Last time, we saw Summer’s on-the-court play take a step up only to run into a wall when she and her team got trounced. She’d also gotten caught up in the ongoing love triangle between her father and two women with rather poor taste. Despite Les and Cayla officially being a thing, TB saw need to throw doubt on the relationship as Susan Smith — that sinister suicidal succubus — proceeded to butt her way into things, a process made all the easier because Les is an oblivious moron and Cayla is a character with absolutely no spine. Summer’s importance after the first few months took a backseat as Batty began diving into fiction’s most laughably unbelievable love triangle and unfortunately for her, 2011 is going to go much the same way as 2010 for a while.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel as Batty will finally put this interminable storyline to rest. But not before he goes in guns blazing, pushing Summer out of the way in the process. Right from the jump, 2010 ends with Cayla and Susan at Les’ New Year’s party. As the clock ticks closer and closer to midnight, they both anxiously look around for their dickheaded dreamboat, each hoping to be the one that he rings in 2011 with.
But alas, the bespectacled beefcake is already claimed as they find him instead making out with the ghost of his dead wife who, need I remind you, called in a bomb threat just a week or so earlier.
Summer and Keisha, meanwhile, decide to ring in the new year with a little one-on-one.
But Keisha either intended this whole game as a ruse to talk about important issues or she simply resorted to dirty tricks once she started losing to Summer. Both are equally plausible.
Dissatisfied with Summer’s inability to know what her dad is thinking at all times, Keisha then decides to switch it up.
Keisha says that maybe the two of them should try nudging their parents closer together and Batty decides to end the week with a fancy (for him) narrative transition to show Les being an absolute prick under the guise of him just being a little frazzled. Of course, we know better.
After some “hilarious” Dinkle and the Band shenanigans, it’s another of Les’ endless book tours with some never before seen college friend of Les, since Batty never ever shows his characters actually attending college 99% of the time. He spends the entire trip back from the airport muttering to himself like a complete lunatic about Summer’s chances in the tournament but it seems fate had different plans.
We’re then regaled with the tale of the destruction of Summer’s knee along with the death Les’ dreams of not having to shell out money for his daughter’s higher education.
Having watched five too many inspirational sports movies and conflating them with real life, Batty decides to have the Lady ‘Goats do the logical thing and forefeit the friggin’ game to “be with their co-captain.” Because that’s something real teams do all the time of course and not just a cheap attempt at trying to wring sentimental pathos out of this wet rag of a story.
In a show of good sportsmanship, the other team refused the forfeit meaning the game was going to be replayed (does this actually happen?) much to Summer’s delight.
Summer will, of course, need surgery but not quite yet which she’s also happy about because it means she gets to inspirationally cheer her teammates on.
But alas, this strip is a quarter-inch from reality and thus unlike an inspirational sports movie or an anime where good vibes and the power of friendship can will even the smallest minnow to victory, Summer’s encouragement doesn’t prevent the team from losing and ending their season. Which kind of makes it seem like Central Catholic was so offended by the whole forfeit thing that they refused it simply so they could kick the asses of the She-Goats once more for good measure. Just to show them who’s boss.
With the tournament done, Summer now has to get her knee surgery and Cayla’s there to support Les in what’s obviously his hour of need. But oh no, that horrible harlot has decided to make her presence known here too!
But that’s not all! With Summer’s surgery a success, Bull shows up at Chateau Moore to offer his services and help Summer rehab her knee.
This is but one of the many acts of kindness that Bull has paid and will pay to his former victim that will go unappreciated by Les. Instead, Les and Cayla will opine about how awkward it is that his former bully is now helping his daughter as if he and Bull hadn’t been friends since before Summer was even born. To cap things off, the vile vixen also stops by to bring Summer’s homework and of course Les has to get in a snide little remark.
After a month or so of Dinkle, Owen and Cody’s nonsense, it’s back to Summer’s knee but not before TB decides to off the long-retired Coach Stropp.
Summer talks to Bull a bit about he and her dad knowing one another. This is the infamous week where it’s revealed that Bull’s bullying of Les was actually a ruse the whole time cooked up to protect Les from even worse bullies. A revelation that is utterly pointless as like so many other things with Bull and Les after Act I, it’s promptly ignored.
