When last we left this examination of the life and times of Summer Moore, the retiring Betty Somethingorother was replaced as Westview High’s secretary by Cayla Williams. As we all know, Cayla will eventually be Les Moore’s second wife and Summer’s stepmother. She also happens to be the daughter of Smokey Williams, a pro baseball player who had appeared much earlier in Crankshaft being mentored by the crusty old bus driver. Cayla’s future position as Queen of the Taj Moore-hal will not be for a while, though Batty will get to kindling that fire in this, the year of love.
But love can take many forms of course such as the bonds between parent and child which will be somewhat tested this summer when our Messiah finds that her genetic contributor will be spending the time off from school making a nuisance of himself at her hangout spot.
In fact, Sporto Spice already has a backup plan by spending the summer playing youth softball which dear old dad sees as a potential gravy train.
And it’s not just going to be Summer because Linda has noticed Jinx giving her father the typical teenager attitude because they’re just, you know, so opposite and all and decides to solve this problem by meddling. First by signing her daughter up for the same softball league behind her back.
While also signing up Bull to coach behind his back, christening it a bonding exercise for the two them and gloating about how her scheme is already working.
Now on the subject of love, Batty gives us this rather peculiar Sunday strip at the beginning of July.
This has nothing to do with anything, of course, but when I was collecting material for this piece I came across this and just had to grab it. This has to stand as one of the most bizarre strips in the comic’s history, right up there with Zanzibar, the Gun-Wielding Primate. Now I can clearly guess that Batty’s intention was just a simple “Pete gets pulled over and the cop’s amused by his wit and lets him off” kind of gag but I mean… he and Ayers had to know what they were doing right? The dialogue, the little knowing looks between them and the cop’s fierce way of walking away. A big Pride float filled with leather daddies going down Westview’s main street wouldn’t be near as homoerotic as this exchange between Mopey and Officer Sassy.
And now that I’ve given the yaoi fans the fuel that they’ve undoubtedly been craving, we go to the opposite end of the spectrum as Jinx is just thrilled, positively elated even, to be on the same team as Summer.
But ultimately this is more of a Jinx story where Summer is just along for the ride and it’s about her one shot of relevance in the strip’s entirety.
Meanwhile, while the girls play, the douche has been away having been sent off to New York by Funky to “take care of some things” at Montoni’s NYC location for him.
What that something is we never actually find out because instead Les’ entire trip is spent wandering around NYC talking to Cindy, bemoaning his so-far-failed writing career or reminiscing about his and Lisa’s honeymoon… anything except doing his goddamned job which will be a startlingly common thing with him going forward. It’s during this trip that we also learn that love never dies, it just remains trapped in a depressing purgatory that leaves you looking like an utter lunatic to everyone around you.
That’s right, everyone’s favorite wraith has made her entry into the comic ready to show up at only the most inopportune and awkward times.
Les returns home to news of The Coming Reunion and decides to spend all day moping about getting old and telling his bemused daughter that the ravages of time shall be visiting her too.
By this point Summer has turned 16 and her hospital is throwing a party for all the NICU kids like her who are also turning 16 this year.
And not content to haunting this earthly realm in spectral form, Lisa has left Summer a little birthday present. We get the first of Lisa’s video messages so she can lecture, chastize and threaten the world of the living from beyond the grave. She takes advantage of this inspired bit of forethought to tell Summer the harrowing story of how her half-brother was almost named Econoline.
By the way, Lisa sounds like Doris Grau in my head whenever these cancer video strips pop up.
In September a new player enters the scene when Susan Smith returns as a full time teacher at Westview, crossing paths with what will be one of the other parts of the most nonsensical love triangle imaginable.
In October it’s time for another Lisa’s Legacy run with everyone oohing and aahing over Summer for how she’s helped organize the event. She’s also shown hanging out with Cory who’s been forced to come by his parents.
Unfortunately all the money raised this year has been stolen but Funky graciously offers to have Montoni’s cover the amount which Summer has to accept on behalf of her dithering dad.
