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.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of Lillian At The Ohioana Book Festival
(Dinkle shows up, and is immediately jumped by Emily and Ameila, who beat him into a pulp)
There is another failing: his not understanding what he looks like to other people.
The inability to do follow up on big emotional stories is part of his not wanting to stray from what he thinks writing is. We get Shocking Image and then back to normal because Ridiculous Speed.
This seems as good a place as any to reveal the writing secrets of the master. This is taken verbatim from the intro to Complete FW, Vol. 15, as reprinted as Match To Flame 235 on Tom’s blog:
It always seemed to me that the more rules you followed, the less “you” there was in the story. If someone likes working from a recipe, and that works for them, great. Whatever floats, but just so you know . . .
–Characters don’t have to go through a change by story’s end . . . unless you want them to.
–There doesn’t necessarily have to be a conflict . . . it’s your call.
–Your character may not overcome the monster . . . that’s okay.
–And you don’t have to have a nicely closed ending to satisfy a reader’s need for completeness and closure.
No kidding — he really wrote and published this. And was so proud of it, he published it again on his blog. So remember, kids, just follow these exciting rules (which boil down to “lack of direction is cool, and laziness is just fine!”) and you too can be as fine a writer as Tom Batiuk!
Somedays I wonder if Batiuk is snarking himself so we’ll have nothing to talk about anymore.
If you use these non-rules to guide your writing, you could just
Gotta love that his “rules” boil down to “do such-and-such, or don’t, whatever” and “it’s fine if absolutely nothing happens in your stories”. He certainly does his best to live up to that second one, that’s for sure.
He preaches not to follow rules then goes about making his own set of rules. Classic Batty.
4/30: Regular guy: Signing a Kindle is not really a big deal because she gets royalties. Batiuk: Smug mockery.
Cindy only worked the way that she did [in Act I] because she was a cartoonish character in a cartoonish setting.
And yet, Batiuk worships at the altar of Dinkle.
Without realizing that Dinkle only works in a cartoonish setting as does any character with the name Funky.
What’s so frustrating to me about the whole Sadie situation is that TB actually started doing the work to redefine/grow her character, and frankly was doing a decent job at it (keeping her dramatically different haircut, investing in her friend, giving her a job and some hints at the kind of worldview evolution that young adults often experience). Perhaps this was inadvertent… but he specifically has Wally call out the changes.
And then he just fell back on his crutches: the sob stories. It isn’t new to speculate this, but it really does seem that the high from all the attention he was given for Lisa’s maudlin misadventures just fried his motivation to do anything interesting in the strip.
Also, let us never forget Sadie’s most famous appearance: in this glorious piece of artwork once available for printing on numerous products in the (sadly) now-defunct Funky Winkerbean Cafepress store.
He can’t say that he doesn’t like Sadie because he can’t write maudlin nonsense about her. That would mean admitting that the beady eyed types have his number.
Who the living hell would buy that? I have 3 sisters, and I don’t hate them! This could only be read as an “Ironic” (ie, “Asshole”) gift.
I would guess he sold almost as many “Thank’s Sis” mugs as he’s sold copies of The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 14.
Oh, there were some gems in that Cafepress store, though I think this was the worst/best one. Sadie looks like she has Down’s Syndrome. “Thank’s” is just *chefs kiss*.
My personal favorite of that page was “Let’s Be Friends”, featuring Les and Not-Yet-Dead Lisa. This is the tragic doomed couple that defined the Funkyverse, and the only merch featuring them says “Let’s Be Friends.” You know, just like Campbell Scott and Bridget Fonda in Singles. “Let’s be friends.” What a gigantic monument to the inability of the Funkyverse to handle with any kind of adult relationship.
That’s the kicker, isn’t it? He spent his career tormenting these people and he has nothing to show for it that isn’t childish petulance.
Eh, I’m sure most creators skip the proofreading stage when it comes to merchandise. Must happen to Jim Davis all the time.
(The copyright notice indicates it was put up on CafePress in 2002. Which means it was there for over TWENTY YEARS. So either no one who went to the store ever pointed out the mistake, Tom couldn’t be bothered to fix it, or pretty much no one went to the store in all that time. Probably mostly the third one, but a dash of the second wouldn’t surprise me.)
