They laid Lisa Moore to rest in 2007, scattering her from Ohio to New York. It was a sad thing; so very sad that Tom Batiuk didn’t want to deal with it and have Lisa’s death drag the whole strip down. No sooner had she croaked than we were thrust a decade into the future. Les and the other Act I characters were now middle aged; 46-going-on-60. But they weren’t the only ones who’d aged up as Act III was promoted with a promise. It wouldn’t just be the old men and women getting the stories but their children as well.
That’s right…
First off, I wonder who they got to do this art because these characters all bear only the vaguest of similarities to the characters from the comic itself. Second, we were indeed intended to be getting stories about the sons and daughters of the Westview High School Class of ’92 ’88 ’78 but as we’ll see, Batty eventually seemed to have his own ideas.
Why that is, who can say? In the last couple of years of he’d been getting some writing help from Sean McKeever, a comic book writer who’d been making a name for himself at Marvel on books starring teenaged and college-aged characters. His scripting duties (for I assume he was scripting based on Batty’s plots) included the Senior Skip Day story that started the Dopey/Jessica romance and I suspect almost all of the stuff with them was done by him as well as he’d also done the story about Darin learning that Lisa was his birth mother. I was, and am, a fan of the stuff he was doing for Marvel from that time period and a lot of those strips read like watered down versions of the kind of things he had been writing. McKeever, in an old interview from the COVID times, had said that Batty actually wanted to bring him on full time as a co-writer but by 2007 he’d just signed with DC to write Teen Titans which had been his dream book so turned it down.
I suspect that had McKeever taken up Batty’s offer, he would have been doing stories with the high school characters and without him Batty, who showed less and less interest in younger characters the older he got, just kind of shrugged. But he did still make an attempt at writing them which means it’s now time for the fourth entry in our examination of Summer Moore’s history.
The very first thing Summer gets up to is tagging along with her father on a trip to New York for the (first?) Lisa’s Legacy run.
And tagging along is the right term because while she’s there, she’s just sort of around to throw in a comment or something. While in New York, the Moores meet up with Cindy who takes them to the grand opening of Montoni’s NYC location where Summer promptly gets hit on.
And we also get our first look at Act III Funky who’s become balding and fat.
In November we also get the reveal that she’s a jock as Summer takes the opportunity to make fun of her father. Also, her teammate looks like she could be the sister of that one balding kid from the final generation of WHS students.
Around this time is also when we’re properly introduced to the rest of the Funky Kids, the next generation who will theoretically be carrying the strip. Aside from Summer we have Jinx Bushka, adopted daughter of Bull and Linda Bushka. She’s introduced in a way that would make you think she’s a performative theater kid type but if she was that disappears immediately.
There’s Rana Howard, formerly Rana Winkerbean. Batty seemed keen on the idea that all the kids were the opposite of their parents so while Rana’s the daughter of a band geek and comic store owning dweeb, she gets to be the requisite Most Popular Girl In School right down to what I believe is stealing an old Cindy joke.
But on the flipside there’s Maddie Klinghorn who’s set up as being her father’s daughter. Except you’ll never know it because she gets absolutely zero focus and thus very little in the way of actual personality. Like even Jinx will get a couple of stories focused around her, Maddie gets absolutely nothing. She’s pure scene filler.
Rounding out the group is Cory Winkerbean, the bad seed. A big story throughout the first few years of Act III is how Funky’s focus on business has led to neglect of his family and so with the money that Funky provides but not the terrible puns, Cory’s turned out to be a moody troublemaker.
While it’s not directly related to Summer (yet), Mopey Pete Roberts (not yet Reynolds) returns to Westview having achieved the highest level of prestige in Batiukland: becoming a comic book writer. In this we’re also introduced to Maddie’s younger siblings Tyler and Abbey.
I am almost 100% sure that this is the only time in Act III that Crazy Harry’s other kids are shown or even mentioned. Donna was pregnant at the end of Act II which also makes this extra confusing. Because Maddie was born in 2003 but looks as if she’s a full decade older than her brother when at most it should be like 3 or 4 years. I guess it doesn’t matter because Batty memoryholed them but still, come on man.
It’s Christmas time and Summer, being 15, wants to go on a “solo car date” with a guy. Les responds to this in the way that only a loving father can: by laughing in his child’s face as if she’s the biggest moron on Earth.
But Les caves and decides to let Summer have her date, and Summer gets back at him by laughing at him for being a dork and trying to explain the birds and the bees to her. As she says, she’s a teenager with the internet so presumably she’s already been exposed to at a minimum Naruto and Harry Potter slash fiction.