Of course we immediately find out that Cory stole the money, Holly and Funky know and Funky declares it the “last time I cover for you.” As should be expected though, the shock of Cory being the thief is what’s most important so this is never again followed up on. Cory stole thousands of dollars and basically got away with it. Great writing, Batty!
And speaking of the complete opposite of great writing, soon after Les is moping around because yet another of his crappy stories has been rejected.
In despair Les tells Summer to file it away with all the other garbage. But our curious as a cat savior spies something.
After a quick perusal of it she tells her father to use it instead.
And thus is born Lisa’s Story, the third part of the unholy trinity that will allow Lisa to forever haunt this series for the rest of its life.
With school back up in full swing and Summer now on the varsity squad, life decides to throw her a few curveballs. First up is the loss of the team’s coach who like St. Lisa before her decided to leave Westview for Seattle. Forced to take her place, and still fretting over coaching girls, is newly minted athletic director Bull Bushka.
And he’s not the only new arrival because also transferring is Big Walnut Tech’s star player, Keisha Williams.
Summer is naturally none too happy that she now has competition for the spot of being the team’s star player.
I will give Batty some credit in actually giving Summer a somewhat negative character trait but not overplaying it too much. One would expect someone with the competitive drive to be a star athlete to also have a bit of arrogance to them and not really take kindly to threats to their status. Of course it’s not overplayed for the reason that almost all of his stories ultimately go nowhere but hey, it’s something.
Les decides to take the opportunity to tease Summer about her feeling threatened.
And in a Sunday strip we get Summer tagging along for the incredibly rare Maddie-centric comic as she buys a hat that’s just like her father’s.
Les and Cayla both show up to basketball practice and Cayla decides for some ungodly reason to begin flirting with Les while also revealing that she’s Ketamine’s mother.
At this same time Summer gets picked to be part of the court at the Winterfest dance but is bemoaning not having a date. We also learn that she has apparently been dating — and broken up with — a mysterious “Ron” the whole time so I amend my statement a bit from the previous entry. Now if you thought that showing Summer with a boyfriend, you know the kind of thing that would good both for her and for doing stories about a father dealing with his kid growing up, would be important… well you’re not Tom Batiuk. Maybe Ron just went to a different school in Canada so we couldn’t see him, who knows?
A big school dance would also require a new dress which leads to another Ghost Lisa appearance in what is a favorite strip of readers of this site wherein Les basically yells at his daughter to stop dressing like a tramp.
Cayla, like Les, has signed up to chaperone the dance and makes very subtle come ons to him.
Summer continues to curse the cruel whims of her Flash-obsessed creator. She’s the dateless loser while her dad is going on a date with her rival’s mother? It’s utterly preposterous! Les, of course, plays the role of dense harem manga protagonist to a T just to make him even more annoying.
But lo, the tables turn because Cory has been “volunteered” to ask Summer to the dance.
Cory, despite his protestations to the contrary, doesn’t seem particularly thrilled. I assume going on a date with the school’s popular star athlete was his “punishment” for stealing thousands of dollars from a charity event and maybe he realizes what a farce this whole story and indeed series is.
I don’t know if Batty had any intention of actually doing some kind of a romance between Summer and Cory but if he did then he rightly realized that actually putting Les and Funky’s kids together would have been too lame and cliche a move even for him because this is immediately dropped. One thing he didn’t drop of course is the one between Les and Cayla.
As we can see, TB seemed to be in a bit of a lovin’ mood in the back half of the year. 2008 was the year where he’d had his car crash so maybe that close call led him to a bit of reevaluating that he decided to temporarily reflect in Funky. Whatever the case most of it will end up going nowhere: Summer’s love life, Pete’s flirty little brush with the law, not a one of them.
