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I’m sure they’d be useful if Les encounters situations with which he’d need to play role of an outdated and culturally questionable jungle adventure hero and given the things Batty has done that wouldn’t have been outside the realm of possibility.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.
To steal an old Mitch Hedberg joke, he still is a loser but he used to be one too.
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.
Summer is already over this crap.
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.
“If by ‘there’ he means ‘Hell’ then we already are thanks to him.”
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.
Now she can harangue from the mountaintops.
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.
“Seriously, can you lay off the puns for five seconds, Moby Dickhead?”
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.
2009 saw a decent amount of stuff for Summer, largely with her rivalry-turned-friendship with Big Walnut Tech transfer “Breakfast Cereal” Keisha Williams. It was a story that weaved its way into a larger one involving Les, Keisha’s mother Cayla and the beginnings of the love triangle that involved the both of them and Les’ former student Susan Smith. Lisa continued to haunt the strip both figuratively and literally in the forms of Les beginning to write Lisa’s Story — the Holy Bible of the Batiukverse — and the real ectoplasmic form of Dead Lisa, creepily watching her husband make out with his new gal pal.
The underage Summer also had to deal with getting sexually harassed by the much older and very creepy Pete as the year ended… and we’ve reached the point where things are going to start going downhill for Westview’s Messiah. Not in the sense of bad things happening to her but rather as we enter into 2010 we’re now about halfway through Summer’s time in high school and we’ve about hit the point where Batty is beginning to grow bored of her.
In a broader context, the end of 2009 and start of 2010 revolved around Les traveling to, where else, New York City to meet high-powered literary agent Ann Apple and Batty pulls the oh so hilarious (not really) trope where the reader knows that Ann is really Apple Annie, the homeless woman who’d found the manuscript for Les’ book about John Darling (whose murder would leave Jessica Darling fatherless), but Les is too much of an ignorant buffoon to put 2 and 2 together to make 4.
Summer gets that small cameo there but does get a more important role the next week in a series dedicated to Les and Cayla watching her play, with Les fretting over her driving because he’s worried she’s going to end up like Becky.
I get the intent is to show Les being overly worried as parents tend to do and in a sense I can even see where he’s coming from because I’m also the type of person whose brain goes to absurd worst case scenarios. To this day I’ve never been on a roller coaster because I’m completely convinced I’m going to get the one that gets stuck upside down in a loop for two hours or flies off the track or something. But most people would rightly see that as just ridiculous anxiety and so it is here. Although I suppose the prevelance of conveniently placed cliffs along the equally convenient narrow mountain roads that surround Westview makes this a slightly more understandable concern.
There’s also some ironic comparisons between Les the uber-geek and Summer the uber-jock.
As the kids say, she got that dawg in her.
I’ll give Batty some credit in that typically he does a good enough job of showing Summer as being confident, driven to succeed and enjoying finding herself in high pressure situations. She is definitely the type of person who would attempt hero ball stuff. At least her athletic prowess is something we get to see repeatedly so we understand why people would praise her unlike with things like Les’ writing talent or Funky’s ability to make a pizza or Pete’s… everything.
Summer ends up sinking the game winning shot and Les relents on his driving fears.
The next week is some nonsense about Montoni’s and karma that I’m only bringing up as it contains one very important debut.
Anyway, Summer does at least get the Sunday comic that week which is more gushing over her being the greatest white basketball player since Larry Bird.
Apparently the Lady Scapegoats have done well enough this season to make the state tournament or I guess this is to determine the conference champion who would represent the conference in the state tournament? I think Batty is confused about state and conference because Bull gives a pep talk to his team before the game against Big Walnut Tech saying they’d be champions after this but it’s also a tournament game somehow.
And naturally Summer gets to play hero again.
But in reality Summer and her on-court success is secondary to what the actual story of this arc is about which is Wally’s PTSD.