All of this is just build up to her date showing up for one strip so Les can play the role of embarassing parent while turning it into a sappy Lisa tribute.
Oddly enough, this is also the last time that Summer is shown being involved in anything romantic, at least on her end. There’s other stories that involve boys having crushes on her but never again is she shown having feelings for another boy, trying to date or anything like that really. Why that is are things we can speculate on much, much later so we’ll just move on to Summer’s last significant appearance of the year.
Just before New Year’s, she’s shown joining her dad and his buddies for a game of football and naturally, like the true jock she is, can’t pass up the opportunity to bully her father for being a wimp.
She also shows up at the beginning of the year having attended a party that Cory threw to further the story of Cory being Problem Child (1990) as he’d thrown the party while Funky and Holly were out of town.
She starts getting some attention paid to the fact she’s an athlete in February which leads to a week of flashback strips where she climbed up a tree…
…and Les got stuck going up after her.
March begins a story wherein she leads the JV team to the conference finals.
Which is, of course, against Big Walnut Tech leading to the first appearance of Keisha Williams and Summer showing that, as great athletes tend to, she can be both overly aggressive and a little conceited.
And being that kind of athlete means she eventually decides it’s time to play hero ball.
Which of course works, bringing Westview its first championship since some time during the Act II days. The excitement is so much that it almost kills Les, though unfortunately “almost” is the operative word there.
A month later the trophy arrives at Westview as Les and Becky gush over how amazing Summer is. I believe this is the first of the comic cover homages which will become an Act III staple. Apparently this is also the last professional work of the great Jim Mooney who passed away a few weeks before this strip was published.
She also shows up for a Mother’s Day strip that naturally flashes back to Lisa.
There’s also a few debuts and returns around this time. First off is Summer’s half-brother Darin who returns to the strip in order to welcome back Mopey who’s going to be living in the apartment above Montoni’s as all young Westview men must do.
At the end of the school year, long time secretary and walking pile of nothing Betty decides to retire and turn over her duties to another woman. A transfer from Big Walnut Tech.
Cayla is here (and has yet to undergo her caucasoid metamorphosis) and she, and her daughter, will play a big role in Summer’s life going forward.
But already we can kind of see how things are going. Despite all the proclamations, a lot of that initial year or so of Act III is spent largely on Les, on Funky, on the adults in general. I didn’t mention it before for instance but at this time Les takes up a secondary job of becoming the new night manager at Montoni’s. A lot of time is spent on Funky being so focused on success that he’s letting his personal life and business go to shit while all his employees are beginning to dislike him.
Summer’s around of course and has yet to be completely sidelined (that’s for later) but aside from the month or so focused on her basketball prowess, around is all she really is. She’s just sort of there and that, I am sure, will bode well for her future usage under the Batty’s pen. That still puts her as better than Jinx and Maddie and at least she hasn’t disappeared into nonexistance like Crazy Harry’s other kids. Small miracles I suppose, but it’s a rather inauspicious start for humanity’s supposed savior.
Since we’re at the end of Summer’s freshman year of high school I figure that this is as good a place as any to leave off for now. We’ll take a look at how things go for her in her sophomore year next time.
Son of Stuck Funky 
We’ve had blogs about the “FUNKY KIDS ARE COMING” flyer before and I feel like the most apt bit is that the thing opens up an inner illustration saying “…AND SO ARE THEIR PARENTS!” You can pretty much say that was the Trojan Horse of Act 3 as far as the ultimate inclination of Batiuk going “screw it we’re writing about old people and comics” with the remaining 14 years.
Guess on one hand I can’t blame him for being in a rough point where a co-writing deal he was betting on fell through and he had to shift focus, particularly when this big shift was mostly a marketing gimmick, but on the other hand if he was looking for help in writing high schoolers there was a whole damn industry of young adult fiction writers blooming in 2007 (Twilight was 3 books in by that point, for the record) that he could’ve contracted for help if he didn’t have blinders on peers from the comic book industry. Or considering how the replacement artist for Ayers didn’t work out was collabing outside of temporary arrangements with John Byrne just doomed to failure?
Batiuk torpedoed Act III because he couldn’t get the ONE writer he wanted. Bevause if Tom Batiuk doesn’t get everything 100% the way he wants it, he takes his ball and goes home. As you say, it should have been trivial to find a replacement. He probably still holds a grudge against Sam McKeever for taking a better, higher-paying, more prestigious job than what he had to offer.
