Act II – Son of Stuck Funky

Outside the circumstances of her birth, life has been pretty simple for Summer. I mean true, she is a toddler so it can’t really be all that complicated for her but still, things have been going pretty well for the Moores and the residents of Westview in general minus the occasional hiccup. Sure, John got his hopes up that maybe the pretty one-armed pizza lady was going to give him the time of day only to have them cruelly dashed when that bastard Wally returned.

But Tom Batiuk is an artiste with a vision and soon the misery miasma will blanket Westview once more for he shall unleash upon it’s hatchet-faced denizens his masterpiece.

However at the start of 2005, things are going so good that after only their second date — which followed her being ghosted for most of the previous year — Funky and Holly get engaged! Wally and Lefty are as well so it’s going to be a double wedding at Montoni’s. This wedding stuff will take up well over half of the year and so for a lot of it Summer will only be making some token appearances. In fact it won’t be until February when Summer makes her first appearance of the year, starting to talk and being used to prank her Lego-headed father.

But February is also when we start getting the first hints that things will be taking a decidedly darker turn as Wally begins trying to deal with his PTSD and Roberta Blackburn appears out of nowhere to pester her daughter and son-in-law to be. But she’s also there looking for a gift for Becky’s cousin who just so happens to like comic books so Becky directs her moralizing mother down to Komix Korner where some Japanese works catch her attention and soon, the cops are taking John to the slammer. Presumably for having shit taste in manga.

*“Sir, we’re taking you in on one count of actually liking Rent-A-Girlfriend.”*

So Lisa’s got her big plot for the year, trying to uphold the sanctity of artistic expression and fight obscenity laws and you know… I really in a broad sense do agree with Batty on these types of issues whenever they do come up. After all, I live in the state that produced Jack Thompson and a lot of my formative and not-so-formative years involved hearing about his antics against music, video games and the like. But Batty makes it so damn hard when his arguments for them is delivered in a manner that tends to be overly self-assured in spite of their shallow insipidness. Like Les will go “These articles are important because free speech!” which… yeah? No shit. Or Lisa will stand in front of a jury and go “Comics… are art!” and yeah, of course they are.

But come on, Batty! This is an issue you seem passionate about so whenever you bring it up maybe show a little more fire than “[thing] is good, actually” and then leaving it at that.

With all of these events going on, it’s months before we see Summer again as she shows up during the Winkerbean double wedding in June.

Which then causes her to have marriage on the brain.

*In the end, I don’t think he’ll have to worry about that.*

But once again there’s no time in summer for Summer because it’s taken up by Wally and Becky’s honeymoon to beautiful Afghanistan. Which includes this rather bizarre strip just before Wally leaves.

In a case of Batty just grabbing characters from other works, the implication is that La Choi San — the outdated cariature who doubles as the grandmother of Jade Dragon owner Liu Lin — is actually the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates and is giving Terry’s flight jacket to Wally. It’s a jacket that Wally will wear all throughout the Afghanistan story that takes up a full two months of the strip’s focus, ending with he and Becky deciding to adopt Rana, the younger sister of the girl who rescued Wally during his original MIA phase but who was blown up along with the rest of her family by a car bomb.

Naturally, Lisa adds “adoption” to her plate of legal work to help them bring Rana over to the U.S. just as Becky’s taken the assistant band director job at the high school that was vacated when Kara became Big Walnut Tech’s band director.

Summer is still kind of there, hanging around during a multi-week story about Taj Moore-hal having bats in the attic… Batiuks, if you will hyuck hyuck.

John’s trial occurs and Lisa has her big success with the rousing argument that John can’t be guilty of breaking obscenity laws because comics are art and also the “child” that was in the store when Roberta purchased the pornography — part of the reason John was being charged with breaking obscenity laws — was really an adult midget. It sort of feels like TB wasted months’ worth of time just to get to that punchline too.

The year winds down with some ligther fare like a pun worse than my bats in the attic one.

*Also, web blog? Where do you think the word “blog” comes from Batty?*

And some Christmas shenanigans.

But poor Summer opens up the next year having caught some kind of bug leading to a week of Les having to care for his sick child.

After heroically puking all over her father, she again takes a backseat to Lisa and Holly’s cancer support group as well as Becky learning she’s pregnant. We do get what I believe is the first appearance together of Summer and Cory though.

But it’s the calm before the storm. Things look as if they’re going well and Les is even going to have his story published in the New Yorker which means Summer, and we, get to watch him do a dumb little dance.

But as Lisa’s expression in the last panel indicates, something is wrong. She’d gone in to participate in some genetic testing but something came up and she gets the confirmation just as her and Les are heading out on a vacation to New York.

That’s right folks, it’s been twenty years since The Story That Changed Everything and with his creative fires fueled, Tom Batiuk has decided to give us The Story That Changed Everything II: The Lady with All the Cancers. Les and Lisa go on their vacation but of course the shadow of cancer looms over everything. When they get back, Lisa makes sure to give her daughter a hug and give the audience one of Funky Winkerbean‘s patented cursed close ups.

I would assume that deciding to bring back Lisa’s cancer is when Batty decided to do a second timeskip and it seems to have really put him in a mood because this is when we’re getting all the stuff that seemed to catch the attention of the broader internet in the mid-2000s, making people fascinated by how damn miserable this strip was. Because this is also the same timeframe where Wally gets dragged away from his family and back into active duty in Iraq which, spoilers, will not work out well for him. At all. This is right after construction on the street in front of Montoni’s forced the Jade Dragon to close as well.

But it’s not all bad, at least in-universe, because this is also the period where Darin and Jessica Darling, Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered, become an item when she’s impressed by some quick thinking he pulled to unforunately save Pete from getting his ass kicked by the Rough Riders from Crankshaft. And this is when Bull Bushka gets married to walking buzzkill Linda Lopez, who’d hooked up during summer break the previous year. It’s the kind of story you think we’d actually see but no, because Batty loves his shocking twists and so figured it was best to have everything happen offscreen so he could randomly spring it on the readers.

Why let a story get in the way of a good surprise?

A lot of the rest of 2006 goes back and forth between Lisa’s cancer — which includes repeated appearances by the worst doctor on Earth and a trip to the Grand Canyon — and the stuff with Darin and Jessica. Interspersed is also a goofy story about Montoni’s being profiled by the Food Network which culminates in some kind of Iron Chef style pizza cooking competition show.

Summer’s last significant appearance of 2006 and her first one since showing up in the background before Les and Lisa leave for Arizona isn’t until December.

Batty was too busy with other things to deal with Summer. There’s Becky giving birth, John continuing to pine for her and setting up things that will have zero payoff by establishing Mooch’s relationship with Mindy Murdoch and Crazy Harry’s second kid, both of which will disappear shortly into Act III.

But 2007 starts off with a seeming bright spot for Lisa.

Joy of joys, Lisa’s results are looking good and she’s in remission which seems to be putting her in a much better mood as she can actually appreciate having a kid again. The one she actually has mind you, not the one she gave up and pines for.

