2009 saw a decent amount of stuff for Summer, largely with her rivalry-turned-friendship with Big Walnut Tech transfer “Breakfast Cereal” Keisha Williams. It was a story that weaved its way into a larger one involving Les, Keisha’s mother Cayla and the beginnings of the love triangle that involved the both of them and Les’ former student Susan Smith. Lisa continued to haunt the strip both figuratively and literally in the forms of Les beginning to write Lisa’s Story — the Holy Bible of the Batiukverse — and the real ectoplasmic form of Dead Lisa, creepily watching her husband make out with his new gal pal.
The underage Summer also had to deal with getting sexually harassed by the much older and very creepy Pete as the year ended… and we’ve reached the point where things are going to start going downhill for Westview’s Messiah. Not in the sense of bad things happening to her but rather as we enter into 2010 we’re now about halfway through Summer’s time in high school and we’ve about hit the point where Batty is beginning to grow bored of her.
In a broader context, the end of 2009 and start of 2010 revolved around Les traveling to, where else, New York City to meet high-powered literary agent Ann Apple and Batty pulls the oh so hilarious (not really) trope where the reader knows that Ann is really Apple Annie, the homeless woman who’d found the manuscript for Les’ book about John Darling (whose murder would leave Jessica Darling fatherless), but Les is too much of an ignorant buffoon to put 2 and 2 together to make 4.
Summer gets that small cameo there but does get a more important role the next week in a series dedicated to Les and Cayla watching her play, with Les fretting over her driving because he’s worried she’s going to end up like Becky.
I get the intent is to show Les being overly worried as parents tend to do and in a sense I can even see where he’s coming from because I’m also the type of person whose brain goes to absurd worst case scenarios. To this day I’ve never been on a roller coaster because I’m completely convinced I’m going to get the one that gets stuck upside down in a loop for two hours or flies off the track or something. But most people would rightly see that as just ridiculous anxiety and so it is here. Although I suppose the prevelance of conveniently placed cliffs along the equally convenient narrow mountain roads that surround Westview makes this a slightly more understandable concern.
There’s also some ironic comparisons between Les the uber-geek and Summer the uber-jock.
I’ll give Batty some credit in that typically he does a good enough job of showing Summer as being confident, driven to succeed and enjoying finding herself in high pressure situations. She is definitely the type of person who would attempt hero ball stuff. At least her athletic prowess is something we get to see repeatedly so we understand why people would praise her unlike with things like Les’ writing talent or Funky’s ability to make a pizza or Pete’s… everything.
Summer ends up sinking the game winning shot and Les relents on his driving fears.
The next week is some nonsense about Montoni’s and karma that I’m only bringing up as it contains one very important debut.
Anyway, Summer does at least get the Sunday comic that week which is more gushing over her being the greatest white basketball player since Larry Bird.
Apparently the Lady Scapegoats have done well enough this season to make the state tournament or I guess this is to determine the conference champion who would represent the conference in the state tournament? I think Batty is confused about state and conference because Bull gives a pep talk to his team before the game against Big Walnut Tech saying they’d be champions after this but it’s also a tournament game somehow.
And naturally Summer gets to play hero again.
But in reality Summer and her on-court success is secondary to what the actual story of this arc is about which is Wally’s PTSD.
After having twice been shot down and captured, after losing a decade of his life to it the second time, after having his family stolen from him by a skunk-haired comic book shop owner, after having the love of his life cruelly cast him aside, Rana — the only person who seems to remotely care about him — invites him to come out to the game because it may be the last time he can watch her cheer. Why, I have no clue. Summer’s generation isn’t close to graduating yet so Rana isn’t going to stop being a cheerleader any time soon. All the excitement of the game causes Wally to freak out which leads to him getting chased down by Funky and Becky who drive him back to his apartment and find out he sleeps with a gun under his pillow. Funky then gets Wally set up with counseling.
All of this plays out over about a month and a half so Summer and her team’s (conference?) championship is really little more than window dressing.