Summer at least is actually getting a reasonable amount of focus now compared to most of the first year or so of Act III but of course you can still see issues. Batty’s love of doing something shocking only for it to go nowhere is evident in Cory’s stealing of the Lisa’s Legacy money; as I said maybe the date for the Winterfest is the “punishment” but if so then that’s a pretty poor cap to that. Les takes a job at Montoni’s which mostly seems to exist as a reason for him to go to New York so he can mope about his failed writing career and see Lisa’s ghost.
But at least his writing career up to this point can be described as “failed.” Not so for Mopey who, if you remember, is reintroduced in Act III as a successful writer for Marvel. Not brought up here is that he’s now, somehow, moved over to DC to write Superman which leads a multiweek storyline about Pete feeling inadequate and going to Jerry Siegel’s childhood home where he imagines what Siegel (or Pete playing the role of Siegel) must have felt when creating Superman in what is the first of the Pete (and later Darin) flashback to the olden days of comics strips.
Les, of course, is a self-insert for Batty but Pete feels like an even more blatant one at times.
But that’s getting off track and is also enough ranting for one day so I’ll leave things here for now. Batty’s plots may be going nowhere and neither is this retrospective as brother, we still have a long way to go.
Son of Stuck Funky 
“His name? It’s Ron.”
“Ron what?”
“Ron…Glass. Ron Glass.”
“Sure, Summer.”
I’ve gone on at great (great) length about BatYam’s obvious issues with women, but Summer may have been the most stupidly-written female character of all. He was just so far out of his depth that you could actually see it on the page. And he lost interest fairly quickly, too.
Women seem to confuse him. For one thing, they think that it’s a waste of time and effort to care about a man running at Wouldn’t Friction Incinerate Him Speed.
To rewrite a vintage Australian television commercial, this makes me happy, Jan.
I see Batty misspelled “arrange” in the first comic. I wonder if he later claimed it was “on purpose to see if people are paying attention.”
Good a call!
Also “Every timed you bump into that walled-off area…” in the 7/26 strip.
Did Batiuk write it that way, and Ayers lettered it just as it was written? Or did Ayers introduce the mistake, and Batty just didn’t notice (or care)?
Clearly, no-one at the syndicate was reading this, even to copy-edit it … and I don’t really blame them. Timed spent copy-editing Batiuk = Timed spent rearrainging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
In any event, Ayers was putting a LOT more effort into these strips than they deserved. Can you imagine how much more they would suck if Batiuk was still attempting to do the art?
To this day, I still can’t tell if “good a call” was a mistake that should have been caught in proofreading (if Batiuk believed in proofreading) or Batiuk attempting to introduce his own terminology into the world (“solo car date”).
Batiuk’s Law: When trying to ascertain the reasons for flaws in Batiuk’s work, the laziest explanation is more likely to be the correct one.
So I’m going with ‘uncorrected typo’.
Timed, Timed, see what’s become of me…
“A Hazy Shade of Winkerbean”!
8/6: All this for a stupid joke at Ed’s expense.
Also, let’s do anything that won’t address the grass fire they’ll be dealing with tomorrow.
Fascinating recap — thanks, Narshe.
I started my confusing journey with FW in this exact era, having spent the first decades of my life where the newspapers didn’t carry it. I discovered the Comics Curmudgeon (and later SOSF) by Googling something like, “What the hell is wrong with the comic strip Funky Winkerbean?”
I wish I could remember exactly what strip triggered me, but I’m glad it did. This and other comics snark communities have added delightful color to my life ever since.
Pretty sure that is the last time Linda acts as a mother. One could argue it is the last time she acts as a wife too… Man, TB’s writing for the teen characters in Act III is so much easier to digest than anything involving the adults, especially Les and ghost Lisa. It really is too bad he increasingly moved away from the teenage characters as Act III, because they were almost always his most competently-written characters by far.
Also, a decent gag in Crankshaft today, who woulda guessed?
Also, the moronic tapes don’t just irritate me because of Les seemingly not having heard of Oprah. What bothers me is that Lisa clearly seemed to think that she could phone in being a mother.
