Act I – Son of Stuck Funky

Car Season

Newly minted SoSF contributor Narshe here with my first post and I figured what better way to start off my career in Funkology than by diving right in… archive deep diving right in, if you will. Today, we’ll be taking a look at Tom Batiuk’s biggest mistake.

That’s right, the subject of our deep dive will be the character that TB has hated and despised like no other. The character whom he considers to be the biggest albatross hanging around his neck: none other than Sadie Summers! But why, oh why, did he end up disliking Sadie so much? Let’s let the man himself explain it.

Cindy, the most popular girl in the school, was coming on like gangbusters at this point, and I felt that I had barely scratched the surface of her potential as a character. I didn’t want to lose all of that, so I did something stupid. I cloned her and created her little sister/doppelgänger Sadie. Flash Fairfield, the editor who way back when had tried to school me on character development, would have been spinning in his grave at that move, and, if he weren’t in his grave, that would have probably finished him. Mea culpa, Flash. It was a totally misguided reason for creating a character. It was dumb, stupid, boneheaded, half-baked, ill-advised, risible, and done for all the wrong reasons. In an effort to not lose big-haired Cindy, I created her big-haired little sister and in doing so brought about character confusion, redundancy, overpopulation, and just about everything else that Flash had warned me not to do. And I paid the price. Sadie would limp along for a while after the time-jump, but she was and would always be a pale imitation of her big sis until she was eventually banished to the Dumb Character Phantom Zone, where she could pal around with the Moon Maid from Dick Tracy and Snoopy’s brothers Andy, Marbles, Olaf, and Spike.

Yes, in his own words she’s nothing but “a pale imitation of her big sis” but how fair of an assessment is that in reality? My belief, however, is that Sadie does indeed represent failure on the part of Batty but not for the reasons that he thinks but am I more correct than Batty is about his own character? By taking a look at Sadie’s history and with the distance afforded by both time and not being Tom Batiuk, that’s what we’ll try and determine.

Sadie first shows up on September 25, 1991 during a week where Ginny Wolfe has decided that the students in her class should bring in their siblings as part of a discussion on family units. This is basically done as preparation for Sadie showing up in Act II so we don’t skip ahead four years to suddenly see Cindy’s previously unknown and never mentioned sister. I mean look, she was introduced about nine months before the switch over was done so see, she’s definitely a pre-existing character! By the by, Les is in this class as well and there’s a strip way back in the ’70s where he mentions having a sister. You’d think that Batty would have used this as an opportunity to introduce her as well but I guess that obscure callbacks was something he wasn’t interested in until Act III.

Anyway, the Summers girls have the type of normal and healthy relationship all siblings have. Some times they fight…

*We’ve all tried murdering our brothers and sisters right?*

And some times they mess with one another.

This is largely going to be Sadie’s role throughout her handful of Act I appearances. Less than being a clone of Cindy, she exists pretty much entirely to troll her sister and drive her into near homicidal rages. After her introductory week, it won’t be until December 1 when Sadie next appears.

*Good old State U., the Typical Ohio College that TB used before he decided that 99% of the characters would instead attend his alma mater.*

A few weeks later she gets a Christmas themed strip on December 26.

*Batty will later reuse this strip/joke with Cindy having replaced Sadie.*

And… that’s about it for her in 1991. The next time she shows up is on February 10, 1992 for a week of strips where Cindy is forced to bring Sadie along with her to the mall.

In true bratty little sister fashion, Sadie decides to take the opportunity to embarass Cindy in front of a guy she likes.

Cindy, of course, responds to all of this in a manner most calm and rational.

*Remember that this woman is going to go on to be a respected (?) journalist.*

Sunday gives us the reveal of how Sadie was able to engage in such targeted annoyance.

*“The actual writing though? Four thumbs down! It’s as bad as that Three O’Clock High comic in the newspaper!”*

The next time she shows up is in March being the instigator in Cindy losing her credit card privileges.

*Learning tech simply to screw with your sibling is some high level trollery.*

This will also be Sadie’s final Act I appearance as soon after is the prom, Barry’s freak out, Les’s downer graduation speech and the shift over to Act II.