Summer, who’d been largely positive about her rehab, is now starting to feel the effects of inactivity which has made her cranky. But she’s about to get cheered up by a certain Saint’s Son.
After about 3 and a half years, Darin and his bride creep their way back into the comic to take their rightful place amongst the main cast. Well Darin does anyway as he and his funny books crew will come to increasingly dominate the strip; Jessica just kind of hangs around. We learn that he accepted a buy out from wherever he was working for unspecified reasons (they went under? who knows) and is effectively a jobless, homeless bum. Except not really because Les immediately gets him a job at, where else, Montoni’s and allows Darin to move in with them.
Summer’s excited but Cayla isn’t because god forbid she ever be proactive about anything in her life.
After the requisite month’s worth of strips is spent on reintroducing Darin to the strip’s dozens of readers, we move on to the next part of this grand tapestry that Tom Batiuk so skillfully weaves. Ann Apple, the homeless schizoid-turned-literary agent, calls to tell Les that someone wants to option Lisa’s Story into an actual movie. And not just anyone, but Hollywood! Yes, the entirety of the film industry is apparently just some monolithic entity and it needs to feed itself on the self-pitying misery literature produced by a mediocre and delusionally self-important high school English teacher.
Summer, being slightly more proactive than either her father or his milksop girlfriend, decides to take matters into her own hands when Les begins to falter.
Well that should be the end of it but Les himself has to agree which means a week of him sitting on a bench and talking to Ghost Lisa about all the ways in which Hollywood will ruin it. Personally I feel like all they’d need to do is give it a more accurate title; Tuesdays with Boring should work.
In the end, the spectral Lisa is able to set Les straight and get him to agree to it.
With everything coming up Les, he and Cayla sit on the Sacred Throne aka the porch swing and Cayla decides to tell Les “I love you.” Les can only fumble around like an idiot and not say the words back which upsets Cayla who decides they should put the brakes on things for the moment. This is mostly a test to try and get Les to stop being an idiot and Les, predictably, fails it.
But Cayla has made a mistake and the terrible temptress decides to make her move and fill the newly opened up woman-shaped hole in Les’ life. Alone in a classroom, Susan locks lips with the hunky man of her dreams.
Les now, finally, realizes that he has two women in love with him and decides to tell Funky and Crazy Harry about his dilemma. Funky and Crazy do what any reasonable people would do when confronted with the idea of Les the Lothario and proceed to laugh in his face. This pisses him off and causes him to storm out of Montoni’s like a baby.
We then get what is an all-timer in terms of Les’ unwarranted self-importance where Funky is forced to apologize to him and he snidely tells Funky “yes you did” to Funky’s admission that he went too far.
And it’s not just Funky as Cayla comes by to also apologize to Les for getting upset at him being an emotionally stunted dunce.
Keisha decides to send her mother a little image she just so happened to have.
Les explains the whole deal of what happened with Susan to Cayla who accepts it with little hesitation but worries about the reaction of others as the picture gets passed around. Summer, embarassed over the whole thing, decides to cosplay as the Unabomber to hide her identity.
The photo has quickly spread around school so Nate calls Les and Susan in so they can explain what it’s about. Any blowback Les could have received is immediately dealt with by Susan sacrificing herself and taking all the blame instead.
Susan decides to resign from her position and tells Les that she’s making a clean break from Westview entirely. Les makes a bunch of pithy and somewhat insulting remarks over the whole thing like the giant tool that he is.
And then decides to bid goodye to Susan with what might be one of the most eyerollingly stupid and infuriating things he says in the entire 50 year run of the strip.
“Heck of a kiss,” are you fucking kidding me? What a Grade-A turbo douche.
Susan gets one final sad and lonely trip down the halls of Westview High, reminiscing over her life there before exiting the school and thus the strip entirely.
Perhaps because people might have thought that Susan went off to try and kill herself once more, in the waning days of the strip Batty will randomly follow up this story with the immediate aftermath. Susan stops at a bridge, gets out and looks over the side but gets a pep talk by the conveniently passing by Ed Crankshaft.