The tapes are an example of just how little Batty cares about the continuity of his own stories and the pointlessness of trying to make an ongoing quarter-inch from reality drama when your stories have all the internal consistency of The Simpsons or Family Guy. Who came up with the idea and who gave who the idea for the tapes, even the very status of the tapes themselves and whether or not they’re thrown out, changes every time the subject is brought up.
Being consistent gets in the way of shocking image/not counting.
I had completely forgotten how much of a whiner Summer was. Admittedly, she had a poor role model; like father, like daughter.
Eh, she’s supposed to be your Typical Moody Teenager and combined with having her spot threatened. I’m generally more positive in my view of Summer than a lot of people here are I suppose. She’s one of the least offensive Act III characters to me and at least when everyone goes on about her talent it’s talent we actually get to see and aren’t just informed about. Well not until the sudden left field writer bullshit anyway.
If we’re talking about characters that are unlikable and one detests, then there’s a certain moment down the road that I might use as an aside to rant about how much I loathe Pete.
I think we all got sick of Summer worshipping at the altar of Lisa (as if she had a choice) and then, of course, she returned to play a major role in the asinine end of Funky Winkerbean… but I agree with you, she’s not a terribly offensive character compared to most. Especially her teen years, where TB was actually pretty comfortable writing for her, a pity he clearly didn’t want to and discarded her for almost all of the last 2/3 of Act III.
The ultimate late Act III Summer strip is at Cory’s wedding where Maddie asks Keisha what Summer has been up to and Keisha is all “heck if I know?”… these two being Summer’s best high school friend and her own step-sister and college basketball teammate. Yikes!
My intention wasn’t to insinuate Summer was in Les’s class. She’s not. When it comes to whining, Pouty McPout Face is in a class all by himself. OTOH, there are multiple cases of Summer’s whining in your blog to observe.
Upon discovering Les has started working at Monotoni’s, Summer immediately wants to arrange a new place to meet her friends. I’ll allow it. This scenario is hardly new in comic strips. I can easily imagine Luann Degroot behaving this way. Ditto Meg from Dustin. BTW, whenever Meg says something snarky in Dustin, does anybody else imagine Peter Griffin saying, “Shut up, Meg”?
I’m sorry, but witnessing Summer whining about Kishka (Keisha) joining the team and stealing her spotlight annoys me. I played high school basketball. It’s a team sport, and we were mediocre. We’d accept any player who’d help us win. Our attitude would have been Big Walnut Tech’s loss was our gain. Our best player didn’t have a big ego. She was all about the team. I know because she was my best friend.
The Winterfest Dance story arc. There’s more than one thing in this one story arc that annoys me. First, Summer is all upset that she doesn’t have a date. She’s picked to be part of the court and still doesn’t have a date? Hunh?! Is there an odd number of guys to gals on the court? How did Summer get chosen for the court without a date?
Summer whines to Les that he “has a date,” but she doesn’t. Les tries to fix the situation by arranging a date for her. She complains about that too. Do you want to go to the dance or whine about not having a date? Pick a fucking lane. I rarely feel bad for Les, but this was clearly a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Speaking of Les, that Sunday strip of Summer picking her dress bothers me in all kinds of ways. Why is Les taking Summer to look for her dress in the first place? So he could ogle the mannequins? Where are her friends? I picked out my prom dress with my friends. Doesn’t Summer have any friends who are going to the dance? No friends and no date? Not exactly popular, is she? I have a hard time imagining my father taking me to shop for a dress. If he did, he would have bailed on me to go to Walden Books or waited for me in the car.
There is nothing especially risque about the dress Summer chose. Swimsuits are worse. I’ll have to check the photos in my high school yearbook. If memory serves, several girls wore similar dresses. My dress felt Victorian in comparison. Les’s over-the-top reaction was ridiculous. Batty could not be serious! Worst of all was Summer’s reaction. She runs away sobbing. “Boo hoo hoo. Daddy criticized my dress.” Puh-leeze. Does she have the maturity of an eight-year-old?