But hey, they still did win which put them in the state championship game. Les goes back to playing the overly worried parent and acts as if Columbus is like Baltimore or 1980s NYC or something. My impression of Columbus is that it’s basically Blandville, USA based entirely on it being used as the ideal test market for stuff but maybe there’s lots of crime to worry about.
Westview’s opponent is a school called Our Lady of the Cedars which I guess is supposed to be Batty’s way of telling the reader that they’re big and bad and that’s why the She-Goats are so scared of them.
Their fear turns out to be justified because Cedars pretty much stomps them into the dirt. Not even Summer’s main character boost are enough to put a dent in them.
There was, then, no joy in Westview because the Lady Scapegoats got their asses kicked.
But like the savior figure she is, Summer vows to rise from the dead. Figuratively but you never know.
The team in fact are a bunch of masochists as the beating laid down on them has only fired them up. Summer and Keisha are named co-captains in an “unusual move” so the team is ready to go next season.
Summer subsequently decides to get an early start on training.
And that’s basically it for Summer’s relevance for the rest of the year. What I said earlier about what Summer’s stuff being mostly window dressing for Wally’s story? It’s basically going to be that on overdrive for the rest of 2010 because with Summer’s sporto BS over and done with, Batty can now move forward with what the readers really yearn for: Lisa’s Story and Les’ love life.
Most of the next month and change of strips is dedicated to Les and Funky going to New York to close down Montoni’s. But of course the actual meat of the story is Les meeting with Ann who’s set him up with a deal for Kent State Press to publish Lisa’s Story just like in real life because this is the point where Les has really morphed into Tom Batiuk’s avatar more than he already was. From this point on it’s book signings, shilling collected editions and collared shirts under sweaters for Les.
This actually gets into another irritating problem Batiuk has that I suspect Funky’s expansion of Montoni’s was a victim of. That being that things are only as important as they in service to the immediate plot needs of Les or some other pet character. That’s clunkily worded I’m sure so let me explain.
At the beginning of Act III, Funky has turned Montoni’s into a chain and expanded into New York City. Because Funky is busy all over Ohio and now New York, Les takes a second job at the original Montoni’s to help him out. He’s now a Montoni’s employee in addition to being Funky’s best friend which means that he now has a reason to travel to the NYC location. The first time is when Funky sends him to “put out some fires” there but do we ever actually see him doing any of this? No, he wanders around NYC, reminisces over Lisa, meets with Cindy and then has a revelation about his writing. The needing to constantly go to New York means that Les is able to keep in touch with Cindy who in turn connects him with Ann Apple which then gives Les further reason to go and meet with her. With Les’ book deal for Lisa’s Story secured, he no longer needs a plot excuse to keep going to New York and thus Montoni’s closes down because its only purpose for existing was as a plot device to facilitate Les coming and going from NYC to advance his writing career.
It’s quite sad when you think about it. Funky’s business success is pretty much a giant farce, existing only to prop up the second biggest loser in the entire strip.
With his book deal in hand and NYC Montoni’s consigned to the dust bin, Les finally returns to Westview. He’s met not by Cayla or his daughter or friends but by Susan who’s just over the moon. Summer, arriving back from something to do with softball, doesn’t seem overly happy to see her.
Les continues paying more attention to Susan than Cayla as Susan is, you know, actually helping him do work on his manuscript as opposed to sulking around like Cayla. Summer continues to be nonplussed about the whole thing.
Now you’d think that this would lead to a story where Summer confronts her dad about ignoring his girlfriend by paying attention to this horrible homewrecking harlot. But of course Batty is the master of going nowhere as slowly as possible so nothing ever comes of this aside from Summers’ disapproving looks. Who needs her having a talk with her dad about all of this when there are far more important stories to tell?