Unfortunately for Lisa we’re in the misery porn era of Funky Winkerbean so it’s not long before she learns that her doctor has in fact been utterly incompetent and that they’d mixed up her results with someone else’s.

Now given all of this — that Lisa had gone off her chemo and other treatments for a few months because of their screw up, the fact that said screw up even happened at all — you’d expect the Moores to do something right? I would guess that they probably have a pretty clear case for a malpractice lawsuit. But nope, they just throw up their hands and say nothing can be done. There’s a constant thing whenever Lisa is brought up about what a strong fighter she was right up until the end but no, not really. She immediately gives up and just allows herself to rot away over the next few months.

Because as we all know, Lisa is destined to die and it’s in the summer when she gets the news, delivered to her by Dr. Screwup in the most tactful and courteous manner she can muster.

Now let me digress a bit here to ask, what was Batty’s intention with this character? Was it to portray someone who was ultimately a good and caring doctor who made a little whoopsie doodle because we all make mistakes? Or was she intended to be representative of the real or perceived cold indifference of the American healthcare system? I suspect something closer to the first one given that neither Les nor Lisa treat her with the scorn she rightly deserves for messing up in such a massive way.

And that response? “Months… but don’t ask me how many.” Double fuck Dr. Dipshit. It’s easy to want to criticize various characters for various reasons in Batiuk’s works but I don’t really think any of them are as bad as Dr. Hallet. It’s not just the incompetence but the callous flippancy with which she tells Lisa that she’s going die that makes her so unbelievably repugnant in a setting filled with repugnant jackasses. Les at Bull’s funeral comes close but really, she might be the absolute worst person in the history of the strip.

While this has been going on, the other major story running through the year has been Darin, at Jessica’s urging, searching for his birth mother. There were some starts and stops but eventually the information is released and he learns that Lisa is his bio-mom and decides to convey this via creepily watching Lisa and Summer play in front of Taj Moore-hal.

Maybe someone can tell me whether I’m right or not but I get this feeling that this is a go-to Batty likes to employ as part of his forced dramatics. The whole shot of someone staring at others from their car. I don’t think this is either the first or last time this type of thing occurs but maybe I’m wrong.

From here Darin basically plays real big brother to Summer who now has to face her dying mother though of course is still to young to fully grasp what’s happening.

Shortly after this she enters kindergarten as well.

Lisa’s state is rapidly deteriorating and by September she’s hit the point where she can’t go up and down the stairs and so effectively enters hospice care in the living room.

Batty decides to get in one last minute instance of both closing off a plot thread and setting things up for Act III by having Bull and Linda pop by with the kid they’ve spent most of the year trying to adopt. At that point it’s pretty much the endgame for Lisa. Her parents show up one final time so her dad can apologize for not being there for her even though they’ve been around plenty the last few years.

Finally Masky McDeath appears to usher Lisa into the Great Phantom Zone Beyond and it’s over.

And we immediately smash cut to a goateed Les lying on a couch, speaking to a therapist as it flashes back to him dropping off Summer with the Winkerbeans while he heads to New York to spread Lisa’s ashes in Central Park.

Now Batty’s rationale for fast forwarding through and past everything was that he didn’t want to turn the comic into an extended grieving process but given what happens in Act III that’s obviously a load of crap.

The simple fact is that he wants to tell this grand ongoing narrative but is incapable of thinking of stories as existing beyond themselves. When the Flash beat Weather Wizard that was the end of it, it didn’t affect the next issue and it’s the same approach that Batty likes to take with his stories. Which is fine if you want to do a bunch of loosely connected but self-contained stories but that isn’t what he’s doing. We can see that in the currently ongoing Dinkle Pity Party in Crankshaft where 50+ years of Harry L. Dinkle, the World’s Greatest Band Director is brushed aside as a mere persona created by a man with daddy issues. All the haranguing, egotism, band turkeys… it was just an act to hide Dinkle’s insecurities. None of it was mentioned before this story and I would bet that once it’s over it’ll go in the same box and shoved into the same closet as all the other important stories and revelations like Danny Madison or Bull’s having protected Les from even worse bullying.

Or like Lisa’s death and the fallout from it. A story this big needs to dive into what happens afterwards, how the characters react, how Lisa’s passing affects them. But Batty is incapable of thinking about any of that and to him it’s not important anyway. Lisa dying was what was important and once her life ended so to did the story and it was time to move on to the next one. So the two weeks that TB allots for the story of Les’ NYC sojourn is all we get. This was his big masterpiece of a story and it’s treated with all the gravitas of the ending of a Silver Age comic book as that’s what his storytelling sensibilities are stuck in.

And back to the actual story, we get a little bit with Les returning to tuck Summer into bed and stare forlornly at his now empty bed.

*Don’t worry, Lisa will quite literally be there with you in spirit.*

And, uh, sniff Lisa’s clothes like a giant creepy weirdo.

He finally sits Summer down to explain death to her and that Mommy isn’t coming home at which point we get one final Sunday that transitions to older versions of Les and Summer.

With that, Act II officially closes and we enter into Act III starring the middle-aged Les and the teenage Summer… for now, anyway. We’ve jumped ahead ten years but not really as infamously the timeline was instead shifted back by a decade because I guess TB is so lacking in imagination that he was unable to think of what life would look like in the far off year of 2017. Perhaps it would have had flying cars and ray guns and look like something out of an atomic age sci-fi comic book but maybe not. Best not to risk being wrong.

What will the future of Funky Winkerbean and Summer Moore look like from here? Next time we’ll gaze into tomorrow to look at the future-present of Westview and Batty’s attempts at making Summer into an actual character.

The Littlest Accessory

I will be honest, once I finished the first part of this Summer retrospective I figured I would just take things up through the end or close to the end of Act II. See, it’s kind of hard to talk about Summer in Act II because she’s really not much of a character given that she only just starts kindergarten in the final few months of it. For most of it she’s just a baby or a pre-schooler and really doesn’t seem to exist as an actual character as much as she is a kind of thing that’s drawn into scenes with Les and/or Lisa.

She’s more of a living, baby-shaped accessory than anything else. She’s not a baby who’s secretly an evil genius or anything, she’s just kind of there to add color to scenes. There’s a part of me that wanted to just get through this period as fast as possible because of it but I just couldn’t do it. For one thing, I realized doing that would make this a mega-sized entry and we don’t really need one that’s as long as this insipid Larry Dinkle storyline over in Crankshaft. But I also realized that maybe there’s at least a little value in using Summer’s presence to give us a sort of quickish overview on the last few years of Act II.