But, and this is a real knee slapper, it turns out that Susan’s car merely ran out of gas. Ha ha, you thought she was going to toss herself off of the bridge because she’d tried to commit suicide before! Isn’t that hilarious!? Suicide Suzy, that’s what they call her!
Thus ends the dumbest love triangle in history and all I really got out of it, besides Les being insufferable and Cayla being Cayla, is that for whatever reason TB really seemed to develop a strong dislike for Susan. Why that is, I can’t really say. I’m sure if you asked him he would say he was just adding some drama and didn’t mean anything by it but come on, I don’t think it’s possible to read that love triangle storyline and Susan’s role in it as an antagonist and roadblock for Cayla, who Keisha actively dislikes and who Summer doesn’t seem overly fond of either, and then get that week in October 2022 clearly playing off of her long ago suicide attempt and think that Batty has anything other than disdain for Susan. It’s one of the most baffling things about the entire strip, there’s no real reason for it but it’s there, clear as day.
Speaking of, while the identity of who took and spread around that photo is unknown I’m 100% convinced it was Keisha. I don’t really have any reason not to think otherwise and completely ruining another person’s life would be an easy way to get that person out of her mother’s way. I’d wonder why she cares so much about making sure that Cayla gets with Les, of all people, but I think in reality it’s not like Cayla could do much better. She’s such a nonentity as a person that I think it would drive most people insane but Les loves someone like that who exists to feed his own ego. Also, if we’re going off the idea that Keisha was behind the photo then that makes her easily one of the most rotten characters in the entire strip.
You’ll notice that once again, Summer pretty quickly disappeared from this little recap because as I’ve said before Batty obviously lost interest in her pretty quickly. After she blows out her knee she mostly exists as scene filler for the first half of the year. But that will change at least a little bit because next time will cover the rest of Summer’s time in high school.
“This is the infamous week where it’s revealed that Bull’s bullying of Les was actually a ruse the whole time cooked up to protect Les from even worse bullies.”
This raises so many questions, some of which the strip may have answered and some it may not have; I don’t have access to those old strips.
I probably don’t need to tell you this, but you’ve just demonstrated that you’ve thought way more about all this than Tom Batiuk ever did.
All he’s done is give Les more reasons to resent him.
I’ve always assumed that middle-aged Jerry Bushka was just lying about his former actions to make himself look less bad. Creepy Les would go along with it because it would feed a smug sense of superiority by implying that he wasn’t a friendless dweeb who got pushed around.
My guess is that Batty intended that the flashback was a one off thing: Bull gets wind of someone even worse going after Les and so does him a solid this one time and Batty being who he is, is bad at conveying this. Of course that just opens up more questions. Like why wouldn’t the other bullies have just kept at it after this one time? Bull would have had to keep up the fake bullying the entire time to ward off the real bullies and given that Les was there laughing while Bull was pounding his own fist to make the fake noises, he’d know it was all fake. So why hold a grudge over the bullying?
Of course the logical answer is that there’s no logic at all to it and it makes no sense. Batty got the idea in his head that this revelation would be some brilliant little twist and then, having gotten it out of his system, forgot about it as soon as he was finished writing it.
Here’s the week long arc, including the infamous “yellow liquid” strip.
April 4, 2011 – the setup
April 5, 2011 – Les being Les
April 6, 2011 – ewww
April 7, 2011 – so. many. bricks. BRIX.
April 8, 2011 – the oldest trick in the book
April 9, 2011 – fin
Thanks for posting the original strips.
Where were all those alleged bullies during Act III? It’s the insufferable adult Les who could have used a good pounding once in a while. That would have wiped the self-satisfied smirk off his face.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Batty wouldn’t allow such a thing happen to his creator’s pet. It’s amazing how tone deaf Batty became to how his readers perceived Les.
TB: My readers love Les Moore. They want more Moore. (smirk).
Readers: 🤢🤮
It’s damn annoying to have to deal with two people fixating on a choad like Les.
At the time, I couldn’t figure out what it was Susan had done that required anything more than waiting like a week for the gossip value of “two teachers had a KISS” to die back, but on looking at the story arc as a whole, I still don’t understand it.