The next two months are taken up by the tragicomedy (unintended of course) of Funky having to move his dementia-addled father to a nursing home and then getting into a car wreck. The collision rockets him through time, transporting him back to the days of Act I where he wanders around town and tells his younger self to buy a Starbuck Jones comic because it’ll be worth a lot one day and that’s really it. It’s a story that meanders as aimlessly as the title character does and then eventually ends with Funky waking up in the hospital to discover it was all a dream… or was it!? Because at the start of the story Funky gave DSH a rare Starbuck Jones comic so he’d have the money to cover the Komix Korner’s rent claiming that “some old guy” told him to buy it when he was younger. The implication of course is that the old guy was in fact Funky himself per the events of the “dream” that we had witnessed and the whole thing was some kind of time loop.
Time travel stories and them being dismissed as mere dreams? I’m sure glad that will never come up again in this series.
That’s followed up with more Winkerbean wackiness when perennial scene filler Rachel starts dating the highly traumatized Wally beginning her journey to become what every Batiukian woman aspires to be: a mommy-wife who exists to solve her man’s problems. It’s not until the end of August, a full three months since her last appearance, when Summer pops in to remind the readers she still exists.
Around just long enough to tell her dad that it’s cool to start his literary career inside the sad remains of a once proud pizza empire, Summer disappears as quickly as she’d appeared so Batty Funky can say goodbye to his beloved PT Cruiser and Les can have a sitdown with Cayla and Susan to… help him choose the cover of his book. Because this farce of a story needs to be stretched out in increasingly inane ways. Cayla’s spent the last few months feeling left out in the cold by all the attention Les is paying to that little tramp and decides to do something about it. Does she confront Les and tell him how she feels about all of this directly? Does she maybe get into a catfight with the younger but far less athletic Susan?
No, of course not. She just changes her hair as some kind of weird passive-aggressive power move intended to one-up Susan which works, for now, because of course it does. Cayla: 1, Susan: 0, Readers: -500.
Summer makes her customary monthly appearance to go “WOW CAYLA, COOL HAIR!” and slink back into increasing irrelevancy.
And I do mean monthly because it’s about 1 month on the dot when she next shows up during the book launch to talk about Ann, inadvertantly creating jealousy in both Cayla and Susan.
Unfortunately this does not lead to an absurd story of the two love rivals teaming up to deal with a schizophrenic homeless woman masquerading as a literary agent. Missed opportunities, I say. Again, it’s another month before Summer shows up, throwing it down like she was Shawn Kemp.
Since October, Les has been on a book tour because at this point while he’s still technically a teacher, his appearances actually teaching classes are largely over and done with. His real career of flying around to engage in book signings where he wryly mocks all the people taking time out of their day and money out of their wallets to support him has begun. Why Batty even continues with the charade of Les being a teacher is beyond me, he even calls attention to it by having Nate handwave it away.
Summer gets slightly more to do for once with Les checking in on her…
…and having to deal with the dreaded task of talking someone through using technology over the phone, presumably because she’s considered tech savvy for knowing how to turn on and off a computer.
By the middle of December, the first of an unending parade of book tours is finished and Les is ready to head home but a mysterious voice from beyond the grave pleads with him not to get on the plane.
Les believes he’s being pranked and angrily walks — with anger — onto his seemingly doomed flight. Summer is supposed to pick him up from the airport but has yet to hear from him.
Tension builds as Batty ends the week with a cliffhanger.
But Batty does his best R.L. Stine impression and the cliffhanger turns out to be nothing as Les, unfortunately, shows up at the Taj Moore-hal fine and dandy.
Les explains to Summer and Cayla that it’s “a long story” of which we only catch the tail end of.
But oho! That’s not quite the end of it because TB has one final curveball to throw at us.
Yes, that’s right, Lisa used her ghostly powers to call in a bomb threat and commit (fake) terrorism in order to save the life of her still living husband either out of genuine concern for his wellbeing or simply so he doesn’t bother her for eternity in the afterlife considering he keeps summoning her to Earth for inane crap as is.
With Les’ life saved from another ValuJet incident, the family is able to celebrate Christmas together.