You know who should have gotten involved here? An editor.
A competent editor would be perceived as a bully bullying Batiuk with cruel, baffling questions such as why characters are rarely consistent.
I just keep getting stuck on how “the Funky kids” has the same meter and syllable weight as “the Vengabus” and if I have to have that in my head you all might as well anyway.
If you were to ask me, it seems that without realizing it, he’d mutated into the past obsessed inner child Batton Thomas is and saw the next generation as an afterthought.
7/23: He should have pestered Stan Lee. He’d have gotten an envelope with Spider-Man on it.
“And yet, for some unexplained reason, I never received a single fan letter in all the years I did my comic strips. That darned Post Office must have kept losing them.”
“I’ll show them! How would you like to see one of your precious post offices bombed in my comic strip? That’ll teach them not to mess with a comic strip writer!”
As I said down thread, Childe Thomas doesn’t know that features editors don’t forward mail they know will anger the recipient.
Great post, as always.
Was the first Lisa’s Legacy Run in New York City? If it were real life, I’d think the logistics of that would be complicated. I don’t have easy access to Funky archives, so I asked Grandpa Google, and it referenced this post for confirmation. Grandpa acts fast!
It was split (I guess?) between New York and Ohio because in that initial week Les is calling Bull to see how things are going back in Westview. Because Bull never did nothin’ for Les dontcha know.
Les and Summer were in New York for an American Cancer Society “Making Strides Against Breast Cancer” walk event, it wasn’t really depicted as a Lisa’s Legacy event. These are real events organized and held across the country to this day. TB depicted the Lisa’s Legacy walk that Bull was running in 2007 as being a Making Strides event as well, though I don’t believe he ever did this again.
It’s like an ad for a new totally radical syndicated Saturday morning teen show from 1994.
Yeah. On UPN.
So a big event is coming up on the BattyBlog…
If my calculations are correct, there are only two more Sunday John Darling strips to post before the feature has come to its end. He’s been posting these things for a decade now, rarely bothering to comment on them.
Which makes sense, I guess … really, what is there to say? “Here’s another one of these JD’s I cranked out in ten minutes, and somebody else drew. It was really tough dragging it out for seven panels! TBH, I’d rather have been reading comic books.”
But the big question is — what will happen once the supply of John Darling strips has been exhausted?
– Batiuk simply stops posting this filler content, and the blog is reduced to Flash Fridays, the odd “I liked this cover!” entry, Match To Flame posts copied from his book intros, and the occasional forlorn photo of a book signing with no people in attendance. (1.00001-to-1)
– He starts the cycle over again with the first Sunday John Darling strip. (2-to-1)
– He starts posting old Crankshaft or FW strips weekly. (2.5-to-1)
– He makes good on his promise to create some original comic content for the blog, and we get weekly postings of that. (10,000-to-1)
The tension builds…..
Pretty sure Flash Fridays are done. He reached #350, the final issue of the original run, and his write-up sounded like he was likewise finished with the “retrospective”. (Although “bland recap that could have been copied from a wiki article’s plot synopsis” would be a more apt description.)
Doesn’t sound like he has any plans to keep Flash Fridays going. (Granted, I’m assuming he used the wrong tense on “open” when he meant “opened”; proofreading is, after all, for chumps.) (Maybe he can do an episode-by-episode recap of the Adam West Batman show instead?)
He’s not going to deal with the Wally West Flash. That’s an And Then He Died Fact.
Guess I missed that! My eyes had a tendency to glaze over at the endless Flash stuff, and the constant mentions of Cary Bates (whom I only know as the writer of the what are consistently the worst episodes of Gargoyles.)
So now we’re reduced to Match To Flame entries, “covers I like but lack the insight to explain why”, and sad photography. This is gonna be one pathetic blog! (I mean, even more pathetic than it is now … which hardly seems possible, but there you go.)
Translation from Batiukese to English:
And so ends my long tribute to the book that locked my twelve year old head into place and closed my head and heart to a future of anything other than The Flash #123.
We have enjoyed the journey, but only ironically.
Looks like I’m on the GoComics watch list, since I’ve got another “Pending Approval”.
I mean… I could maybe see what set them off this time, but it’s not like it’s the worst thing that I’ve ever seen in a GoComics comments section.
What bothers me is that he doesn’t realize that it is highly likely that the person never received his letter. He doesn’t know that people’s letters are screened before given to the recipient.