By the by, Batty’s inability to keep to a timeline rears its ugly head once more due to a teeny tiny problem. That problem is, once again, the presence of Durwood and the rest of his high school class. Summer is born in summer 2002 and at the end of summer/start of fall in 2007 she’s entering kindergarten which would mean five years in-universe have passed. I’m sure the readers can already see the issue but just to make sure it’s clear to everyone, when Lisa said she was wanting to get pregnant she mentioned that Darin was a junior in high school. Even if we give that Batty doesn’t actually know high school grade names and Darin is actually a freshman, he still should have been out of high school by around 2005. Yet Summer’s entering kindergarten and Darin’s class graduating happens at the same time. So is the Class of ’07 just exceptionally slow? How did it take them six years to finish four grades in high school?

Ah well, there’s no use getting myself worked up over it. Let’s get to what this is actually about. Batty decides to open up the year with some biting humor about how guys like football and some times they get loud while watching it.

Les also shows that now that the new car smell is gone he cares about his daughter roughly as much as he cares about everything that’s not his precious writing.

*Haha, it’s funny because she’s suffocating!*

Now it’s around the period of John Byrne’s stint as artist and all the attempted dramatics of DCH John’s attempts at wooing Becky and getting tossed to the curb because Wally has shown back up in Westview, having survived being blown up in Afghanistan. Inbetween weeks where John’s mother sits forlornly with a Superman cake and John purchasing an engagement ring so he can ask Becky to marry him after like one or two dates, we get a week dedicated to Lesisa deciding to ignore Summer while she cries in the hopes of getting her used to sleeping normally.

With this hurdle cleared, Summer seems to be taking to other major infant milestones quickly such as hitting the point where she begins doing a Michigan J. Frog impression.

This is also the time period where Lisa was starting out as a lawyer with her first job being helping out at a women’s legal center to help deal with a guy who was going after an employee for having breast cancer. That job lasted for as long as Batty needed to do his “Lisa fights for cancer victims” story because the minute the case is over the legal center shuts down forcing Lisa to get a new job. A word is put in for her to work as a public defender in the state’s capital appeals division where she meets yet another sexist jerk when she’s forced to bring Summer along with her to her first day on the job.

She gets assigned to working on a case involving a death row inmate named Danny Madison, a Vietnam veteran who’s up for execution for a robbery and murder. Working with Misogynist Man — real name Mark Potter — we get the impression that he’s less a misogynist and more just an incredibly jaded guy due to the high failure rate of his line of work. I mean if your job was fighting losing battles to keep people from dying you’d probably have a case of the Mondays too, so his introduction kind of sticks out since these sexist tendencies never really crop up again.

For most of the rest of 2003, then, Lisa is busy trying to find any evidence to exonerate Danny. From statements about his PTSD from convenient war buddy and Westview High vice principal Nate Green, to shaky justification for unreliable witness testimony because one of the witnesses to the murder was a shut-in which I guess means her eyes didn’t function or something. So while this is going on, it’s up to Les to play Mr. Mom and take Summer on a playdate where he reacts to lady talk about the way you’d expect him too.

But he manages to overcome his fear of cooties and win the Mom Squad over with pretzels, beer and football proving that old canards about what planets men and women come from wrong (Les, for the record, comes from Hisanus). While Les is wooing the Westview MILF Brigade though, things aren’t going so well for Lisa. Her clever legal tactic of throwing agoraphobes under the bus fails to have much of an effect and it’s looking more and more like Danny’s not going to make it leading to this heartwarming Thanksgiving strip.

As time continues to run short for Danny, Les attempts to introduce Summer to sports.

April finds out that Kortney’s been using sex chatrooms while she’s supposed to be working but Ellie can’t bring herself to fire her, while Liz has started student teaching– wait, that strip’s got me all mixed up.

Anyway, all of Lisa’s efforts have failed which means Danny’s execution is imminent. This leads to the delightful Christmas tale of Lisa having to go to the prison and watch — at his request no less — Danny being executed. Misogynist Mark had told Lisa when she started that he thought she didn’t have the spine enough to stick with the job and after having earned his respect, Lisa decides to prove him right by immediately quitting.

Danny had learned of Summer when talking to Lisa a little before Thanksgiving and when Lisa had come in to tell him that they were out of options, he in turn tells her that he’d made Summer a Christmas present. After his execution we see that it’s a snowman carved out of what I presume is prison soap.

*I suppose it’s better than a shank or prison hooch.* Or a toy made out of the gun that killed your grandfather.

I get that Batty was trying to give a touching end to an otherwise grim story but man, that second panel there is just kind of weird and the emotion doesn’t come through at all. Maybe it needed Ghost Danny or something, I don’t know. But Danny’s more or less forgotten as soon as he’s gone and to start 2004 we see that Les’ inadvertant indoctrination is beginning to take hold and Summer is on the path to becoming a filthy sporto.

Batty also can’t help himself by bringing back one of his favorite tropes: dramatic irony.

*See, it’s funny because they are brother and sister!*

At this point, presaging her eventual future in Act III, Batty’s started getting bored of the little rugrat and so her appearances actually dwindle a lot. She gets some things like a customary appearance during Mother’s Day but she’s mostly just there to hang around as a prop for scenes. This includes a week in August about her birthday party — the prepartion and the actual party — where I’m pretty sure that Summer doesn’t actually appear because he’s more worried about sticking it to helicopter parents for some reason.

One of the big storylines running throughout 2004 is the Moores deciding that being well into adulthood with careers and a kid, they should start looking for a house. More precisely, Lisa decides this while Les pouts and grumbles the whole time. All of their initial attempts, including a crossover week with Crankshaft where they were checking out Lilian’s house, go nowhere. And then in the fall, they find it; the place of their dreams. A cozy little home in a cozy little neighborhood.

*I’m not passing up opportunities to see Les get hurt.*

The Taj Moore-hal has arrived and it hates Les because there’s a running joke for a while of him hitting his head on a low-hanging pipe every time he goes into the basement.

Of course come December, we also get the customary dose of Lisa pining for the son she had to give up while the daughter she actually has sits in blissful, childish ignorance of being Mommy’s Little Runner-Up.

I’ll end things here for now with the close of 2004. There’s some other events that take place this year too such as the start of Funky’s relationship with Holly, which means the first appearances of Cory Winkerbean, as well as the birth of Maddie Klinghorn in the summer. That last one is another thing that throws the sacred timeline off because she’s a full year younger than Summer yet is in the same grade when realistically she shouldn’t be. If TimeMop can’t even keep the timestream clean, I can’t imagine what a poor job he does with the floors and bathrooms.

As I said earlier, it’s a bit hard to write about Summer specifically in Act II because she’s just a toddling prop more than she is an actual character. So I think that next time, for real, I’ll try and get through the rest of Act II and all the fun times with cancer that made this strip famous.

Making a Messiah

Over in Crankshaft, Batty is taking a trip into the distant past of the Funkyverse as three old farts stand around in a storage unit while one of them regales his enraptured pals and unenraptured readers about how his daddy played the trumpet and wore a suit. Larry Dinkle went all around the Great Lakes region but was never around the one place where — *sniff* — it mattered most.