Apparently this is also the John Byrne era of artwork. Which makes the attempt at a soft emotional appeal even more off-putting.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of Lillian at The Ohioana Book Festival
I don’t get the punchline of today’s Crankshaft strip
Airline passengers often accidentally leave items in those little mesh-pockets on the backs of seats: glasses, cell phones, half-eaten McDonald’s meals they smuggled on board, and of course the occasional book. Today’s entrant in the “Goofy and Clueless Fan Parade” just assumes she’ll lose one copy on her vacation, as Lizard Lil smirkingly adds up what two books per customer will mean to her bank balance. Can’t wait to see how Batiuk belittles his clientele in tomorrow’s conclusion.
5/1: Another day, another straw man.
It’s not even that. It’s something so banal it’s not even worth talking about, much less smugly mocking someone for bringing it up.
Tom Batiuk makes an effort to set up his book signing table in a way that screams ATTENTION! SUPER-IMPORTANT WRITER HERE! He’s got his professional backdrop, his stacks of hardcovers, and his table setup is designed to keep people a little separated from The Great Writer. Some fans (and anyone asking for an autograph is a fan) will be a little intimidated about approaching. If they don’t really have anything to say, they might fumble through some inane comment like “I once forget a paperback on a flight,” in an attempt to relate to The Great Writer.
Batiuk is too dumb to realize that behavior is flattery; too much of a jerk not to mock them for it; and too talentless not to repurpose it in his own work.
Of course the man is too stupid to understand he’s being flattered. It requires understanding people and that’s not something he’s good at.
I think the Keane kids might have pica.
Narshe, thank you for the series of posts. Following one otherwise “minor” character across so much time puts so much of Tom’s work and how much squandered potential it all had into stark relief.
Seeing the Byrne (it was Byrne, right? The page here doesn’t say it) sketches among all of this really drove it home. With revisiting the page, it’s remarkable to see so much expressiveness in posing and faces among all the characters. Despite being an art teacher, Tom basically never had the desire to put that same level of detail in his own work. If I recall Tom’s attempt at being a Serious Marvel/DC Artist correctly, I think he perhaps had the ability to do so, but just didn’t bother when it came to making the strips. Seeing those Act 3 updates effortlessly outclass his own work must have been disquieting, particularly to someone like Tom.
For all of his faults and weaknesses, Byrne isn’t as lazy as Batiuk.
Byrne was a better artist than Batiuk, but Batiuk’s goofier art style better suited Act I. Byrne’s art would have worked better for the drama-heavy stuff, if Batiuk could have committed to that direction. “Thank’s Sis” is a great example of Byrne’s art style not suiting Batiuk’s attempts at lighter content.
5/2: Batiuk doesn’t understand that maybe Life gets in the way of crapping out cookie cutter slop.
And thus do we come to the end of another week of Batiuk being a snide jerk looking down on people for asking questions that only he thinks are stupid. Sort of refutes his notion that people are too intimidated of him to become straw men, doesn’t it?
5/2’s strip is egregious for two main reasons. One is that Tom seems to have again forgotten that a prior strip that he wrote established that this latest book is AI slop, which means that she would be able to pump out another book any time she wants.
Two is that the question is perfectly valid to ask. An average rate is an average rate, but perhaps the next one could be written more quickly. Perhaps she has some more grandiose idea where it could take longer than a year. Tom has written passages about how inspiration comes to him in sporadic bursts and not on a set schedule, so where does he even come from in presenting the strip as he does today?
He comes by it by experiencing being asked questions as persecution.
I never understood why Batty would behave this way. Makes me want to actually go to one of his book signings and ask him a stupid question and then record the interaction.
I’ve thought about doing the same thing. I would ask him if Lisa, Phil Holt, and Tony Montoni are dead.
If it’s a question that he never thought of, to him, it’s stupid otherwise he’d have thought of it.
Bingo! But I would say: Lisa would have liked this question.
Not that Batiuk would know that or especially care.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
Days 5 and 6 of Lillian At The Ohioana Book Festival
(ZZZZZ)
5/3: Hardefrixiinghar, wimmin parts is funny.
Also, it tracks that he learned the wrong things from the “too old to worry about being assaulted” fracas.
A 75-year-old woman is having hot flashes — quick, call a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, an oncologist, and the Guinness Book of World Records, in that order!