He’s waaaay too invested in the whole thing. He craves validation, and he views responses to his stupid comic book letters as proof of his importance and talent. And when he doesn’t get it, he takes it as a personal rejection. He has no concept that some people receive so much mail that it’s implausible to respond to them all. Or that the only person he impressed is whatever random person was the Letters Page editor that month.
He wouldn’t have liked the answer if he got one but can’t admit it.
He hates the campy 60s Batman. Thinking about it occasions old man yelling at cloud ranting about deliberately trying to humiliate an anonymous drone from Ohio.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of Batton Week
Batton: If you’ll excuse me, I gotta head to Montonis.
Crazy Harry: “Here, I know a shortcut.” *Pushes Batton down the stairs*
If Les is the same dumb guy he was when Summer was four, it seems stupid to have the time frog.
Act III, aka Batiuk’s Failed Ambition tour. He had some big plans, and high hopes for Act III, but then he lost interest after running out of ways to cram Lisa back into the strip. He tried and tried, but then he foolishly brought Les and Cayla together, could split them up, and quickly lost interest, as evidenced by the last ten years of the strip. I sometimes read through the Act III recaps, and it’s just unbelievable how quickly almost all of it was instantly forgotten.
Yeah, it’s kind of amazing how fast it dissolved. I never knew the Sean McKeever story, but it would explain why it all died so fast and what drove that. And it’s perfectly consistent with what we know about this world: give up on everything at the first tiny obstacle. And “obstacle” can mean something as petty as not getting the exact writer you wanted, where plenty of other people could have done the job. Even other people who meet Tom Batiuk’s implicit “must know how to write comic books correctly” requirement.
You know, I have to admit, the one time I e-mailed Tom Batiuk, he wrote back within 8 hours.
(I mentioned it in the comment section on this blog at the time. I had asked him about the story where Batton got into a confrontation on the road with someone, then saw that person’s car at Roger Bollen’s house, but it couldn’t have been Roger since he wasn’t out of bed yet. Tom wrote back, “The driver was Roger’s wife Georgiana.” That didn’t do much to explain the point of the story in the comic strip, but at least it was a response. See https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2025/05/30/a-very-handy-manny/#comment-176271 .)
CBH has also said she’s gotten responses from him. But i suspect Batiuk gets so little fan mail that he can personally reply to it all. (Not a slam on the man, just a statement of fact.)
The hiring of McKeever falling through really does shine a light on why TB lost interest in so many high schoolers in Act III (especially Jinx… Maddie and Rana at least existed to set up gags for a time, Jinx got nothing). This still puzzles me, because I will always contend that TB was never as comfortable writing for any characters in Act III as he was for Owen and Cody.
Jinx seemed to be set up as if she was Summer’s best friend given the softball story (which would be covered in the next entry). But if that was the case then he dropped that as soon as he added Keisha.
I get what TB was going for with Jinx; her dad is a jock and she is not, a reverse of the Les-Summer dynamic. He just did absolutely nothing with that setup beyond the softball sign stealing story.
In some ways, that is more than Maddie got (she lost her role as Summer’s potential BFF to Keisha as well)… but Maddie did keep appearing up to (and occasionally after) graduation while Jinx largely did not. I suspect that is because TB was willing to depict Crazy and Donna as a couple and as parents and could play that dynamic off of Maddie from time to time. He seemed allergic to depicting Bull and Linda together until Bull caught terminal issue du jour (by which time Jinx was long gone from the household, her reaction to Bull’s illness and death barely a thought for even us beady-eyed nitpickers). Before that, Bull was a coach and Linda was the kind of feckless educator that the strip used to make fun of. Somehow, Les was a work spouse to both of them…
RE: Fri. 7/24’s C’Shaft:
To paraphrase Bill Murray in “Ghostbusters,” “Batton has gone bye-bye.” Your time to retire was back during the Bush 43 administration, pal.
Also, is Mr. Thomas aware that the Jay Garrick version of Earth-2 hasn’t existed since 1986, when it and all the other parallel worlds were combined during “Crisis on Infinite Earths”?
Also also, is that supposed to be Crazy Harry sorting through longboxes in the foreground? I could believe that, but not that the Komix Korner has an actual customer in the left background.
is Mr. Thomas aware
No. No, he is not. I don’t even need to hear the rest of the sentence.
No…..and he doesn’t want to be. He wants Crisis and all the various subsequent retools of the DC Multiverse to have not happened so that his Flash can have the ‘happy’ ending of exile in a distant future.