But while Batty is looking back to reveal the Funkyverse’s past, we shall be looking back in order to reveal its future. So nestle in, dear reader, for this tale truly told…

It is late 2022 and Tom Batiuk has just dropped his bombshell via crotchety Golden Age relic Ruby Lith that it’s over. After fifty long years Funky Winkerbean would be coming to an end in but a few short weeks. A half-century of characters mugging at the fourth wall, life or death school levy votes, old men geeking out over even older comic books, Les Moore’s undeservedly smug face, cancer, alcoholism, band candy and murderous gun-wielding chimpanzees would finally draw to a close.

However there were still things to learn about Westview, OH and it was the job of one person to learn them. They had to, after all, for as it turns out only they alone could do this. Only they had the ability to sift through the information and see the patterns and find the clues that would allow us to become a better, more united people. And someone else was there to make sure that they did it.

Summer Moore had a destiny. She would write the book that would bring about utopia. The book that would help us realize that humanity was our nation. The greatest work of philosophy by the greatest one book author of all time. But how would she get to this point? What could have caused an otherwise innocuous young woman from a middling Rust Belt town to eventually become the Pattern-Finder?

In order to answer these oh-so-pressing questions, I’ll be starting a new series examining the twists and turns of Summer’s life. Because surely this will be a sensible and logical development and not just Tom Batiuk pulling something out of his ass at the last minute, won’t it?

But while the cat’s in the cradle over in Crankshaft, we’ll be starting with a different cradle entirely as examining Summer’s life means that we must first examine her pre-life which means going all the way back into the wilds of 2001. It was a year of great tragedy as Funky started it drukenly passed out on the sidewalk, his marriage rapidly crumbling around him. In these dark times though there was a bright spot as Lisa, cancer free and better than you, was working on her law degree and decided to let slip that there was something else she wanted.

The Moores decide to talk about Lisa’s sudden desire for a child with Les expressing his worries in his usual whiny and self-absorbed manner.

Being the insufferable turd that he is, Les decides to take this time to bust out his new character that he’s been working on — Armchair Freud — and begin psychoanalyizing his wife’s desire to have a child.

Of course Lisa did not decide on a whim that she wanted a baby. As we all know, Batty loves his meaningful anniversaries and in November 2001 it had been 15 years since the story that forever changed the trajectory of Funky Winkerbean and Tom Batiuk’s career. And what better way to call back to it than to get Lisa’s biological clock a-tickin’ and have her come down with a case of baby fever? For the next month then, the reader is treated to a complete retelling of the Pregnant Lisa Saga from 1986 and I suppose it’s a minor miracle that Batty got Ayers to actually draw the whole thing as opposed to taking the exceedingly lazy way out and just reprinting it.

Tangenting here, and there may be more tangents as this series goes, but we see here some of Batty’s patented ability to completely disregard his own timeline. Lisa states that “Dopey” Darin Fairgood is a junior in high school which would mean, given that this is set around the time of his birthday, he’s just about to turn 17 years old. You’d think that wanting to call back to his most important story, Batty would just say “he’s a freshman in high school” to line up with the story’s anniversary.

Yet for some reason Batty is basically acting as if the last few years have been happening in real time even though time in this strip has always been a fluid thing — For Better or For Worse this ain’t. I mean it won’t be until 2007 when Darin’s generation, having entered high school in 1998, graduates. So for Darin to be a junior in 2001, his birth would have had to happen in 1984 which I guess lines up with when he started school but would then mean that, if we kept the original 1988 graduation date that Act II establishes, then Lisa would have been a freshman herself when she was pregnant which okay, fine. But in 2002, for the strip’s 30th anniversary, Funky will also celebrate his 30th birthday. With the Act I crew graduating college at 22, that would mean that Act II would have had to have started in 1994 and Funky’s group graduated in 1990 not 1988 which means Lisa would have had to have given birth, at the earliest, in 1986 which means Darin should be a freshman and not a junior which means…

God dammit, why do I put more thought into this than him?

Okay, back to the actual important stuff. After the flashback to Lisa’s nebulously dated pregnancy, she’s feeling frisky and decides it’s time to get to babymakin’ with the most sensual of come ons.

Wooed by those romantic words, in February 2002 we learn that Les was successful at implanting his miracle seed within his ovulating she-bride and that she now carries Ohio’s most divine child inside her cancer womb.

With the divine child now growing within her, life continues as normal for Lisa and Les over the next few months. Les does… uh, something — Les-type things I suppose — while Lisa graduates law school. At the same time both Funky and Crazy Harry are going through their own significant life changes as Funky’s in the process of getting divorced while Crazy has gotten engaged to Donna who, you’ll be surprised to learn, was actually the Eliminator the whole time! Betcha didn’t expect that, did you? Because of all these changes going on in their lives, the guys decide to go on a camping trip as this may be their last chance to do so, while at the same time Lisa is in Columbus taking the bar exam.

Everything’s going pretty well which of course means it’s time for drama to rear it’s head. Which it does when Lisa arrives back at Montoni’s and to her surprise ends up in a confrontation with an old friend.

*Leapin’ lizards! What a shocking development!*

Yes, while carrying the holy child within her Lisa is met with the appearance of Ohio Satan who, while not all powerful in his devilry, is able to draw upon his hellish powers to engage in minor annoyance. This annoyance comes in the form of Frankie demanding Lisa take him to his son — who ironically is right there unbeknownst to any of them — and he won’t take no for an answer. Because he’s evil, you see. So evil that he manhandles Lisa a little bit with dire consequences.

The stress of the situation causes Lisa to go into labor… I guess? I would assume that’s the reason anyway but who can really know? Godtiuk works in mysterious ways after all. Frankie takes the opportunity to skedaddle on out of the comic for the time being. With Darin and Lisa being the only two in Montoni’s it’s suggested that an ambulance is called but like a true Batiukian Hero, Darin decides he can get her to the hospital faster than the crummy professionals whose jobs it is to do this and who are basically their own traffic laws.

*How are EMTs even going to compete with a pizza delivery car?*

I mean how else was TomBa going to give us some hilarious dramatic irony and Teen Pregnant Lisa callbacks if the characters just left things up to the professionals like reasonable people? Don’t they know that there’s awards to be won? And oh man was Tommy Boy really in love with the dramatic irony for this story because he was practically ODing on it.

*It’s funny of course because he’s just reenacting his own birth.*

Okay, what the hell? Darin was canonically born in 1986 so he, if this took place in real time, cannot possibly be in the 11th grade. Unless I’m discounting the possibility that TB doesn’t actually know the difference between freshman, sophomore, junior and senior which maybe I shouldn’t be.

Anyway, the whole situation means that that the Annointed One was born a little earlier than normal and so she’s put on a ventilator to help her survive.