So 2010 turned out to be a pretty down year for Summer on the whole. Aside from the basketball stuff in the earlier part of the year she was mostly relegated to one-off appearances for the majority of the year… when TB could be bothered to actually have her show up at all. Even then, a good chunk of that basketball story is really just there to provide background noise in service to Wally’s PTSD story or to Les’ parental worries. It’s really only when the Scapegoats are getting destroyed in the championship game that it’s kind of about her and the team specifically.
Which really gets into the heart of the problem with Summer’s use while she’s in high school. As I’d mentioned earlier, Batty typically does fine (by his standards) in showing that Summer’s supposed to be a talented athlete as opposed to simply telling us she is and then leaving us to actually believe that it’s true as he does with so many other “talented” characters. The problem though is that’s all that she does. Think about it, since Act III has started how many stories has she had that were about anything other than her playing basketball? I don’t mean her being involved in a story, like where she’s the one who convinces Les to write Lisa’s Story, I mean stories that are about her specifically.
All I can really think of is the 16th birthday at the NICU for premature births, her wanting to drive and her being pissy over not having a date to the winter dance. Everything else is basketball and if she’s not playing basketball she’s playing softball. Otherwise she’s basically just there to hang around Les and encourage him or gush over Cayla, basically acting like a shipper.
For a character who was supposed to be so important to Act III she’s pretty quickly relegated to the sidelines and in a couple of years it’s only going to get worse.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Holtron: To be honest, Pepper, I did what I did when Mr. Winkerbean was in high school because I enjoyed pissing everybody in the school off.
This is the problem. He’s fixated on stupid things because he’s lazy.
20 September: So, Skynet is the promised savior….or an advance man for Megatron.
https://sonofstuckfunky.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/2010-summer-18.jpg
DO IT ANYWAY! You’ll be the most beloved character in the entire strip if you do!
At least we’re not up to the most punch worthy thing Les has ever done yet.
Thank you for another excellent entry!
Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who I recall reading at times, and one line of advice that he has written and I have taken to heart, because he would have more direct experience than I would on the matter, is that “you should never say anything to a black woman about her hair […], even as a compliment.” I think there are a few Crankshaft weeks with the Roughriders children that were acceptable, and some early 70s Derek and Junebug content was fine enough, so I won’t say that Tom has missed the mark regarding writing with black characters every single time, but there are certain aspects about the culture that he clearly has no clue about and shouldn’t have tried. The week about Cayla’s hair is one of those times.
Oh damn, those Apple Ann “I saved your John Darling Who Was Murdered book” trivia highlight reminds me of a particular stinker: It’s during the tail end of this “publishing Lisa’s Story” arc that Ann actually returns the treasured, presumed-only manuscript to Les to his elation, but if I remember things right Batiuk went on to snarl continuity by claiming that Les had published Fallen Star at some point during the Act 2/3 time skip prior to his Lisa masterpiece, where in contrast to his later luck and more in line with his typical Act 2 writing woes it was a resounding failure with minimal people at his book signings (and one of them might’ve been Lillian’s bookstore garage).
Is that one of the first times we had a serious crinkling of the timeline for the sake of cheap narrative/joke drivel, or are we left to assume that Les managed to squeeze out a 2nd version of the manuscript for his job while treating the first version as a Lost Lenore?
Relatedly, Batiuk indeed put the end of John Darling the strip on his blog so we now have an official splash of colors to put on his tombstone. He’s apparently implied that he’ll rerun Les’s murder mystery arc where he cracks the case, so I guess we can look forward to that too.
And what a crappy ending that was! Not that John Darling was ever a well-written strip … those Sunday strips he posted for years and years were consistently third-rate. It was easy to see why papers kept dropping it.
But he couldn’t even come up with a funny (or even particularly comprehensible) series of strips that would serve as acknowledgement and respect to whatever (few) long term readers were left. He just had to thumb his nose at them too, along with the syndicate. Because readers should have organized “Save John Darling” petitions and formed a human chain around the syndicate offices, I suppose.
The malicious little turd in him mandated the big middle finger to the remaining readers.