It’s definitely not Crazy Harry; we saw him in yesterday’s strip, looking like he usually does (receding hairline, but still with hair, and a bushier beard than this guy’s goatee). And we saw UncannyValley McPhotoReference in Wednesday’s strip, also looking directly into our souls.
Hm. In the Flash Fridays for #346, Tom mentioned a fan who had gotten him to autograph every edition of The Complete Funky Winkerbean, who he decided to have make an appearance in a future Crankshaft strip. Could this be that guy? (I mean, it’s gotta be a real person; I was guessing it was a comics creator, but then I remembered that little anecdote. If so… man, Davis did NOT do this guy any favors…)
Guess we should be on the lookout for a new Match to Flame soon to see if this gets explained, though I’m not holding my breath.
It looks a lot like Chris Claremont though why Batty and/or Davis would choose to put Claremont into random cameos is beyond me.
I think we can safely rule out Batiuk doing a Claremont cameo; Batiuk’s obviously friends with John “I know how to hold a grudge” Byrne, and Byrne hasn’t exactly been on good terms with Claremont since leaving Uncanny X-Men in 1981. (They would trade potshots at each other in their comics for a while, though Claremont’s editors did a better job of talking him out of it than Byrne’s editors managed. Even when they “reunited” on a Justice League story in 2007, they apparently never actually had any direct contact with each other, collaborating entirely through intermediaries.)
So I’m guessing that Batiuk wouldn’t pay tribute to someone that’s been on Byrne’s (legendary) bad side for more than four decades.
He looks not unlike former hockey coach and fired-in-disgrace Canadian hockey commentator Don Cherry, apparently enjoying his forced retirement by traveling to out-of-the-way comic book stores and rifling through the merchandise. Nice to see that at 92 he can still climb those stairs!
We’ve seen this balding-white-haired-bearded guy before in a previous Komix Korner/Buttinsky Batiuk Thomas story arc. On May 14 – 16, a guy named “Mark” arrived to Batton Thomas’s signing table to pick up volume 15 of ‘Three O’Clock High’. This must be the fan you mentioned. It was a painful to see case of asskissery towards Batton Thomas. The arc finished on Saturday with a luke-warm joke (surprise suprise).
Not sure why he’s back for a second appearance. He must be a glutton for punishment.
You know, I’ve always been particularly curious about Cory. First introduced to us as an innocent, bowl-cut toddler, he soon becomes Funky’s stepson and Summer’s best friend. In Act III, he’s re-introduced to us as an exceptionally angry teen, and it’s implied that living under Funky’s roof is to blame. It never really made sense to me that he stole money from the Lisa’s Legacy fund (the mother of his closest female friend!!!) and the response to this was either: A, a grave offense of the highest level, or B, “oh, that rascal!”
Actually, it seemed to be that way for every mess that Cory got into. And of course, thanks to “writing”, it was never clearly presented to us whether Cory, growing up under clueless Holly and hardarse Funky, was a future criminal or a small-town youth with no real direction crying out for help. It was never clear whether he was deserving of his mishaps, or was simply misunderstood.
He had a kind of old-fashioned way about him, too. Referring to Funky as “my old man”, protesting his attendance to a Lisa’s Legacy event with a grandfatherly “don’t I get any say in this?”, and dressing up as Elvis during Halloween, Cory almost had a sort of gee-golly-gosh ’50s greaser demeanor going on, rather than the bandana-sporting ruffian we see in the promo art. More “writing”!
Eventually, Cory, without being forced, and entirely of his own accord, decides to seek out his own path in life and enlists in the Army. When comics inevitably get involved, his parents finally realize they hadn’t been paying any attention to him. Meanwhile, unlike Wally, the Army makes Cory SO well-adjusted and happy that he returns home a Beaver Cleaver-esque young man with his innocence and passion for c̶o̶m̶i̶c̶ b̶o̶o̶k̶s̶ life fully restored! He gets a girl (not Summer, which disappointed some readers), the strip ends, and that’s pretty much it.
Another example of Batiuk letting the time skip do all his work for him. He”s simply incapable of writing a story about a young person going astray. It’s easy to imagine causes: a crappy home life, conflicts with parents, getting hoodlum friends, wanting something he can’t have and seeing an opportunity to take it, or simply getting into substances. But if it didn’t happen to Batiuk personally, it might as well be another planet.
Which is another way he fails.