While talking with the doctor, the Moores realize that with all the craziness going on this summer they forgot to decide on a name for their little girl. Lisa decides that craziness means that Summer is the name that they’ll be going with which means I can finally start calling her by her actual name too. With the newborn Summer now clinging to life in Doctor Depresso’s Breatheinator 5000, Lisa fills in Les — who’d zipped back from the camping trip because he somehow felt that “something was wrong back home” — on the events that led to their kid’s premature birth. Les comically threatens to kick Frankie’s ass if he ever shows up again.

While you’re thinking of people more qualified and able than Les to beat up Frankie — the newborn Summer for instance — our hero decides to start making a list.

Batty, of course, is milking the apparent touch and go nature of Summer’s situation for everything it’s worth.

But fret not for this is but a fake out and these are happy tears! It turns out that Summer has gained a pound and Les is overcome with joy, huzzah! Things are going well and Summer’s about ready to leave the hospital, so Les goes out to buy a fancy new digital camera so he can get Boy Genius to explain to him and Lisa how uploading a picture works.

By the way, giving me vibes similar to this gem.

But even back in 2002 uploading pictures of your kids onto the internet for the whole world to see could lead to some suspicious characters coming across them. Characters you might not want.

*I bet he also evilly narrates putting jelly on his English muffin.*

Who could this be? Frankie? Or someone even more sinister?

Why it’s just another fake out as Lisa’s dad and/or mom were sinisterly and dramatically narrating their every action for our benefit simply to fool us. Perhaps they’re aware they’re characters in a comic strip and understand dramatic tension. Who can say? Regardless of any potential medium awareness, they’ve decided to move back to Westview to be closer to their family and so Lisa can have a convenient babysitter. Summer soon after has her first Christmas and Les decides to end it with the type of uplifting positivity that only he can provide.

*The world’s crummy and maybe it’ll be slightly less crummy for you but still crummy. Merry Christmas, kid.*

With that I’ll close things off here for the time being. The future Messiah has been born and all is right with the world for now. There will be plenty of time for Batty to screw up his handling of this most important of all Westviewians later but next time we may possibly rocket through a good chunk of the remaining years of Act II. Or we may not. But there will be a next time because we’ve got a long way to go.

Failure to Launch

I had previously showed and examined the history of Sadie Summers to determine whether or not she lived up to Batty’s assertion that she was his biggest mistake. I, and others it seems, did not really see her the same way her creator did and that her biggest problems were endlessly underused potential and missed opportunities. After all, she did manage a 15 year run and it took a literal decade long timeskip for Batty to finally get rid of the character he so detested. So she was a failure mostly through no fault of her own.

In terms of failed characters in Funky Winkerbean, there are plenty that would hope to be as successful as Sadie was. Today, we’ll be looking at some of these characters and speculating on where things went wrong. This won’t be a comprehensive look at any one character but little snippets of a large variety of them. So let’s get started with the Parade of Failed Characters.

LIVINIA SWENSON: One of the more well known examples of this group. Present in the very first strip, she would appear fairly regularly early on with what seemed to be a few stock gags. First, there was her repeated shooting down of eternal loser Les Moore.

And there was also her being a young feminist.

However, her prominence would very quickly diminish and by the second year or so of the strip she’d quickly become barely better than a generic student. Her appearances would go down in number dramatically, with her final one being a wordless appearance in the Fourth of July 1976 strip.

Infamously, she would “show up” at one of the many Coming Reunions having been killed offscreen via her name and photo on a board showing Westview High School students who had died, many decades after she’d stopped showing up.

Why She Failed: Likely a case of Batty just not knowing what to do with her. He probably figured there wasn’t a lot of mileage in her young feminist thing and her shooting down Les became redundant once Mary Sue Sweetwater was introduced to fill the same role. Also she was The Girl and we all know how ineffectual Batty is at writing women.

ROLAND MATHEWS: Another character who appeared in the very first strip. He was the radical leftist who didn’t bow to The Man, man, and played by his own rules.

But he was also something of a hypocrite given his denigration of the women’s lib movement (via his antagonism of Wicked Wanda) and fighting capitalism with capitalism.

By 1975, however, he would be gone.

Why He Failed: The likely reason is that Batty probably figured there wasn’t enough to be mined from his shtick. Roland and Livinia both had the problem of being tied to specific cultural moments that were long becoming passé by the time they were being phased out in the mid-’70s. Of course it would be shortsightedness on TB’s part because the hypocritical radical never goes out of style and there were plenty of ways to take Roland’s character after Act I as well. So naturally Batty decided to do the most logical thing and after nearly half a century bring Roland back in the waning months of the strip…

…as a transgender woman named Rolanda and using the first strip posted as justification. It’s easy to say that Batty was simply pulling a contemporary issue out of his ass in a shallow and thoughtless attempt at chasing glory. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d do it with LGBT issues after all. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt as in 2025 comics writer Tony Isabella would come out as a transgender woman named Jenny Blake Isabella. Given how close they are, I don’t think it would be surprising if Batty knew about it long before Isabella came out publicly so I’m willing to take it more as a shout out to a good friend… with a little self-aggrandizing back patting on the side.

DEREK AND JUNEBUG: A pair of characters from early in the strip’s run. Derek, being African-American, seemed to exist as an excuse to make race-based jokes. Though they were never at his expense but rather directed at the unintended ignorance of characters like Les and Funky.

While Junebug was… well…

Yeah.

Neither would be written out or completely disappear per se. Junebug would appear well into the late portions of Act I as one of the cheerleaders in the recurring Cheers For Losing Football Teams gag weeks. Although like a lot of similar gag weeks she, specifically, does not need to be there for the joke to work. Derek’s importance would just steadily plummet and not even an attempt to give him a hip new hi-top haircut late in Act I could bring him back to relevance.

*This is like a Who’s Who lineup of characters for this entry.*

After Act I, both Derek and Junebug would continue to make what amounted to glorified cameos during the various Reunions That Came and Went and poor Derek would later get retconned out of a remembrance of the story where he, Funky, Les and Crazy Harry painting Big Walnut Tech’s school rock.

Why They Failed: As said, Derek mostly seemed to be a vehicle for race jokes and perhaps Batty quickly grew to feel uncomfortable with that. But he also seemed to serve the role of straight man having to grudgingly deal with the morons he was surrounded by and that’s still funny on its own. But I suppose Batty didn’t think so. Junebug was pretty much little more than a loud and sassy black woman and I could see Batty probably realizing that what amounted to an eyerolling stereotype wasn’t going to fly.

Of course, the work could have been done to make them into more rounded characters but effectively dropping them is much easier and never let it be said that Batty didn’t take the laziest way out of a given situation.

MARY SUE SWEETWATER: Batty’s Original Cindy, the first Batiuk Blonde goddess and unending desire of Les’ affections and unfortunate victim of his many romantic overtures.

She lasted at some point up into the 1980s but her relevance had massively declined long before then as Batty had other gags for Les and decided to have him pointlessly swoon over a variety of new girls instead, including a story arc with an unseen girl that our own BJ6K utterly despises.

In the later portions of Act III, though, Batty was feeling nostalgic and decided to drag Mary Sue out of mothballs but not before deciding that she needed a little divine punishment for denying God’s Favored Son what was rightfully his.