After having twice been shot down and captured, after losing a decade of his life to it the second time, after having his family stolen from him by a skunk-haired comic book shop owner, after having the love of his life cruelly cast him aside, Rana — the only person who seems to remotely care about him — invites him to come out to the game because it may be the last time he can watch her cheer. Why, I have no clue. Summer’s generation isn’t close to graduating yet so Rana isn’t going to stop being a cheerleader any time soon. All the excitement of the game causes Wally to freak out which leads to him getting chased down by Funky and Becky who drive him back to his apartment and find out he sleeps with a gun under his pillow. Funky then gets Wally set up with counseling.
All of this plays out over about a month and a half so Summer and her team’s (conference?) championship is really little more than window dressing.
But hey, they still did win which put them in the state championship game. Les goes back to playing the overly worried parent and acts as if Columbus is like Baltimore or 1980s NYC or something. My impression of Columbus is that it’s basically Blandville, USA based entirely on it being used as the ideal test market for stuff but maybe there’s lots of crime to worry about.
Westview’s opponent is a school called Our Lady of the Cedars which I guess is supposed to be Batty’s way of telling the reader that they’re big and bad and that’s why the She-Goats are so scared of them.
Their fear turns out to be justified because Cedars pretty much stomps them into the dirt. Not even Summer’s main character boost are enough to put a dent in them.
There was, then, no joy in Westview because the Lady Scapegoats got their asses kicked.
But like the savior figure she is, Summer vows to rise from the dead. Figuratively but you never know.
The team in fact are a bunch of masochists as the beating laid down on them has only fired them up. Summer and Keisha are named co-captains in an “unusual move” so the team is ready to go next season.
Even more unusual, Bull is talking like a sideline reporter.
Summer subsequently decides to get an early start on training.
And that’s basically it for Summer’s relevance for the rest of the year. What I said earlier about what Summer’s stuff being mostly window dressing for Wally’s story? It’s basically going to be that on overdrive for the rest of 2010 because with Summer’s sporto BS over and done with, Batty can now move forward with what the readers really yearn for: Lisa’s Story and Les’ love life.
Most of the next month and change of strips is dedicated to Les and Funky going to New York to close down Montoni’s. But of course the actual meat of the story is Les meeting with Ann who’s set him up with a deal for Kent State Press to publish Lisa’s Story just like in real life because this is the point where Les has really morphed into Tom Batiuk’s avatar more than he already was. From this point on it’s book signings, shilling collected editions and collared shirts under sweaters for Les.
This actually gets into another irritating problem Batiuk has that I suspect Funky’s expansion of Montoni’s was a victim of. That being that things are only as important as they in service to the immediate plot needs of Les or some other pet character. That’s clunkily worded I’m sure so let me explain.
At the beginning of Act III, Funky has turned Montoni’s into a chain and expanded into New York City. Because Funky is busy all over Ohio and now New York, Les takes a second job at the original Montoni’s to help him out. He’s now a Montoni’s employee in addition to being Funky’s best friend which means that he now has a reason to travel to the NYC location. The first time is when Funky sends him to “put out some fires” there but do we ever actually see him doing any of this? No, he wanders around NYC, reminisces over Lisa, meets with Cindy and then has a revelation about his writing. The needing to constantly go to New York means that Les is able to keep in touch with Cindy who in turn connects him with Ann Apple which then gives Les further reason to go and meet with her. With Les’ book deal for Lisa’s Story secured, he no longer needs a plot excuse to keep going to New York and thus Montoni’s closes down because its only purpose for existing was as a plot device to facilitate Les coming and going from NYC to advance his writing career.
It’s quite sad when you think about it. Funky’s business success is pretty much a giant farce, existing only to prop up the second biggest loser in the entire strip.
With his book deal in hand and NYC Montoni’s consigned to the dust bin, Les finally returns to Westview. He’s met not by Cayla or his daughter or friends but by Susan who’s just over the moon. Summer, arriving back from something to do with softball, doesn’t seem overly happy to see her.
Les continues paying more attention to Susan than Cayla as Susan is, you know, actually helping him do work on his manuscript as opposed to sulking around like Cayla. Summer continues to be nonplussed about the whole thing.