These strips display the core problem with the Batty’s writing: character behavior driven purely by artificial plot conflict rather than how real teenagers or parents act. The sports ego vs. team logic and the weird dad-daughter dress shopping dynamic rub me the wrong way.
Thanks for the reply, Narsche. I appreciate it. Your perspective of Summer is obviously fresher than mine. Most of your series on Summer is a refresher or something I’m reading for the first time. Before you started, my opinion of Summer was that she was a career college student whom Time Mop convinced to write a book that allegedly saved humanity.
I look forward to your impending evisceration of Mopey Pete (Roberts? Reynolds? You can take your pick).
I tore apart that dress shop strip in Bad Parenting From Beyond The Grave. It’s one of my favorite blog posts ever.
I remember that blog! It was great!
Talk about déjà vu; I wrote a comment in the discussion of that blog where I mentioned all of my objections above, plus some. At least I’m consistent.
I won’t say that Summer is a great character — I mean come on, there’s not really much of any in this strip. Even ones I genuinely like such as Sadie are “good” only in their wasted potential. But I definitely find her relatively inoffensive compared to the gaggle of smirking jackasses and ineffectual Caylas that haunt of Act III. She falls sort of in the same area as someone like Mason or Mindy who have their faults (tied so directly to Les’ Hollywood adventures for him and her inexplicably awful taste in guys) but don’t inspire the same levels of disdain in me as the truly rotten characters.
I guess trying to keep the characters boxed into this (or Batty’s other work) is something I try to keep in mind with these. By any objective standard of broader fiction, yeah every character and story is mostly going to be weak and bad so I think of it more within the confines of Funky Winkerbean or Crankshaft I guess because I feel like that’s me being a little more fair and probably more fair than Batty or his comics deserve.
Narshe,
I enjoy reading you!
To me the most interesting part of your post was the sports rivalry between Keisha and Summer. Did Batiuk ever follow up on this conflict?
💝🏀⛹️♀️⛹🏾♀️💖🌺💐🌹
Perhaps I am a little harsh on Summer. If my parents were Les and Lisa, I’d probably be an emotional mess too.
Most SoSF commenters had a positive viewpoint of John Darling refugee and Funky’s AA sponsor, Wade Wallace. I don’t recall anyone saying they disliked the character.
We’ve discussed the dress-shopping strip on this blog before, but one oddity stands out to me. The strip looks like it portrays Lisa and Les shopping with Summer, except that Lisa isn’t actually there since she died years before.
Lisa’s final comment — “A new world’s record … from under control to totally losing containment in less than a second” — is apparently being spoken to herself, since it doesn’t look like she is speaking to Les directly, due to the positions of the characters in the panel. How is Lisa saying that at all? Products of one’s imagination don’t talk outside of one’s own consciousness.
That’s “Force Ghost Lisa”, a Force ghost like Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. After Lisa died, she often returned to be Les’s spiritual advisor. Only Les can see or hear her.
Batty’s use of Force ghosts is highly inconsistent. First, there was Phil Holt, who appeared as a ghost alongside “Ghost Lisa”, even though he wasn’t actually dead. Later on, Batty retconned Phil’s death by revealing he had merely faked it, resurrecting the character simply because a new storyline required him. Then Funky Winkerbean featured an appearance by Force Ghost Tony Montoni, which baffled readers who knew him to be alive and retired in Florida. Force Ghost Tony had no spoken lines; he was just standing there, leaving many of us thoroughly confused.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Ed then picks up his flaming phone, and hurls it at Dinkle)
You got half of it right, so far! Maybe the other part happens off camera.
8)7: That’s three stupid people watching the lawn ignite.
“As we all know, Cayla will eventually be Les Moore’s second wife and Summer’s mother-in-law.”
Please make that “Summer’s stepmother.”
Fixed it, thanks. I read over this a good 3 or 4 times before posting and somehow never caught that.
Hell, Batty himself probably referred to her as “mother-in-law” in one strip, and “non-bio-mom-in-law” in another. It’s semi-amazing that she’s not “Layla Wilson” somewhere.