*Ha ha, it’s funny ’cause she’s fat and frumpy now while Les has pretty women throw themselves at him for some reason.*

But Batty was not quite done with humiliating Westview High’s formerly most popular girl and in 2022 poor Mary Sue would be unceremoniously Livinia’d, probably of diabeetus or something. But she deserved it for her cruel treatment of famous writer and Oscar-winning actress Leslie Moore.

Why She Failed: She never had much in the way of personality to begin with and as stated it seems that TB very quickly grew bored of her. Once Cindy showed up her fate was sealed.

JEROME: A marching band member who was introduced as a rival to/annoyance for Holly.

He marched out about as quickly as he marched in.

Why He Failed: Incredibly easy to see why. His entire joke was pretty much his posture as part of him taking the band too seriously. It’s not remotely funny and I can imagine that this is one of the few instances where Batty stopped and rightly thought “What the hell was I thinking?” and immediately deep sixed him.

BODEAN: A delinquent introduced during the late Act I story arc where Barry Balderman is forced to go to summer school.

He and Barry connect during the summer, bonding over their shitty parents and Barry helping him discover that he’s dyslexic, which Barry is knowledgable about because he too is dyslexic. Unfortunately literally none of this is ever followed up on and outside of a few small appearances Bodean fades away before Act I even ends.

Why He Failed: I guess Batty really wanted to do a Breakfast Club riff focused on Brian and Bender and once he got it out of his system he didn’t really have much use for Bodean. Hilariously, he’s mentioned prominently in the description for The Complete Funky Winkerbean, Volume 6 (on sale now, BUYITBUYITBUYIT) as a new cast member alongside Cindy Summers so Batty seems rather proud of a character he almost immediately discarded.

CARRIE: Cindy Summers’ best friend and right-hand girl during Act I. Carrie pretty much served the expected role of both enabling her friend but also being one of the only people willing or able to give her a needed ego check once in a while.

She even gets a story dedicated to her late in Act I when she gets caught shoplifting at the mall.

But while she appears right up until the very end of Act I she doesn’t survive the transition to Act II, only getting small appearances during Cindy’s wedding to Funky and Cindy serving as maid of honor at her own wedding.

Why She Failed: Pretty easy to see in this case. Act II and beyond Cindy is such a completely different character from her Act I self that there really wasn’t much of a place for the Alpha Bitch’s Sidekick when Cindy’s attitude had 180’d like that. Maybe she still could have had use as someone for Cindy to bounce off so she has her own circle outside of the Montoni’s Dungeon but really, Carrie mostly filled a role that wasn’t needed anymore.

DUANE: Duane was a slow kid who Les hung out with in the gym a couple of times.

After only a handful of appearances he disappeared.

Why He Failed: Another one that seems pretty easy to see. I’m guessing Batty quickly got cold feet at making jokes about an intellectually disabled person. At least one that wasn’t an evil sporto.

GINNY WOLFE: If the saying “the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long” could apply to any single character in Funky Winkerbean, then it would easily be Ginny. She first shows up in 1985 as a mere substitute teacher.

But almost immediately she’d be either promoted or retconned into being a full-time teacher and regular member of the cast, teaching a sort of vague health/family class. Her most notable trait was that she seemed to be just about the only teacher who actually tried to do her job seriously which seemed to cast her in the role of Westview’s Frank Grimes.

She got a rather nice moment near the end of Act I, dancing with Les at the prom in an attempt to lift his spirits after his date stood him up. This friendly relationship between the two would continue into the first year of Act II where Ginny was portrayed as Les’ main work buddy.

She then completely disappears at the start of the 1993 school year, her spot having been taken by new teacher Linda Lopez who is basically just Ginny right down to teaching the same class. Only hispanic and much more jaded. No mention is ever made of why Ginny was gone, not even an off-handed line about taking a job at another school or anything like that.

Why She Failed: I… I don’t know. I really don’t. She’d been a regular and prominent character since the mid-’80s and then poof! There one minute, gone the next with no explanation. The only thing that makes even a shred of sense to me is that perhaps TB wanted to add a bit of diversity to the cast and so decided to replace Ginny with an effectively similar character. But really, out of all the characters in this entry Ginny’s “failure” is the most baffling because she wasn’t really a failure at all.

TRACY: In 1989 it was yet another prom story and Batty decided to actually do something with the strip’s namesake, who’d long been supplanted from his role as central character by Les, and give him a girlfriend. Thus come prom, Funky is one of many boys vying for the previously unseen and newly single Tracy and lucky him, she chooses to go with him.

*This isn’t the only shot at “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” that TB would take around this time. I’m guessing he really hated that song.*

Funky and Tracy would be an item all the way up until the time jump at which point she’d disappear until randomly coming back for a week in 2005.

At least I think this is Tracy. I’m pretty sure this is Tracy. Vicky was the name of a girlfriend that Funky had in the first year or two of the strip but seeing as this “Vicky” was Funky’s prom date I assume this is Batty screwing up names or something. Anyway, this led to Funky briefly falling off the wagon which caused some short-lived strain in his relationship with Holly in the lead up to their wedding. Tracy would disappear for good after this but managed to get a small cameo in an Act III strip where Funky is reminiscing about a merry-go-round.

Why She Failed: Even during Act I Batty didn’t seem to have much of an idea as to what to do with her. Her personality largely began and ended at Funky’s Girlfriend. But hey, their relationship lasted longer than the Divine One from Act I.

CLIFF: In the mid-’90s, Fred Fairgood decided that WHS needed a security guard and hired only the best of the best.

Cliff was another character who’d disappear fairly quickly but he makes what is probably the most confusing appearance in the entire strip. During Crazy Harry’s time travel trip back to 1980, he stops by WHS and gets accosted by none other than Cliff as he tries to warn Lisa about The Cancer.

“No wait, wasn’t Cliff not introduced until the ’90s?” you’re likely wondering. “Didn’t you just say he was hired by Fred who wasn’t principal at the time this strip is supposed to take place?” Yes, you’d be correct. Given that only a few months later, the Funky gang would be shown as having graduated in 1972, it’s clear that by this point Batty had long stopped caring about keeping the timeline coherent. So Cliff was somehow a security guard 16 years before he got hired which was 8 years after the gang had graduated high school and nobody thinks anything of it.

Why He Failed: Batty seemed to have a thing for the “old person doing stuff that old people don’t do” gag and Cliff was just one example of that. But his gag wore thin very, very quickly so it’s easy to see why he’d stop showing up. He was an Act I style character in a post-Act I world.

CARLO: It’s 2000, Funky is now co-owner of Montoni’s and decides he needs some extra help so it’s time to hire a dedicated cook. He eventually settles on Carlo whose whole shtick is that he’s a preening prima donna chef, not a mere cook.