There is one strip in late Act II that TB seems to be using foreshadow Cory’s heel turn; Funky and Les are doing some sort of handyman something or other and Funky confides to Les that Holly doesn’t discipline Cory and that he doesn’t feel comfortable doing so either as he is a step parent. A decent set up, really… that NEVER, not once, actually pays off.
Not a single time does Cory shout “YOU’RE NOT MY REAL FATHER” at Funky in Acts II or III, the easiest shortcut to showing kid-is-nogoodnik-’cause-issues-at-home. And both Funky and Les use bad behavior that they caught and covered up to blackmail Cory into doing favors for each other, something that should have curdled his already sour attitude towards authority, but instead he just remains a sour apple until he decides to join the service for no depicted reason.
I’ve said before that he simply doesn’t want to do the inbetween. He has a point that he wants to get to so he skips over everything to get there and as annoying as it is it wouldn’t be half as frustrating if he’d actually do something once he’s at the destination. Cory was a blank slate after all so working from where he is now and filling out the blanks of his past as part of it is fine.
In Superior Foes of Spider-Man, writer Nick Spencer took the D-list villain Boomerang and reworked him massively. Previously he’d been a generic guy who shows up for filler issues, throws boomerangs and that’s really it. Spencer instead turned him into a Picaresque jackass who will stab even his closest friends in the back to save his own ass when inevitably his actions and mouth get him into trouble, yet there’s still a certain roguish likability to him (which is fine because it was a book about a group of criminals).
He was essentially inventing a lot of details out of whole cloth that hadn’t been there in literally decades of previous appearances but it worked and has gone and made the character popular enough that he’s going to now be in the new Spider-Man movie.
Batty skipping ahead to show Cory as the troubled kid would have worked if he’d just built on that but he really didn’t. He’s obscenely bad at actual character development and thinks simply stating things is good enough.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 5 of Batton Week
(John Howard presses a button on his phone and falls through a trapdoor, and is then eaten alive by a horde of zombies)
If he falls through a trap door he’ll wind up in Montoni’s, won’t he? That would explain why zombies would eat John: not for his “brains,” but because anything tastes better than a Montoni’s pizza.
Re: 07/25. It’s honestly surprising that Tom doesn’t mention political stuff more often now. Whether anything he says in that field “is correct” or “makes sense” no longer matters, and the tiniest mention of anything about it will get people to say something. Getting people to say something is the only thing that he and McMeel cares about, so why not just go full Mallard Fillmore, only do so in usual Tom fashion where he doesn’t appear to take any kind of stance. Win win for him and his employer.
He isn’t that smart.
Rana in that horrible Funky Kids art looks like she’s about to kidnap 101 puppies for nefarious purposes.
today’s Crankfuckery
(Suddenly, a giant piano falls on Dinkle, instantly killing him)
Upon having this morning’s comics read to him as usual, Donald Trump flies into a rage, demands that Batty be fired, launches an investigation, and sues the syndicate. So you’ve got that going for you, Batty.
7/25: The problem is, of course, that once again, a personality is malleable. I don’t see the real Dinkle not inserting himself into Tangerine Shitgibbon’s Snoozefest.
Act I and early Act II Dinkle would be an effective Trump allegory, if TB really wanted to get in to political commentary from that angle. Pity that he’s sanded Dinkle’s megalomania down so much, the bit wouldn’t land now.
Frankly, I think this general gag idea would be stronger if it was Dinkle’s incessant fundraising had involved shenanigans that resulted in the revocation of St. Spires’ tax exempt status. Even so, it is one of the clearest and strongest gags TB has hatched in “Act IV”, with the right amount of over the top to give the commentary some edge.
Also, the Blue Bombers (with a little help from a Calgary defensive back) ran the Crankshaft play yesterday! They got smoked by the Stampeders, ultimately, but that play sure was fun.
Today’s Past Batiukverse Storyline: Le Chat Bleu’s First Appearance
Les: I was expecting peace and quiet, Le Chat.
Le Chat Bleu: Oh, I’m just as every bit as real as you are, Leslie.
Le Chat Bleu: Oh, MERDE!
whatthehellwasthat_krusty.gif
I guess he wanted to personify feeling unhappy about something, but that was a whole week to say a lot of nothing. I’m not sure what point he was even trying to make there.
Well, thanks for posting it all the same. Another week I don’t recall seeing before.
So Batty may have contracted out the writing to Sean McKeever as well as the illustrating duties to John Byrne Et. al. Other than that he’s one hell of a cartoonist. /s