It doesn’t surprise me. Batty thinks proofreading and having an editor are something a writer of his caliber doesn’t need, but he is continually proven wrong. First thought = best thought.
“Bio-mom” and “bio-dad”. Gawd, that’s an affront to orphaned and adopted children everywhere. Batty makes me feel like I was conceived in a test tube.
Understanding this actually is too much to ask of a mediocrity like him.
8/8: No, Batiuk, the phone wouldn’t survive this.
Ok sure, hedge a bit more humor out of Siri as autonomous entity with physical quirks all her own. Maybe we’ll get a new Holtron out of this even if he does fill it with “gen AI” jokes or whatever.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
HOW IS ED’S PHONE STILL FUNCTIONAL AFTER BEING RUN OVER AND THEN BURSTED INTO FLAMES SOON AFTER
8/9: If you wanna make a joke about how unreasonable insurance is, don’t prove that you need it.
You could literally cut out the rest of the week’s worth of strips and only include Sunday’s and it would probably work better as a joke since we’re left to picture in our minds what happened instead of a week of old farts standing around looking at a broken and burning phone. Focusing on something for a week works when you have some semblance of story, even something as shallow as the Daddy Dinkle epic. When it’s a 7 days of the same banal joke repeated over and over then you have ask yourself why you’re bothering, beyond the laziness of not having to think of a new joke for an entire week.
The Monday and Tuesday strips weren’t even banal jokes.
The Monday strip took three panels, with no dialogue, to establish “Look! It’s Ed, on a riding mower! Look! He has a phone in his pocket! Look! It fell out of this pocket!”
The Tuesday strip similar conveyed “Look! The phone is on the ground! Look! The riding mower is riding over it! Look! The phone’s bursting into flame!”
Then the Wednesday strip reiterated all that for us, rendering the Monday and Tuesday strips even more pointless than they already were.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. The awful fascination of Batiuk is that he sucks as a writer in so, so many ways. His dialogue can suck at word-zeppelin length, at regular length, or even with no words at all. His characters suck, and he can pull out one of his many Avatars of MegaSuck at will: Batton Thomas, Les Moore, Lillian McKenzie, Harry Dinkle, or Some Guy Who Appeared For A Brief Arc In 1994 And Everyone Forgot About But Upon Reappearing Still Sucks Mightily. And his plotting is a master class in Suck, generally topped by Batiuk’s signature move: cutting away from anything resembling a climax before it happens (but allowing the aftermath to fester on forever.)
This was just an average week for Batiuk: it sucked, but not in any outstanding way.
But Batton Thomas is out there, waiting…..
well said.
He chokes when trying to do a climax because Les Moore cannot run at What The Hell Speed or use funny book science.
He’s also terrible at pacing. This would have worked better as a Sunday strip but here we are.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Ed then storms off and hurls his damaged phone at Dinkle)
8/10: Let’s see how he can screw up sitting on a porch.
Thanks to Sunday’s Luann, I learned that the National Cartoonists Society handed out its annual awards this past week. Taking home the coveted Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year was none other than…Lio creator Mark Tatulli. I assume we all know who has never won. And to make matters worse, the 2026 NCS get-together was in Columbus, Ohio.
I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t consider Tom a cartoonist, though … at least not today. He positions himself as a writer, and I don’t believe he has done the artwork (i.e, the actual cartoonist part of cartooning) for any of his strips in over 30 years.
I can see this will be another exciting week on the ol’ ‘shaft.
It’s the traditional Ed makes an ass of himself at the fair and everyone just stands there looking deflated arc.
8/11: Oh. The County Fair arc. Ed’s gonna do something stupid to ruin it.
8/11: Since we know that Ed will do something stupid, the county fair arc writes itself.
Really? Because that would certainly be preferable to Batiuk writing it.
Writing better than he does is not much of an accomplishment.
Fair thee well!
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
I guess this week is gonna be Random Joke Week