At this point, outside of her actual visual design there’s not really anything about Sadie that I’d say qualifies her for the clone designation that Batty had given her and really, there’s not much of anything wrong with her. Her role is to act as an annoyance for Cindy by flustering and embarassing her and you know what? It works. Sadie’s appearances in Act I are amusing. The mall week is genuinely, with no qualifications, pretty funny. Yes there’s Cindy’s physical abuse but we’re still in the cartoonish period of sentient Star Trek obsessed school computers and Dinkle’s band candy sales propping up the economy. It’s in line with everyone’s favorite running gag of Homer Simpson strangling Bart. Cindy and Sadie’s relationship is typical sibling rivalry stuff but taken to absurd extremes which is what you’d expect from a gag comic so it all works fairly well.

But how will this carry over to when Sadie’s on her own, having to be more of her own character instead of being the person who winds up her older sister? That’ll have to wait until next time when we jump back ahead to the past future present of 1992 and take a look at the first few years of Act II.

How Many Times Did Funky Winkerbean Jump The Shark?

I didn’t mean for that last post to be a poll, but it’s revealing how many individual Jump The Shark moments posters were able to identify in Funky Winkerbean. Here’s a compiled list, in roughly chronological order (because, as you know, Timemop).

Act I (1972-1992, ends with the original class’ graduation)

Lisa’s pregnancy (1986)
A high school girl has a genuine mutual, unreciprocated crush on Les (1988)
Les’ valedictorian speech (1992)

Act II (1992-2007, ends with Lisa’s death)

Lisa’s first detection of cancer (1998)
Wally dies in the minesweeping simulator
Becky loses her arm
The first class reunion
Susan Smith’s suicide attempt
Wally’s first homecoming (2003)
John Byrne’s guest stint permanently alters the artwork (2003)
Sadie Summers – not because she was a bad character as Tom Batiuk thinks, but because she was under- and mis-utilized
The post office bombing (USA!)
Lisa’s cancer returns in 2006, because of a hospital error
Lisa’s death (October 4, 2007)

Act III (2007-2022, ends when Funky Winkerbean ends and its characters move to Crankshaft)

Tom Batiuk skips ten years after Lisa’s death, throwing away a gold mine of story ideas. Which also prevents Les Moore (and Batiuk) from ever moving past Lisa’s death, when that was the stated reason for the time jump
Les screaming at Summer over a dress for the winter dance he was pushing her to attend
Les saying “yes you did” and getting pissy with Funky over a mild joke about Les attracting two women at once
Wally’s second homecoming, which destroyed the likeable Wally-Becky relationship, and needlessly added to Wally’s suffering
Lisa’s Story becomes a thing
Starbuck Jones become a thing
The emergence of Cayla as a character
Funky’s car crash and time-altering coma (2010)
casting Susan Smith as the antagonist in the Les-Cayla-Susan love triangle
the gay prom story where the gay teens never seen or talked about again
Morton Winkerbean’s remarkable but never-addressed recovery from dementia
Wally hooking up with Rachel and turning his life around
Cayla’s appearance changes
Lisa calls in a bomb threat from beyond the grave
Darin and Pete become major characters
The rise of Atomik Komix as a central location
“Where’s father?” – the resolution of the Zanzibar The Talking Murder Chimp story
The death of Bull Bushka, which was ultimately insurance fraud
Les walking back his earlier forgiveness of Bull
Darin makes a toy for his son, out of a handgun that was used to murder his grandfather
The entire finale, featuring a long -forgotten janitor who is revealed to be a time-traveling agent, tasked with ensuring Summer’s book gets written
“behavior-patterned algorithms that will let us define humanity as our nation” or whatever that drivel was

Act IV (Crankshaft, 2023-)

The Funky Winkerbean characters invade Crankshaft
The alleged Burnings
The Batton Thomas interview arc

And must be a lot more candidates than that… because that list doesn’t mention Dinkle even once.

I Stand Corrected

In my last post, I said comic book week could have been a charming little throw back to Act I, and that Tom Batiuk should do this kind of thing more often.

I take it back.

Last week’s “bus driver shortage” arc in Crankshaft was a perfect example of why Tom Batiuk shouldn’t try doing Act I-style stories anymore. They miss everything that made Act I arcs good.

The best way to see this is to look at the Act I stories Harriet has recently dived into, such as the literary magazine arc, the video games/censorship arc, and The Eliminator’s hacking arc.

What did those stories have that last week didn’t have?

There were actual stakes. Les was facing criticism, and possible termination of employment, for what his magazine published. Westview faced threats remove to popular video games. The Eliminator was tampering with Crazy’s grade, War Games-style.