Ha ha ha, Summer DUNKED the ball? Someone under 6 feet (no way she’s close to or taller than 6 feet), dunking is rare. Especially a female, I don’t know if there are any short females that can dunk. And even if they do, no way is it a windmill dunk! I don’t think you even see any WNBA players who can dunk do a windmill.
Summer’s athletic career is yet another exercise in a Funkyverse character being handed fame and success without ever lifting a finger. She never goes to the gym, she’s not even interested in sports other than the one she’s playing right now, and a high school girl who could dunk even once in 2009 or 2010 would have gone somewhere much better than Kent State – probably Tennessee or UConn. The first dunk in a WNBA game was in 2002, by Lisa Leslie, who was six foot five. But we’re apparently supposed to believe Summer actually did this. I prefer to interpret Keisha and Bull Bushka’s shocked faces as being appalled at how bad the writing is.
Summer dunking the ball, even just in practice, would have been NATIONAL news. She would have woke up the next morning to find Geno Auriemma, Pat Summitt, Kim Mulkey, Tara VanDerveer, Sherri Coale, Muffet McGraw, and 100 other college coaches lined up at the front door of the Taj-Moore-Hal. I recall this (at the time very young) website was incredulous over the dunk, and became even more so when it became clear that TB was going to do nothing with it and go right on back to BOOK TOUR!
Also falling in to the category of national news that just got moved on from with no real world fallout… a bomb threat grounding an airliner at one of the busiest airports in the country.
Any implication that both would be more newsworthy then some dumb guy from the sticks flogging a graphic novel is, of course, bullying.
21 September: Welp, that’s it for Pepper.
As long as someone in today’s strip dies, I’m not particular about who it is.
If the debris from the explosion takes out Dime Store Ross Geller and Batton Thomas, that would be even better.
Make it stop.
Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
(SNORE)
Today’s Crankfuckery
Pepper: Mr. Crankshaft, don’t put that much gasoline in the grill! It’s gonna explode the second it gets-(Ed ignites the grill, causing the grill to explode and Ed to get sent flying like Team Rocket) ignited.
If Ed blows up Pepper I don’t know if I’ll be happy that the dumb robot is gone or annoyed that Batty spent an entire month on a shaggy dog story.
As opposed to his usual finely-crafted arcs that blend sterling comedy and faultless plotting, ending in thrilling climaxes that engender both awe and respect?
Well like I said in the post, Batty is the master of going nowhere slowly so I imagine the actual ending is Ed does grill things, nothing bad happens to Pepper and that’s the end of it. Next week begins with some variation of the most horrifying words in Crankshaft: “Last time, you were telling me about…”
We haven’t seen Skip and Batton for months. Will absence really make the heart grow fonder?
(Hey, Batty, imagine how fond of them we’d be if they disappeared for years!)
22 September: Wouldn’t the debate over removing sidewalk access be more compelling than whatever he thought he was doing with Larry Dinkle?
When I read today’s strip, my first thought was that the removal of accessibility ramps would have been with the intent to make things more difficult for the AI Robots, and not to make life more difficult for those for whom the ramps were intended. Maybe I’m too generous.
The most generous thing is to think he didn’t .
In my assessment, it has certainly inspired a more heated response (at the other page at least) than anything related to Daddy Dinkle.
I typically abstain from either supporting or denouncing political cheap shots that are unrelated to the subject material in that comment section. Making a (misinformed and astoundingly vague) mention of “the government taking out all the ramps” is enough to get so many people frothy. Isn’t everyone tired of it all? I keep reading so many people say that they are, and yet. And yet.
So with saying that; well done to you, Tom? I guess? It brought out the replies and clicks and such. Yay?
The problem is that I doubt that was his intention. He really didn’t think about what that would mean.
That the worst of it: I can’t even tell what the intended effect is. This is a comic strip that once made a weeklong arc out of installing handicap ramps in front of Montoni’s, and then posting an “all welcome rainbow flag in the window. And now he seems to be taking the opposite position, that handicapped ramps are something to be torn up by an uncaring government, because… something, I guess.