Crankshaft stopping and trying to save Susan from the suicide that isn’t on her mind is a pretty good joke, though.
4 October: Not knowing how to download the app is not a punchline.
In a show of good sportsmanship, the other team refused the forfeit meaning the game was going to be replayed (does this actually happen?)
I’ve seen cases where a football team intentionally takes a penalty, and the other team declines it. There was a college team whose punter had died during the off season. For the first punt of the season, they brought out 10 men and no punter for sort of a “missing man formation” to honor the deceased. They let the clock run out and took a 5 yard delay a game penalty, but the other team declined it. Either they knew beforehand this was happening, or they just had the decency to realize what was going on.
I also remember Nykesha Sales, who wrecked her knee when she was one points short of the UConn school scoring record. They arranged with an opponent to let Sales score a layup, then UConn let the opponent score a layup, then the game started at 2-2. (Six UConn players have since exceeded Sales’ total, and a 7th tied it.)
But the idea that a game would be postponed because a player hurt their knee is absolutely ludicrous. If Westview wanted to forfeit rather than play with one of their reserves, the state governing body would declare the other team the winner, and that would be that. They certainly wouldn’t have let them “decline the forfeit” days after the fact! By this time, high school sports championship games ended up on all the regional sports channels there were.
It’s also another example of some faceless person having their dreams destroyed because the main characters have to make everything about them. Some girl on that Westview team went to every practice, backed up Summer, came off the bench in every game, did all the work outs, and deserved a chance to compete. And if Tom Batiuk ever watched any inspirational sports movies, he’d know that out-of-nowhere performances from obscure players often define these stories. But no: if Lisa Junior can’t play, Westview takes its ball and goes home. And shame on Bull Bushka for not putting a stop to this.
BEEJ, I’d give this more Likes if I could. Good stuff.
Why focus on irrelevant side characters? Nobody wants them. The masses clamor for more Les!
I don’t want the story to focus on irrelevant side characters; just acknowledge that they exist. No school would forfeit a playoff game just because one player got hurt (short of a Hank Gathers situation). Every competitive sports team nurtures a “next man up” mentality for situations like this. Players can get hurt or ejected. Especially in basketball, where you can foul out. This is exactly why backup players exist, and Coach Bushka would know this. Again, it was his job to put a stop to this nonsense. If the team walked out anyway, then he would little choice but to forfeit for being unable to field a team.
It’s not like Summer almost died on the field like Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills a few years ago.
I played four years of high school basketball and never heard of, or read about, a game postponed for an injury. Games were postponed only for inclement weather, power outages, and referee shortages. The leagues did everything the could to reschedule those games. The only forfeits I can think of involved ineligible players.
If the star player on an opposing team got hurt, my team’s thoughts would have been, ‘Oh, tough break. Sorry about that, but we have a better chance of winning now.’ As Herm Edwards famously said, “‘”You play to win the game!” It’s a competition, not a social event.
The postponement would not only deprive a player of the chance to play, but also inconvenience everyone who paid to attend.
Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley: Everybody, game’s over! Summer Moore fucked it up for everyone so let’s just go home!
A scenario like the one Batty writes about exist only in a certain cartoonist’s imagination. I doubt even an ‘ABC After School Special’ would touch that one.
That’s why he trots out his bullcrap about it being called writing. He’d like to live in that kind of world….. more’s the pity.
Damar Hamlin is another good example. The NFL stopped that game, and never finished it.
Hank Gathers had an irregular heartbeat, collapsed during a conference tournament game, and died later that day. The conference canceled the tournament, and declared Loyola Marymount (Gathers’ team) their NCAA representative. Which led to the memorable sight of Gathers’ buddy Bo Kimble shooting his free throws left handed, as Gathers did.
Another example I thought of was the sad story of Chapecoense. They came out of nowhere to reach the finals of the South American club soccer tournament, but most of the team was killed in a plane crash on the way to the game. Their Colombian opponent requested that Chapecoense be awarded the championship, which they were. The Brazilian Football Association wanted them to play their last regular season game with reservists, but both Chapecoense and their opponents said “Nah.” Technically, both teams forfeited that game.