Now you’d think that this would lead to a story where Summer confronts her dad about ignoring his girlfriend by paying attention to this horrible homewrecking harlot. But of course Batty is the master of going nowhere as slowly as possible so nothing ever comes of this aside from Summers’ disapproving looks. Who needs her having a talk with her dad about all of this when there are far more important stories to tell?
Damn you, Kubo!
The next two months are taken up by the tragicomedy (unintended of course) of Funky having to move his dementia-addled father to a nursing home and then getting into a car wreck. The collision rockets him through time, transporting him back to the days of Act I where he wanders around town and tells his younger self to buy a Starbuck Jones comic because it’ll be worth a lot one day and that’s really it. It’s a story that meanders as aimlessly as the title character does and then eventually ends with Funky waking up in the hospital to discover it was all a dream… or was it!? Because at the start of the story Funky gave DSH a rare Starbuck Jones comic so he’d have the money to cover the Komix Korner’s rent claiming that “some old guy” told him to buy it when he was younger. The implication of course is that the old guy was in fact Funky himself per the events of the “dream” that we had witnessed and the whole thing was some kind of time loop.
Time travel stories and them being dismissed as mere dreams? I’m sure glad that will never come up again in this series.
That’s followed up with more Winkerbean wackiness when perennial scene filler Rachel starts dating the highly traumatized Wally beginning her journey to become what every Batiukian woman aspires to be: a mommy-wife who exists to solve her man’s problems. It’s not until the end of August, a full three months since her last appearance, when Summer pops in to remind the readers she still exists.
Around just long enough to tell her dad that it’s cool to start his literary career inside the sad remains of a once proud pizza empire, Summer disappears as quickly as she’d appeared so Batty Funky can say goodbye to his beloved PT Cruiser and Les can have a sitdown with Cayla and Susan to… help him choose the cover of his book. Because this farce of a story needs to be stretched out in increasingly inane ways. Cayla’s spent the last few months feeling left out in the cold by all the attention Les is paying to that little tramp and decides to do something about it. Does she confront Les and tell him how she feels about all of this directly? Does she maybe get into a catfight with the younger but far less athletic Susan?
No, of course not. She just changes her hair as some kind of weird passive-aggressive power move intended to one-up Susan which works, for now, because of course it does. Cayla: 1, Susan: 0, Readers: -500.
Summer makes her customary monthly appearance to go “WOW CAYLA, COOL HAIR!” and slink back into increasing irrelevancy.
And I do mean monthly because it’s about 1 month on the dot when she next shows up during the book launch to talk about Ann, inadvertantly creating jealousy in both Cayla and Susan.
Unfortunately this does not lead to an absurd story of the two love rivals teaming up to deal with a schizophrenic homeless woman masquerading as a literary agent. Missed opportunities, I say. Again, it’s another month before Summer shows up, throwing it down like she was Shawn Kemp.
Since October, Les has been on a book tour because at this point while he’s still technically a teacher, his appearances actually teaching classes are largely over and done with. His real career of flying around to engage in book signings where he wryly mocks all the people taking time out of their day and money out of their wallets to support him has begun. Why Batty even continues with the charade of Les being a teacher is beyond me, he even calls attention to it by having Nate handwave it away.
Maybe Nate’s just glad he’s not around.
Summer gets slightly more to do for once with Les checking in on her…
…and having to deal with the dreaded task of talking someone through using technology over the phone, presumably because she’s considered tech savvy for knowing how to turn on and off a computer.
By the middle of December, the first of an unending parade of book tours is finished and Les is ready to head home but a mysterious voice from beyond the grave pleads with him not to get on the plane.
Les believes he’s being pranked and angrily walks — with anger — onto his seemingly doomed flight. Summer is supposed to pick him up from the airport but has yet to hear from him.
Tension builds as Batty ends the week with a cliffhanger.
But Batty does his best R.L. Stine impression and the cliffhanger turns out to be nothing as Les, unfortunately, shows up at the Taj Moore-hal fine and dandy.
Les explains to Summer and Cayla that it’s “a long story” of which we only catch the tail end of.