A bus driver shortage should have serious effects on a high-school centric world, even if it’s just “hey, none of us have to worry about getting fired for awhile.” That should push Ed and the crew into even more extreme behavior, which is a staple of the strip. Here, of course, there are no stakes, no implications, and nothing that even escalates existing stories. Speaking of which:

There was an actual story. In all three examples, any gags were part of a larger story which the strip took time to unravel. For example:

The two strips are jokes, but they’re good ones, and they flow naturally from the story. The strip had spent a good week talking how the literary magazine had offended the community, which drove the easily-upset Les to having nightmares, and the feckless Fred Fairgood into making an actual decision. Then the story moves forward.

Bloom County was good at this:

This is silly as hell, but it was actually a small part of a long, complex story about Oliver Wendell Jones’ hacking misadventures. Which itself was also a longrunning theme in Bloom County. The story supported the joke, and the joke supported the story. Berke Breathed had a talent for writing insane stories, but also making them make sense in context. Which is exactly what’s not happening here:

The bus driver shortage isn’t a story, but just a premise to be restated at you over and over and over. It’s another form of “What are you doing, Dad?” Which as it turns out, Pam doesn’t actually say that much. It’s the Funkyverse’s answer to “beam me up, Scotty” or “play it again, Sam”. But you know what I mean: it’s the stand-in phrase for an overused trope. Even if Pam doesn’t say those exact words, she might as well be.

Those stories weren’t contrary to the reality of the world. The literary magazine arc in particular was very consistent with Les’ established personality, Roberta Blackburn’s personality, and the general spinelessness of school leadership in the face of obnoxious citizen critics.

Here, we were treated to a joke about how the school board was so desperate it was forced to hire a Hell’s Angel as an elementary school bus driver. A Hell’s Angel would probably be a way better bus driver than Ed Crankshaft is! They do Toys for Tots, so they must have some degree of altruism, and ability to interact with children. Ed Crankshaft and the other drivers certainly don’t, considering how they routinely blow off children at bus stops, and cause traffic jams to amuse themselves.

The jokes were aimed at the right targets. Les’s worry, Fred’s spinelessness, Roberta’s Karen-ness, and the public’s excessive squeamishness about the tiniest hint of sexual content were all on the receiving end of the barbs.

Here the victim is – to the extent there even is one – this Hell’s Angel who did nothing more than show up and apply for a job. Ed gets no guff for being an awful bus driver. Lena gets no guff for making bad hiring decisions. The school system gets no guff for managing its resources so poorly that it gets into this state. The “Tucker Twins”, who’ve never been mentioned before and probably never will be again, get no guff for bullying a grown man out of a job. (Can they please be assigned to Crankshaft’s bus?)

This is more evidence that the “good” characters can never, ever, ever be in the wrong, not even in the tiniest way. Even unseen “main “good” characters.

There isn’t much to say about this week’s “If Amazon drove your kids to school” arc, even though it progresses naturally from a “bus driver shortage” arc. Yeah, the jokes are lame, but a week of formulaic jokes isn’t worth talking about. It’s well above the level of awful that makes the Funkyverse fascinating.

What is worth talking about? The Burnings! And I haven’t forgotten that I owe you all the next installment of the reimagined Burnings story, so that is coming soon!

Leaving Westview

My colleague Epicus Doomus and others have said: you had to like Funky Winkerbean before you could hate it. This was certainly true of me. I was once a genuine fan of the strip. Now I write venomous screeds about it for this blog. (And don’t worry, that book signing screed is on its way.)

I acquired my love of newspaper comics in the early 1980s, from my dad. I consumed them in a particular order, based on the order they appeared in my newspaper, and in descending order of how much I liked them. It was my little comics ritual.

Peanuts was always first, because good ol’ Charlie Brown holds a very dear place in my heart. Garfield, which was still pretty fresh at the time, was second. The true giants of the 1980s comics page hadn’t come along yet, so unremarkable stuff like Drabble, Shoe (hey, I wanted to be a journalist) and the Mort Walker strips were in the middle. Funky Winkerbean was last. It batted ninth in my lineup, but it made the team. I considered it the last strip worth reading, though I did enjoy it sometimes.

But I can pinpoint the exact day Funky Winkerbean lost me as a reader, and only regained me as a hate-reader 30 years later. That day was November 19, 1988.

Skipping Along

SO, (heh heh,) CBH is tagging in, and we’re back in Crankshaft, back in the McKenzie’s attic, and back in the glorious year of 2007, (for now.)

Eric ‘Mooch’ Myers is gushing about some 60-year-old comic books with more passion and devotion than we could ever expect him to show a lover.

And, for whatever reason, yes we are STILL in the attic.