And I like the comparison you’re making to clickbait, since that’s basically what Tom Batiuk does. He wants attention and awards and he’ll do anything to get them.
The problem is, Batiuk is too disconnected from humanity to even write good clickbait. It’s like watching the damned election ads from this cycle: “Hi folks, I’ll use common sense to lower taxes for ordinary working Americans, and stand up to those fat cats in Washington! My opponent takes dark money from corporations and will do their bidding! Vote for me, Literally Anyone!” (paid for by Definitely Not Dark Money Election Committee Inc.)
” Our robot waiter got an emergency call from your grandfather and took off”? Uh, isn’t that a problem of some sort? As in, your robot workers shouldn’t accept phone calls from any random person to do whatever? Looks like Pete and Mindy are gonna stand around and wait for the wacky hijinks to not ensue.
What’s Rachel up to? I think she said she was going to school for law (what?) somewhere late in FW but come on, we all know she’ll never escape Montoni’s. Might as well just bring her back and have her actually run the restaurant for Dork and Mindy. It’s not like she can do any worse than someone who let their only employee take time off to help an old man grill.
Rachel is one of three women in the Funkyverse I’d actually call attractive. (The other two are Mindy and Chien.) As with Chien, and any halfway-likable character who disappeared from the strip, I like to think she drove out of Westcenterburgcancerville and never looked back.
Rachel is one of three women in the Funkyverse I’d actually call attractive.
Same here (I also consider Chien, Marianne Winters, Act III Holly (her physical appearance from 2007 to 2014), Act II Donna, Act III Mickey Lopez-Bushka (specifically her appearance in 2014) and Act II / Act III Wicked Wanda to be attractive)
“Dork and Mindy”! Ha haaa, I love it!
I originally was going to title my post about Pete and Mindy’s relationship that but I looked and there were already a few posts using that name so I thought that might be overdoing it.
23 September: When the grill blows up, Ed can now blame the other heap of wreckage. Smart. Brains.
https://i.postimg.cc/GmTSPptX/Y2t-Ua-GUg-Rm-Fta-Wx5IENpcm-N1cy1FTkct-Nj-Yx-Mz-M2MQ.jpg
This panel made me think of Lovecraft’s The Festival.
https://i.postimg.cc/K83s7YjJ/Y2t-Ua-GUg-Rm-Fta-Wx5IENpcm-N1cy1FTkct-Nj-Yz-MDE1MQ.jpg
Pepper mangles human idioms and expressions. Crankshaft is mad because that’s his job?
Just blow the grill up already…
Today’s Crankfuckery
Pepper: No can do, Mr. Crankshaft. I’m not risking setting the entire town on fire.
24 September: Lasers do not work that way.
Ha, I have to defend my old stomping grounds on this one! Columbus gets ‘Blandville’ a lot because of the test-market thing, but I’d push back on the causation. Companies pick it because it’s a genuine cross-section of America, not because it’s featureless. It’s actually a city of nearly a million people with a $150+ billion economy and Intel’s massive new semiconductor plant going in.
I’ll admit the outer-ring suburbs can look like Anywhere, USA if that’s all you drive through. But neighborhoods like the Short North, German Village, and Clintonville have real independent food scenes and historic character. They can genuinely give East Coast neighborhoods a run for their money.
Les being paranoid is peak Les, and comparing Columbus to ’80s NYC is funny precisely because it’s so far off. It’s a pretty vibrant, modern midwestern capital these days — not a warzone, but not lifeless either.
Full disclosure: I went to school there and lived there for a while, so I’m biased. Honestly, if I hadn’t met a certain guy, I might still be there.
Pfft! Hiss! 😾
He doesn’t appear to appreciate any city that isn’t where they either publish comic books or make Republic serials.