But oho! That’s not quite the end of it because TB has one final curveball to throw at us.
Yes, that’s right, Lisa used her ghostly powers to call in a bomb threat and commit (fake) terrorism in order to save the life of her still living husband either out of genuine concern for his wellbeing or simply so he doesn’t bother her for eternity in the afterlife considering he keeps summoning her to Earth for inane crap as is.
With Les’ life saved from another ValuJet incident, the family is able to celebrate Christmas together.
So 2010 turned out to be a pretty down year for Summer on the whole. Aside from the basketball stuff in the earlier part of the year she was mostly relegated to one-off appearances for the majority of the year… when TB could be bothered to actually have her show up at all. Even then, a good chunk of that basketball story is really just there to provide background noise in service to Wally’s PTSD story or to Les’ parental worries. It’s really only when the Scapegoats are getting destroyed in the championship game that it’s kind of about her and the team specifically.
Which really gets into the heart of the problem with Summer’s use while she’s in high school. As I’d mentioned earlier, Batty typically does fine (by his standards) in showing that Summer’s supposed to be a talented athlete as opposed to simply telling us she is and then leaving us to actually believe that it’s true as he does with so many other “talented” characters. The problem though is that’s all that she does. Think about it, since Act III has started how many stories has she had that were about anything other than her playing basketball? I don’t mean her being involved in a story, like where she’s the one who convinces Les to write Lisa’s Story, I mean stories that are about her specifically.
All I can really think of is the 16th birthday at the NICU for premature births, her wanting to drive and her being pissy over not having a date to the winter dance. Everything else is basketball and if she’s not playing basketball she’s playing softball. Otherwise she’s basically just there to hang around Les and encourage him or gush over Cayla, basically acting like a shipper.
For a character who was supposed to be so important to Act III she’s pretty quickly relegated to the sidelines and in a couple of years it’s only going to get worse.
It’s been another overly hot summer and where I am, we just got out of a heatwave. I’m sure plenty of readers know how muggy summers in the Southeast tend to be so compound that with even higher temperatures and a poor A/C that’s already not much of anything and the last week or so has been rather brutal.
And yet while summer is entering its end stage (come on, we all know that once the calendar switches over to September, it’s fall no matter what The Man says), Summer continues to roll on. When last we left her, she was spying on dear ol’ dad to see if he was putting the moves on that hot new secretary that replaced boring cat lady Betty. For the start of 2009 we pick up with her hanging out with Jinx in a strip which sets up a story where Rana spends a week freaking out over the fact that guys are going to be added to the cheerleading squad.
Yeah, it’s obvious Batty never had a clue what to actually do with Rana.
The next week starts the story arc that will be Summer’s big focus for the first quarter of the year.
Summer gets Dikembe Mutombo’d and is all out of sorts as she wonders just who could have done that to her. She’s surprised to see that it’s none other than her new teammate Keisha.
Asserting dominance.
Summer seems kind of surprised by this and quite frankly so am I because look at that previous comic; that shot blocker was whiter than the audience of a Dave Matthews Band concert. If I found out that my teammate was a shapeshifter or racebender I would be pretty shocked too. Naturally this whole thing leaves Summer completely out of wack and she complains to Les about how Keisha made her look like a joke.
At the game the next night (?) Les and Cayla talk about how Keisha was the star which presumably has left Summer in a bad mood. Les decides to take Cayla out to eat at Westview’s fanciest restaurant. Not Olive Garden fancy, mind you, but close!
Rachel then contemplated slugging Les for making her recite such a stupid motto.
Les, by the way, is still doing this stupid song and dance of “Oh, uh, we’re totally not dating,” even though they went to the Winterfest together and he’s now taking Cayla to the holiest of Westview’s temples. We’ve seen this crap, we know how it goes. By bringing her to Montoni’s Les is practically proposing to her. But no, we’ve still got the world’s stupidest love triangle to deal with.
Back to the main, Keisha’s presence on the team has completely sapped Summer of her confidence and led to the team playing badly. So far, the Williamses are a complete net negative on things both in and out of universe.