>but also inconvenience everyone who paid to attend
That’s why I mentioned the TV coverage. A state championship game, even for small-school girls basketball, would probably be televised on SportsChannel Ohio. Which means they can’t just stop the game and move it to another day unless there’s a damn good reason to.
All these decisions were made by the governing body, not the players involved. And they weren’t something the players could refuse like, it was a 10-yard holding penalty But it’s the Funkyverse, so the important characters are the only ones whose opinions matter.
(I’m gonna try this a third time. There’s some glitch in the works.)
Oct. 4: Um, is there a panel missing at the end of this strip?
Oh well, at least it’ not The Great Apple Glut of ’26. Man, did that suck.
Yesterday’s Crankfuckery
Thus ends the Apple Week
Today’s Crankfuckery (today’s the 18th anniversary of Lisa’s death)
(Out of a sudden, Masky McDeath shows up, holding a badly beaten up Les)
Thank you.
Few single FW strips piss me off more than the 06/11 entry with Funky groveling at Les The Mighty’s feet for “screwing up”. The entire set up, tone, and language presented structures it all to portray Les as if he’s some kind of absolute domineering person who is justified in demanding fealty from all who deign themselves worthy to enter his presence. “Sit”, says King Les upon his throne, extending his grace and mercy to the lowly peon who dared defied his majesty.
Harry and Funky respond to a situation in a manner that humans who have all called each other “lifelong friends” act, and the response is regarding a matter that is ultimately of such little consequence, or should be among people who are at their age. This isn’t fucking high school anymore.
Such utter reprehensible bullshit.
That one really needed to be fleshed out. “So tell me about it.” Yes, Les, please tell Funky and the rest of us what the hell your problem is! What did Funky “screw up” exactly? What is he even apologizing for? As usual, Batiuk cuts around the explanation because he doesn’t know how to write it. But to be fair, nobody could make this series of events work.
It is all very simple: Les has never understood what he looks like to people around him.
Tom Batiuk has never understood what Les looks like to the people around him.
Tom Batiuk has never understood people.
If he did, he’d understand what he was doing to infuriate his mom.
He can depict a loutish incel without understanding why he’d be a fist magnet.
I kind of agree, except it’s not hard for me to imagine actors making this work. You need to cast someone as Les who can convey that he’s feeling a pain that isn’t quite rational or proportionate but also doesn’t know how to back down, and cast in Funky someone who can convey that he thought he had been doing normal horsing around and had no idea he was going to set off The Big Blowup. It’d be a decent acting exercise to try, anyway.
Unfortunately, the comic strip medium limits how much the faces and body language can carry, so makes it easier for the scene to read bad.
Rex Morgan MD lifting wholesale the Masone-Cindy-Valentine Theater story is embarrassing, even for Rex Morgan MD.
I wish they’d go all the way, and have Ed Crankshaft walk by. It’d be hilarious to see another cartoonist rip off Tom Batiuk the way he rips off everyone else.
Heaven help me, I’m agreeing with Mud Mountain Murphy about something…
Apply this logic to Ed’s desire for comic books at the drugstore too.
5 October: This will provide heat, not illumination.
This promises to be the moral equivalent of all of those air travel arcs where Batiuk feels as he’s being slighted by being treated like the person he actually is.
I don’t understand the part about Susan Smith leaving Westview High because she kissed Les Moore. While I attended high school the art teacher was dating the mechanical drawing teacher. Nobody was that shocked or horrified. No one had to leave. I heard they married later on.
Some of my workplaces have had rules. Married couples couldn’t work for the same company. That was forbidden because if there were staff reductions, both members of the marriage wouldn’t lose their jobs at the same time. That was the case for a couple at one company where I worked. They got married and the husband left to work elsewhere. Later on he found another job in another state. The wife who still worked in my department resigned to follow him there.
I’m guessing Susan left Westview High as a walk of shame. She had to leave because it was Les Moore. She must have been mocked mercilessly by the staff and students.
Student #1: Miss Smith kissed Mr. Moore! Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!
Student #2: It must have been like kissing a frog. How can anybody be that desperate!
At the time the story came out in the comic strip, a Funky Winkerbean snarker on the Comics Kingdom likened Susan Smith’s departure to a “Loser Leave Town” match in pro wrestling.