As quickly as he showed up he… well, doesn’t not show up but stops having much of any focus. He does inexplicably manage to last all the way into Act III, still an employee of Montoni’s in 2010.

The gang’s all here. There’s Khan aka Kahn, Les, Holly, Funky, Carlo, Rachel and wait; hold up. Who’s that on the far end? It’s… a waitress who randomly shows up for a single strip in 2009 as if she’s been waitressing at Montoni’s the entire time.

Anyway, in spite of Funky’s assurances, that 2010 strip above turns out to be the last appearance of Carlo (and Dark-Haired Freckle-Faced Waitress) as near as I can tell.

Why He Failed: He had one joke and it sucked, simple as. DHFFW standing around and looking sad was more intriguing than him.

JAROD POSEY: Balding moody loner who, as punishment for smoking in the bathroom, gets forced to watch the football team practice.

Shock of all shocks, he actually has a great arm and is quickly press-ganged into being the new quarterback for the Scapegoats. Despite doubts, he leads the team to a win.

You’d figure that this would be an ongoing story. The talented outcast finding success on the football field and gaining the acceptance of his peers, you know? Of course not. Outside of a one-off cameo where he puts the moves on Gloomy Crankshaft Twin he never again shows up.

Why He Failed: Batty is lazy.

While this is not an exhaustive list of characters we’re running kind of long so this is as good a place as any to wrap it up. To run it back to the start of this piece, Sadie is far from the only failed character in Funky Winkerbean and characters can fail for many reasons. Some, like Jerome and Carlo, are shallow and ill-conceived and worthy of all the negatives that Batty (or the reader) can throw on them. But many come down to TB being too lazy to have simply taken a few minutes to think about what could be done with them once he’d seemingly mined all he was going to mine. Some times he just made really nonsensical decisions like memoryholing Ginny or doing nothing with the easy story of outcast jock Jarod’s rise to being the big man on campus.

I guess in conclusion, all I can really say is that Batty should have given more appearances to DHFFW.

Where did she come from? Why is she so sad? Is it because she knows she’s a great design wasted on a piece of wallpaper? Is it because she’s trapped in Westview? I suppose like many of these other failed characters, we can only speculate on what could have been.

Sadie Sinks

Last time in this little retrospective on the life and times of Sadie Summers, we charted her journey as the strip entered the mid-1990s, exiting the wilds of early Act II as the comic that surrounded her would begin to settle into its more familiar form. By this point the holdover gags from Act I had begun to fade away as more dramatic storylines took their place. The period covered by part 3 saw the establishment of the poetry club’s literary magazine which would lead to a long storyline involving a suicide attempt by Susan Smith and, more broadly, a madcap trip across Europe for Les Moore tha would end in his proposing to Lisa.

Sadie was… involved in this but only just barely. A lot of her time during that period was spent either around the mall with her interchangeable friends or doing poetry club stuff with Susan but for the most part she never got deeply involved with the serious stories. It was that relationship with Susan which would be the most significant as 1995 had ended with Sadie being the one to welcome her back to Westview High in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness that Susan had received. After all, one can assume that the logic is that if the most popular girl in school is showing her support then everyone will have to follow suit. It’s an interesting and welcome bit of character development for Sadie. But sadly, like a lot of things with her it turns out to be a very stop-start sort of deal.

Much like most of the other years during the early portions of Act II, Sadie gets an early appearance in 1996 spotting Les at the mall.

She also complains about proficiency exams.

And has a sleepover.

*At least my birthday strip wasn’t a Les or Dinkle one.*

You’ll notice that there’s not really much going on in these and it’s very frustrating considering how 1995 ended. At least Sadie’s making some appearances though because I believe Susan basically disappears for a while and it goes along with a problem that Batty will have in the transition to Act III. He wants to do these big dramatic stories with heavy themes but doesn’t want to do the follow up. How Susan readjusts to life is an obvious story to explore, how Sadie being there for her is an obvious story to explore, but these aren’t things that Batty is interested in doing. He wants to do emotional stories without focusing on the emotional fallout from them. It’ll happen with the death of Lisa, it’ll happen when Bull drives over a cliff and it happens here, too, in the wake of Susan’s suicide attempt.

So following the big story with Susan, we get Sadie there for a big emotional moment when she returns… and we get nothing else. We get some pointless nonsense where Batty continues trying to make Sadie into Cindy Lite. She does get a multi-week story in May regarding the prom where oh no, she doesn’t have a date!

It’s also at this point where Sadie gets a redesign as she decides that the prom is a good time to get a haircut that she frets over but ultimately can’t back out of.

*Congratulations on finally entering 1993!*

As said she’d been fretting over not having a date and as Becky was still mostly a prop for her mother, she’d yet to be designated as Wally’s One True Love so that earlier appearance might have been set up for her having to settle to taking him. But no, Sadie just finds some random guy who breaks up with his girlfriend to take her.

*He’s shivering because this story has no heat.*

In the fall, she makes a glorified cameo during a story where Batty, via Wally, tells us that tobacco is wacko.

This is the point where it’s clear that Batty’s interest in Sadie has really waned as it’s not until January 1998, nearly a year and a half later, that Sadie next appears, this time in what’s nothing more than a random one-off strip.

She next shows up for a two week story in March. Les’ class is going on a trip to Washington D.C. and needs to have the number 1 focus of Batty’s high school strips (school levies are number 2): a fund raiser. But poor Susan, finally getting some attention again for the first time in over two years, is having trouble selling anything. Sadie picks up on this and decides she’s going to help out Susan.

(By the by, the D.C. trip is the origin of one of my favorite Batiukisms: vendos!)

*That would put Susan above most of the cast of this comic.*

Naturally, this involves that apparent favorite of teenage girl activities, the makeover. Which means that Sadie, Tiffany and Courtney-Who-Is-Now-Brittany drag Susan out to the mall.

And by the time they’re finished, Susan is practically unrecognizable.

*Considering Batty likes having his guys call their girlfriends and wives “kiddo”…*

So Sadie’s given Susan a makeover, doing something to help her feel more confident, she’s also paying for it all herself. And it’s not presented as having any ulterior motive, like it’ll reflect well on Sadie. She seems to be doing it entirely for Susan’s benefit and Susan doesn’t reject it. She likes her new look and keeps it. And it even benefits her… kind of.

This whole thing will lead to another attempted prestige arc as Batty decides to tell a story about domestic violence as Matt Miller turns out to be a less than ideal boyfriend and we have yet another instance of Frustrating TB Writing. Because Sadie and Susan are friends, because Sadie has done a lot for Susan and because Sadie’s makeover is the genesis of this story one would assume she’d have a big role to play in this storyline. Her friend is dating the big man on campus, he’s being controlling and physically abusive. She should have a lot to say and a lot to do. But no, she has nothing to do with anything. All she can get is a background cameo during graduation.

