out only to do nothing with it once he returns?

And none of it is helped by Batty’s inability and lack of desire, which became worse as he got older, to write about characters he can’t relate to. Sadie was a woman and she wasn’t into comic books or pulp serials or writing or chasing awards and accolades so how could he relate to her? And if he couldn’t relate to her, how could he write her?

At least by the standards of Funky Winkerbean, Sadie Summers is a good character. But all the same she is a failure, not through any fault of her own but because the person writing her was too shortsighted to consider anything beyond his own view of what she should have been. He wanted Cindy II but the circumstances of the strip meant she could never be Cindy II. A better writer would have taken that as an opportunity to really think about this character and dive in. But we are not talking about a better writer, we are talking about Tom Batiuk and instead he would continue trying to force Sadie into a role she was thoroughly unsuited for. And for the crime of being unable to be what he wanted she was unceremoniously tossed aside.

She thus stands as a testament to many of Batty’s worst traits. His inability to think outside of his own poorly constructed box, how easily he gives up when presented with something that frustrates him, a lack of vision that causes him to miss an easy or natural story and being unable or unwilling to follow up dramatic moments in a satisfying way (or at all) are all present and in full force with Sadie. That, I feel, is Sadie’s true legacy and as such she will forever exist as one of the most damning indictments of his shortcomings as a writer.