In my example about the teachers who had a relationship at my high school. It was the late 1970s. People were a lot more open to things in those days.
For example, in every class he taught, a math teacher brought a Rolodex of photos girls had given him, and he displayed it on his desk. Some of those girls were as young as 14 or 15 years old. Quite a few of us found it objectionable, but the school administrators did nothing. The teacher earned the nickname “Uncle Pervy” from the Cheech and Chong sketch. The name “Uncle Pervy” really worked well because the teacher’s last name was a perfect two-syllable homophone. Looking back on the situation, I wonder how he got away with it. He wasn’t tall or even that good-looking. He had a square head like Dinkle. If he tried it nowadays, the parents would make him disappear permanently.
A friend of mine subscribes to our graduation class’s reunion page on Facebook. At the reunion a couple of years ago, someone tried to get this teacher to attend. It confirms my decision never to attend any reunions. I don’t want to associate with anyone who thinks that inviting that vile human being was a good idea.
Batiuk doesn’t live in the real world.
6 October: Jesus Fricking Corbett…..stop whining about funny books.
RE: Tues. 10/6’s C’Shaft:
Let’s see: a WWII veteran who must’ve already been a teen when Action Comics #1 came out in 1938 and who was illiterate for much of his life is suddenly worried about comic bo…I’m sorry, COMIC BOOKS?
Is Ed now going to be the latest Funkyverse character to go off an a tangent about how looking at the pictures in Flash #123 changed his life? By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!
As someone who likes comics a lot and is even gaining an appreciation for older comics I might have dismissed thanks to things like the DC Finest line… I both laughed and rolled my eyes near out of my skull when I saw today’s strip.
Why would Ed Crankshaft, a man who was illiterate until relatively recently, care about comic books? What’s even the point of any of the characters if even Ed is now a comic book obsessed nitwit? Just change the name to Komix Korner and have DSH, Crazy Harry, Pete, Darin, Batton and Jff hang around the store waxing poetic about Flash Gordon, Barry Allen and the Phantom Empire until the heat death of the universe because that’s what Batty seemingly wants to do anyway.
But all must return to 1950s comic books eventually. Every character’s personality must be subsumed into liking these things that Batty read as a child. Remember when Crazy Harry was, you know, eccentric and his comic book interest and geekery was an aspect of that eccentricity instead of being his entire personality?
Because if they don’t, they’re horrible people who laugh cruelly at his self inflicted suffering.
Christ, I’d take a character with a normal comic book hobby at this point. Like someone who’s seen a Marvel movie, knows what Watchmen is, or appreciates how mainstream comic books have become. Everything here is a narrow-minded nostalgia trip back to the imperious Rexall in Akron in 1953 and its precious spinner racks. Which most comic book collectors hate, because they’re not good for preserving condition.
Great post! You really brought back a lot of old SoSF memories. There were sort of two Act IIIs. There was early Act III, when Batty still kind of gave a shit (albeit in his usual half-assed way) and later Act III, when he quite clearly just plain stopped trying (so to speak). That NYE strip was IMO the single most harrowing FW strip of Act III and maybe ever. Given what early Act III was like, perhaps losing interest was in fact in everyone’s best interests.
It was always so strange how BatHam would redeem Bull Bushka, then heap indignities upon him anyway. He went to great lengths to depict Les and Bull as friends, then he went ahead and lopped his head off, then had Les yawn and fuss his way through the funeral. BatTrope never forgave his own creation from bullying Les in stories he himself wrote. Think about how bizarre that is.
Because it’s all about his crappy childhood.
I’ve said before — and I’ll probably end up addressing it again when this retrospective gets to that point — that it seems obvious that Batty had a general plan with what he wanted to do for the first few years of Act III which was to show how Les deals with being a single dad and how he eventually is able to move on once his daughter graduates and he remarries. Now I’m not saying that he did it well — lord knows he didn’t — and of course any character that wasn’t Les didn’t really matter but you can at least see that there was an actual plan that he managed to follow through on.