I always heard Peoria was the test marketing capital of America. And not just because of the “will it play in Peoria?” saying, but for the same reason you said: it has the same demographics as America as a whole. Denver is another city I’ve heard being a test marketing hot spot. I remember seeing some strange products when I visited a couple times. It was the first place I ever saw one of thesse conglomerate soda flavors they have now. Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper Black, or something like that. I was in the middle of giving a training presentation. I had to stop and ask one of the attendees “does that can say what I think it does?” Such products are common now, but this was about 20 years ago.
One silver lining to higher soft drink prices is that Mr. Bwoeh is no longer drinking his daily Coca-Cola and has lost some weight. He refuses to pay more than $5.00 for a 12-pack.
There have been many oddities marketed by the soft drink companies. For example, Crystal Pepsi and Coca-Cola Blak. Remember Jolt Cola? Their slogan was “All the sugar and twice the caffeine”. Where was that when I was cramming for finals in college?
I’m one of those people who preferred New Coke and was sad to see it disappear.
Okay, so Lisa in the afterlife not only has the ability to make phone calls to the living, but she also has supernatural aerospace engineering ability to be able to notice cracked parts within airplane engines. (Keep in mind that when Lisa was alive, she was a lawyer, not an airplane mechanic.) For some reason, I’m not finding this easy to believe, but let’s leave that aside.
It would have been more reasonable for her to impersonate an airline executive and place a call to the maintenance department. “This is [Executive’s Name]. You need to pull [Airplane] out of service and do a full inspection. I have a tip that the trunnion mount may be cracked, and if it breaks while in flight the airplane could crash.” This would be much more helpful than phoning in a threat for a bomb that isn’t there.
Well she’s dead, not smart.
Also keep in mind that she knew there was going to be a catastrophic problem with the plane, and her first thought was to warn Les, and ONLY Les. Had Les listened to her, would she have let the plane take off (and let everyone else on board die)? We kind of have to assume that’s the case, since if her goal was to save anyone other than Les, she could have phoned in the bomb threat without trying to talk Les out of going at all.
Kinda makes Ghost Lisa come across as utterly reprehensible, but she’s also the same person who, when faced with a terminal diagnosis due to gross incompetence on the part of the doctor, DIDN’T launch a massive medical malpractice suit to get the licenses of everyone involved suspended, and instead spent all her time videotaping herself.
(Also, did the FAA and/or NTSB and/or FBI not investigate a bomb threat? You’d think they’d be VERY interested in someone calling in fake threats. Not that I think they’d be able to trace the call back to whatever hell Lisa is burning in, but not being able to find the source should, itself, be a major cause for concern. But, apparently, in the Batiukverse, such things just get shrugged off, just like the domestic terrorist bombing of a post office apparently wasn’t worth investigating. It’s called writing a quarter-inch from reality or whatever.)
That Lisa’s thought of advice to give to her child as she was growing up was not some handwritten notes or something but instead video tapes where her daughter is forced, at random events in her life, to watch her dying mother’s gaunt cancer face struggle to croak out words and includes telling Summer about the time she was raped. Or that said video tapes are also directed to haranguing her husband from beyond the grave and one very absurd tape addressed to Les’ future second wife. They pretty much show that Lisa was always nothing but a self-absorbed mediocrity taking the path of no resistance towards every problem that arose, yet for some reason had an unearned sense of entitlement and superiority.
In that respect though she really was perfect for Les. Truly a match made in Westview.
One video to her daughter referencing milestones Lisa wouldn’t get to experience with her, along with the chance to tell Summer that she loved her and to honor her memory by having a beautiful life, would have been sufficient. Videos to anyone else, including Les and the next wife (that one was truly gross) to the point where Les had an entire box set displayed on his mantel, was just micromanagement from the grave.
I have a spiritual problem with the whole “Lisa calls in the bomb threat” story. If you’re dead and can communicate with the living, and you use that power to save their physical lives, what does that say about the afterlife? What does that say about how much Lisa wants Les to be with her? Is she delaying Les’ entry to the afterlife as much as possible? That certainly makes sense from our perspective, but I doubt it’s the story Batiuk wants to tell.
This is why I’m not a religious person. If you think logically about what we’re expected to believe, it all falls apart pretty quickly.
