For Summer Moore, the future seemed to be bright. She’d managed to return from a knee injury and lead the Lady Scapegoats to a presumably gutsy championship win while sick as a dog. The strength of her performance in high school as well as help from Coach Bushka led to her and Keisha getting offered scholarships from the greatest of all universities that experienced National Guard related tragedies in the Akron metro area in 1970. With high school now behind her, readers were left wondering at just what Tom Batiuk would be able to do with Summer as a young adult attempting to find a life for herself on her own. Unfortunately for these theoretical (as in likely nonexistant) readers, it’ll be a slow slide into oblivion but not before she gets to play a somewhat central role in one more story before getting shipped off to Purgatory U.
Graduation of course included a Dead Lisa Tape where the nazgul nag implored her daughter to “follow her heart.” Summer informs dear old dad that she intends do just that…
…by deciding to fire off Zanzibar’s Gun and take that trip to Africa that Les won back at the Save Our Sports raffle.
Summer knows that her father is a doughy, out of shape, middle aged geek so she’s also brought in Bull to help whip Les into shape for the big climb, much to his chagrin.
Les also gets some additional “help” in the form of Crazy Harry lending him a bunch of old Tarzan comics.
I’m sure they’d be useful if Les encounters situations with which he’d need to play role of an outdated and culturally questionable jungle adventure hero and given the things Batty has done that wouldn’t have been outside the realm of possibility. But fortunately (or unfortunately) it won’t go in that direction so the comics are as useless as Harry.
Batty does decide, however, to take a brief detour from the training in order to dedicate a week of Les’ daughter and his bride-to-be going through an old yearbook and laughing at what a loser he used to be.
Still leading up to the main event, we get some more training and what I believe is the very first continuity snarling appearance of the rotting, barely alive version of Ed Crankshaft in Act III.
The Moores also go shopping for some gear and Les takes the opportunity to tell Summer that he will be an annoying jackass the entire trip, possibly out of revenge for Summer making him go on it. Summer presumably is now hoping that he suffers from one of any number of deaths on the hike.
With the preparations done, Cayla takes Les and Summer to the airport having decided not to go with them. She says it’s because she “doesn’t do camping” but for all we know she was probably looking forward to getting rid of Les for a few weeks; or maybe I’m putting more stock into her character than she deserves.
After an inane week dedicated to Funky naming his new car, father and daughter have arrived in Tanzania and Les immediately endears himself to their local guide by making good on his threat of incessantly performing his Dr. Livingston shtick. We know that this story was based on an actual trip Batty took so I can only pray for the sanity of the other hikers that the real deal was nowhere near as annoying as his fictional counterpart.
There’s also other people with them on this trip of course, most notably Dan who will exist to I guess be even more of a pathetic loser than Les, and a kitten who managed to stowaway in Dan’s luggage.
Naturally though, a big part of this trip is Les continuing to make an ass out of himself to the annoyance of both the characters and the readers.
He also continues to whine once Kilimanjaro is pointed out to him and one begins to suspect even more that Summer and James are hoping that he doesn’t make it to the top with them.
Unfortunately for them Les just happens to be The Thing That Couldn’t Die so they’re left to deal with his childish whining.
He also has trouble dealing with the altitude and thanks to Crazy Harry’s comic books begins hallucinating about Shanna the She-Devil and all the other white savior comic characters of yore.
As they approach the top, the group camps out in a snow storm and once it passes Les falls on his ass and Summer rightly laughs at him.
At the end of July, after a few more jokes at Dan’s expense, the group finally manages to make it to the summit.
Having reached the top it’s now time to make the trek back down. Thankfully Batty has the sense to not subject us to another entire month of Les being a pathetic annoyance and Dan being pathetically useless. But sadly, TB shows us that Les has decided not to respect Mother Earth by polluting one of her natural wonders with garbage.
Having made their way back, they all receive their certificate of authenticities and Les has to make one more terrible pun. It’s a wonder that James didn’t gut him and leave his rotting carcas in the jungle so the animals could choose to starve rather than eat his remains. Incredible restraint from this man.
Of course even on the way back home Les refuses to stop with his horseshit and Summer looks thoroughly finished with him as well.
Once back at the Taj Moore-hal, the pair have a lot of interesting and insightful takeaways from their trip.
After another month or so of doofy stories about band camp, Pete’s imaginary battles with the Lord of the Late while his best friend and said friend’s wife move all of his stuff and Cory enlisting in the Army, we get a week dedicated to Les and Cayla moving their daughters’ stuff into their dorm. Summer wastes no time in telling Les to GTFO.
Only a week or so later she’s back in Westview to help with another Lisa’s Legacy unfun run. We get the first of the multiple instances of women coming to Les to tell them that his milking his wife’s death saved them from cancer too; all cribbed, as we’ve learned, from a similar experience Batty claims happened to him at a book signing.
As the wedding of Les and Cayla is occuring at basically the same time she manages to stick around for a little bit, getting death glared by everyone for an innocuous joke. Considering all she does for her dad, and by extension her about to be step-mother, and considering what she just had to put up with on a mountain half the world away Summer deserves a lame joke and not the judgemental stares of these losers.
With Les and Cayla married, Summer and Keisha get to cap things off as this multi-year storyline finally ends.
They also get one last appearance at the end of the year, riding the bench in what I’m pretty sure is the only instance we see of them playing basketball in college.
With that, we’ve reached what’s effectively the end of the first act of Act III. It’s very clear that TomBa had a general plot he wanted to carry him through the first few years of the post-Lisa’s death era of the strip and I will give him credit, he largely kept to it.
By this point Wally’s dealt with his PTSD and managed to start a new life with Rachel. Crazy Harry has reached his final form as with the post office closed he takes a job hanging around Komix Korner where I’m pretty sure he’ll die and then be stuffed and displayed like a taxidermied bear. Cory is now in the military and barring any Wallyesque incidents is on the path to straightening up. Darin and Jessica are now starting their life together in Westview. Summer has graduated. Les has remarried.
A lot of these were things set up very, very early in Act III and now five years later they’ve all been wrapped up with a nice, neat little bow. It’s an almost admirable bit of actual long term planning on Batiuk’s part and if he had just left it here with this being the ending of Funky Winkerbean… well, I don’t think it would be remembered as great but it would have left a better legacy I’m sure. Unfortunately there’s another decade left of this strip and it’s clear from this point on that any longterm plans Batty had have all been exhausted and we’re now in the “make it up as you go” stage of his writing.
This is, of course, best exemplified by Summer who for most of the next ten years is going to take a greatly reduced role in the story. Next time we’ll begin to take a look at just what life, and Batty, has in store for post-relevancy Summer.