I do wonder if he entertained ending it in 2012 because there’s some funky (heh) stuff like the fact the whole Lisa’s Story plot doesn’t get touched at all; it’s not until 2013 when it’s revisited and then becomes Les’ major plot for most of the rest of the series. There’s also that dumb week where Batty, via Fred, tells the readers (Darin) about all the old places he lived in. If he did then he clearly decided not to out of stubborn refusal which then leads us into what you termed late Act III i.e. the final decade of the strip. From that point on Bats is clearly making up everything as he goes and starts to fixate more on his interests over any real story.
The whole deal with Bull is also a victim of that. In retrospect those stories from 2011/2012 with Bull helping out Summer and the revelation of his bullying feel like something you’d do if you wanted to settle things between the characters because you’re putting a bow on things. But Batty kept going and so hit the reset button on it and every time Les and Bull interact it just keeps going back to the same beat of Les thinking of Bull as his bully.
As you said, after a point TB stopped caring. We can mock his awkward and hacky attempts at storytelling in early Act III or Act II but he’s at least still mostly trying. The last near 15 years though in both Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft is a man who’s clearly lost interest in what he’s doing but refuses to actually step away.
You’re totally correct. Act III was shaping up to be all about the foibles and tribulations Les had to endure re: being a single widowed dad with a daughter who was basically his polar opposite. Plus he had a whole gigantic cast of characters to catch up with, and that proved to be way, way more work than Tom was willing to put in.
So he had Ghost Lisa popping up all the time instead. But then he played the interracial dating prestige arc card with Cayla, which put him in an awkward situation, as he couldn’t just drop that thread without looking like he used it for cheap attention. So, after years of painstaking pathos, he finally had Cayla force herself on Les and “seal the deal”, as they say.
Which created a new problem: how could he keep using Les’ dead first wife (and promote his infamous cancer book) after Les finally married Cayla? Well, he tried diaries, VHS tapes (later baked to DVD) and bringing Frankie back for a cameo, but that all wore thin pretty quickly. But it was his biggest “storytelling” crutch, and without it he was lost. Thus, the last ten years of the strip, where literally almost nothing happened, aside from Bull being cruelly killed.
Both Yesterday and Today’s Crankfuckery
(ZZZZZZZ)
7 October: It’s Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions, not Stupid Answers.
The fact that Les rejected both Kayla and Susan for a New Year’s Eve kiss should have been the end of their interest in him. That’s a pretty harsh declaration of disinterest, even if they don’t know he mentally chose to kiss his long-dead wife instead.
I recently read that Fahrenheit 451, the book so controversial in the Batiukverse that parents tried to burn down two bookstores for selling it, has been made part of the mandatory statewide high school curriculum — in Texas.
Did Les actually indicate any romantic interest in Susan? It’s not much of a love triangle if the central person only desires one of the other two.
Hell, he never indicated in any romantic interest in Cayla. He straight up told her she was gonna be second banana to Lisa, and Cayla was 100 percent fine with that.
Which is why Cayla should have left Les the second she got what she wanted out of him. The relationship only makes sense if she wanted him for something. Les is an asshole, but he’s not an abuser, a cheater, or overly demanding of physical affection. If a woman wanted to marry him for status – which is the only reason any woman ever would – there are worse guys to have to feign affection towards.
Not once did he ever seem to see Susan as anything more than a colleague, friend and protege. Susan was the aggressor in the whole thing which means that that she was cast as the antagonist for getting in the way of Les and Cayla and thus indicates to me Batty’s own dislike of the character for whatever reason.
Giving how Les treated Susan, I don’t think he was much of a friend to her. Of course that could be said about anyone in the Funkyverse.
Well it’s Les after all. He expects his lifelong best friend to grovel as punishment for the type of razzing friends do with one another so treating Susan, or anyone, with smug condescension is pretty much his baseline.
And yet Susan was chosen as the mouthpiece for the strip’s True-Art-Is-Angsty soapboxing, the woman being the one to give the grand speech bubble retort to the anti-Wit parents and then convince Les on the final cover for the in-universe Lisa’s Story book. Batiuk seemed to think she served the job of an extension of Les’s author-minded will for melodramatic justification, but drew a hard line on the possibility of them getting together (which considering the whole teenage backstory thing probably has a decent about of justification anyways, but still it is an abrupt route out).