25 September: He’s having another nightmare.
“Hokum” is too good a word for this…
Welp, that’s a cartoonish twist that befits if classic Act 1 antics were still happening in the 90s when the Terminator was in its prime.
I throw up hands and just assume we’ll see Crank wake up in bed tomorrow, but with the “Crankshaft Saves the World” stuff earlier in Act 4 it’s really hard to predict now. Will say if this extents to the full Pepper arc I’m expecting and demanding that it has to be a homage to the Dallas scene of Pam waking up to Bobby in the shower.
Perhaps I have seen so much for so long that my standards are whittled to a nub, but I think this week’s Crankshaft have been OK overall. Wednesday’s middle panel pause for the setup and delivery against Ed got a light laugh out of me. T1000 showing up today is simple goofiness. It’s fine.
Yesterday Crankfuckery
Pepper: Ed, I’d rather have me or my friend ignite the grill. Why? Because I’m VERY concerned for your safety.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Ed runs away in fear)
T-800: (yelling towards Ed) So is that a no for lighting the grill?
Sorry, just want to circle back to that January 16 strip and the Trellium D lining of Montoni’s.
It is somehow _so_ Tom Batiuk to be dropping a _Star Trek: Enterprise_ reference four years after the show went off the air.
26 September: Yuck. Clank, Clank, Aaaargh is the hill he’s dying on.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Pepper: No. Sarah Connor has been dead for almost three decades.
T-800: FUCK!
(the T-800 sulks off)
One thing to note: The only time a T-800 spoke while as a endoskeleton was in Terminator Salvation, where the T-RIP (a T-800 prototype) lured John Connor using Kyle Resse’s voice
Re: Today’s strip
Batty has entered a new dimension by trailblazing a degree of stupid not heretofore seen by comickind.
As was to be expected, this whole thing goes nowhere; it’s just revisiting Act I wackiness with a Holtron/Scapegoat combo character. Although I feel that this lends credence to my prediction that Batty will announce his retirement next year.
The last few years of FW were filled with a lot of wistfulness and other things that, in retrospect, make it obvious that Batty was planning on wrapping things up. You have the introduction of Batton Thomas, Atomik Komix being used for things like Batty’s fanfiction where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made up, TimeMop showing up in the background, random Act I callbacks and revisits, Dinkle being set up to move over to Crankshaft with the St. Spires stuff, the Lisa’s Story movie which effectively closed out Les’ story, and so on.
These last two years, meanwhile, have seen the interminable Batton Death March, the random and rushed tying up of Max and Hannah’s marital status, an excessive focus on Dinkle thinking about his father in reflection to his own life and career and now a month dedicated to what amounts to trying to recapture Act I style zaniness. It’s giving me very similar vibes and I won’t be surprised if next year Ed randomly declares he’s retiring from bus driving as TB’s way of announcing it much like he did with Ruby.
He ought to have done that years ago.
I’ve said it elsewhere, but I just don’t see Batiuk retiring voluntarily. His health or syndicate financial realities may force an end to things, but I do believe he’s way too invested in being a “writer” (and hasn’t got the self-awareness to realize he’s crap at it) to stop of his own volition.
27 September: Funny books have decimated Jeff’s ability to appreciate his surroundings. This is somehow a good thing.
Is this the end of Pepper Oni? Will she return on Monday? Will she be a fixture at Montoni’s going forward? Is it off to the Isle of Forgotten Characters for Pepper Oni?
It was a story arc that started differently from what we have become accustomed to in Crankshaft. It’s nice to have a little whimsy once in a while. Unfortunately, as time went on, the story arc went from “whimsy” to “what are we doing here?” The final week ended a bit stronger for me, possibly because Ed was featured. Admittedly, a couple of the strips last week earned a like from me.
That’s something which happens more than it should.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Pam then gets up and slaps Jeff)
Way to shit all over the moment, Jeff.
28 September: At least Pam not remembering who her dad is isn’t the robot bullshit.