*Even worse, she has to talk with Linda.*

That’s it, that’s all she gets in a story where her friend is a victim of domestic violence! But of course, this story isn’t actually about Susan because this morphs into a story about Les and Lisa where we get the first (I believe) of the endless retellings — either in full or truncated — of the Lisa’s pregnancy story as well as the first retcon where Frankie (named for the first time) is revealed to have physically abused Lisa and forced himself on her.

Because that’s what this story needed. Not Sadie acting as someone her friend could confide in or maybe using her position as the most popular girl in school to stand up to Matt. Nope, it needed the Moores hijacking it and adding rape to the comic’s lore.

But let’s move on from that unpleasantness to something more, temporarily, happy as soon after graduation it’s the wedding of Funky and Cindy and given that her sister is getting married, Sadie will surely play a role right? At this point, I assume our collective naivete has been thoroughly washed away as she gets another glorified cameo.

*And the last of the Big Eighties Hair holdouts falls.*

At this point, Sadie is reduced to bit character status as it’s not until May 2000 when she next shows up with Cindy getting her a job at Westview’s Home for Wayward Young Women during breaks from college.

*I told you, Sadie, there is no escaping it.*

As is to be expected, this goes absolutely nowhere and Sadie won’t show up again until early 2002 when she talks with Wally before he takes the ROFLcopter to Laughganistan.

A few things, first that first panel in the first strip (firstfirstfirst) is wildly out of character and another example of Batty writing the character he thinks Sadie is versus the character that she actually is. The second is that this is a pretty radical change in direction for Sadie who’s gone from (as Batty sees her anyway) vapid popular girl concerned only with her own image to a conscientious peacenik.

Sadie will actually get the most attention she’s gotten in years in 2002 as she shortly afterwards hears the news of what happened to Wally and is obviously deeply affected by it.

And then shows up for Monroe’s brief return when he reads a letter that Wally had written shortly before his ROFLcopter was shot down by a LOLcket.

But looks are deceiving and like usual this is yet another false start as it’s close to a full year later, during the John Byrne illustrated story of Wally’s return in 2003, that she next shows up snarking about Becky’s taste in animal-haired men.

Now this is definitely the judgiest we’ve seen her in a long time but given that eternal Montoni’s waitress and Wally’s future Mrs. Fix-It Mommywife is joining in I guess we’re not intended to find it too bad. Or maybe we are as Rachel’s only real character at this point was “hot tease”, I don’t know.

It’s yet another year before she shows up again, this time in 2004 for a week of her reflecting on being a student in Les’ class.

*I guess this is supposed to be some sort of joke?*

She gets another appearance that year talking to Rachel about Becky finally escaping Pizzacatraz to take up the job as the WHS assistant band director.

By this point she’s been reduced to what are pretty much cameos as in 2005 she gets some wordless appearances during a week dedicated to Tony trying to teach his employees, including new waitress and Crankshaft guest character Mindy Murdoch, proper etiquette.

*“Especially that cartoonist guy. His stories never go anywhere.”*

And also makes a background appearance during the double wedding for Funky/Holly and Wally/Becky.

*I really have to give TB credit for somehow fitting two lame jakes into a single strip. Bravo, Tom!*

Sadie gets her first speaking role in well over two years in a November 2006 strip as she and Mindy complain about Rachel getting all the tips.

*Speaking of racial profiling, remember the Montoni’s red lining story? Remember how that went absolutely nowhere?*

The next week, Sadie appears as background wallpaper during Becky’s baby shower.

That 11/25/2006 strip will turn out to be Sadie’s last appearance. 2007 is basically all Lisa, all the time between her cancer and Darin searching for his bio-mom so Batty has no time for anyone else, especially not for characters he doesn’t like. She did get an Act III character design sheet however.

But if Batty ever had any intention of using her then he quickly discarded those ideas to cast her into the, as he called it, “Dumb Character Phantom Zone” and she was neither seen nor even so much as mentioned again. What happened to her in the intervening decade between Acts II and III? Who knows? Maybe she got out of Westview, got a decent job somewhere working in, I don’t know, marketing or HR or something. That seems like the kind of thing she’d do.

So that’s it, with Sadie’s final appearance we’ve come to the end of this examination and history lesson. But what was the point? As I said at the start of all of this, Sadie definitely is a failure on Batty’s part but it’s not for the reasons he considers. Rather, it’s because Tom Batiuk failed to ever properly realize her actual potential.

TB complained that Sadie was a clone, a doppelganger and a “pale imitation of her big sis” but she was that only because that’s what he wanted her to be. He wanted her to be Cindy Jr. because he enjoyed writing Cindy in Act I but the problem is that Cindy only worked the way that she did because she was a cartoonish character in a cartoonish setting. Act II clung onto a bit of the cartoony wackiness for two or three years but the very nature of what Batty wanted to do meant that the more absurd tone just wouldn’t work in the more serious and dramatic setting he was trying to create. This means that the bits of Cindy he wanted to carry over with Sadie were completely inconguous with what the comic had become as they were made for what was effectively a different comic entirely.

And when he realized it wasn’t going to work, what did he do? He gave up and declared her to be stupid and ill-conceived. Instead of taking that mistake and working with it he simply threw up his hands as if there was nothing that he could do. This is in spite of the fact that, as I’ve hopefully shown, there were myriad directions to take her character that worked into that whole pale imitation of Cindy things. Plenty of stories that could have been done, ways to evolve and explore her character. The worst part is that it seems as if on some level Batty actually knew this. There are countless examples shown of Sadie having more below the surface, or of interesting directions she could have gone only to just never amount to anything. Her friendship with Susan is the most glaring one, but why give her that connection with Wally before he ships out only to do nothing with it once he returns?

And none of it is helped by Batty’s inability and lack of desire, which became worse as he got older, to write about characters he can’t relate to. Sadie was a woman and she wasn’t into comic books or pulp serials or writing or chasing awards and accolades so how could he relate to her? And if he couldn’t relate to her, how could he write her?

At least by the standards of Funky Winkerbean, Sadie Summers is a good character. But all the same she is a failure, not through any fault of her own but because the person writing her was too shortsighted to consider anything beyond his own view of what she should have been. He wanted Cindy II but the circumstances of the strip meant she could never be Cindy II. A better writer would have taken that as an opportunity to really think about this character and dive in. But we are not talking about a better writer, we are talking about Tom Batiuk and instead he would continue trying to force Sadie into a role she was thoroughly unsuited for. And for the crime of being unable to be what he wanted she was unceremoniously tossed aside.

She thus stands as a testament to many of Batty’s worst traits. His inability to think outside of his own poorly constructed box, how easily he gives up when presented with something that frustrates him, a lack of vision that causes him to miss an easy or natural story and being unable or unwilling to follow up dramatic moments in a satisfying way (or at all) are all present and in full force with Sadie. That, I feel, is Sadie’s true legacy and as such she will forever exist as one of the most damning indictments of his shortcomings as a writer.

Tag: Act II

Surprise! You’re On Cancer Camera!

The Littlest Accessory

Making a Messiah

Failure to Launch

Sadie Sinks