At this point, Summer is a complete disaster and winds up being benched while Keisha continues to get all the praise.
Which then leads to this complete nonsequiter.
Now suddenly bringing up Dead St. Lisa could just be a sign of Summer’s depression, like she’s going to off herself over basketball or something. But no, it’s simply an excuse to then transition into yet another example of Les insisting that he and Cayla are NOT DATING SO BACK OFF AND SHUT UP SUMMER, GOOOOOD YOU’RE NOT MY MOM YOU HAVEN’T EVEN THROWN AWAY MY COMIC BOOKS!
Summer’s on-the-court woes continue and even at home she’s bricking shot after shot when she’s greeted with a surprise that’s pleasant to her but not to the readers.
Darin, unfortunately, makes another appearance to dazzle the readers with his sparkling personality and memorable traits like… uh…
Summer takes the opportunity to vent about how things have been going for her since Keisha transferred over and gives us a nice little Batiukism in the process.
Darin naturally does what any loving brother would do in this situation and gives his baby sister some advice on how to fix her shooting woes.
It’s a nice little moment, I guess, except for one tiny little insignificant nitpick: why is Darin giving Summer basketball advice!?
Darin, as established throughout basically all of Act II, is a grade A geek. He was a low-on-the-totem-pole loser and the closest he ever got to any athlete was whenever Jessica would throw herself at him. He was never hinted at having anything in the way of athletic ability so why, WHY, is he telling a basketball star who is light years beyond where he ever was what to do? And why is Summer even listening to him? I mean sure, okay, in real life you don’t necessarily have to play a sport or be an elite athlete to have some knowledge of things but typically those coaches who weren’t athletes were at least around the game all the time in other capacities, that’s why they’re good at what they do. Darin never been any closer to athletic competition than mocking it in his and Pete’s dumb comic strips.
Well whatever, I guess in the end it doesn’t matter because aside from showing up at her next game that’s really about all we see out of Darin. For as important as he was in Act II and as much as he’ll take over the strip in the 2010s, in the first few years of Act III Darin barely exists.
Anyway, it’s the final game of the season which of course is against Big Walnut Tech and Keisha’s former teammates are showing her how they deal with traitors while Cayla also shows the reader that she has her daughter’s raceswapping properties in what retroactively turns out to be a genius bit of foreshadowing of Cayla’s eventual visual evolution. Bravo Tom!
Summer decides she’s had enough and pretty much inserts herself into the game.
And then swoops in when Keisha’s in trouble.
Westview loses but Summer’s back to her old self and her and Keisha are now on the same page and bonding over their dads. Well, one of them has a dad anyway.
Which of course transitions into more Les insisting he’s not dating Cayla nonsense.
Which I think gets into the core of what Batty was actually doing with this storyline. It wasn’t about Summer per se and lord knows it wasn’t about Keisha who doesn’t have much of a character to speak of. It was mostly just flavor, giving Summer something to do, in service of the real story which was Les, Cayla, and the world’s lamest love triangle. That said, it at least is a story about Summer that’s based on something she’s into and that’s important to her and doesn’t end with her becoming the trophy for a lame nerdy male character like so many other female characters in this comic. So she’s got that going for her.
That love triangle is also where we’ll be detouring to for a little bit as well. After a month of shenanigans focused on Dinkle, Cory, and Funky’s suicide inducingly bad day, Dinkle’s comic opera (because it’s laughably bad you see) The Magic Flutophone is set to open and Susan decides that this will be a great date for her and the hunky English teacher of her dreams. Unfortunately, Cayla’s snapped him up first.
Summer teases Les over the fact he’s still insisting that going to a concert with Cayla is not a date and that he and Cayla aren’t dating.
Cayla comes by to pick up Les, because if nothing else Les is consistent in being a lazy jackass and making his girlfriend drive him around everywhere, and proceeds to have a little schizo break.
Cayla apparently doesn’t mind dating a lunatic who talks to the ghost of his dead wife and the two go to Dinkle’s undoubtedly awful concert and somehow enjoy themselves. At this point Les finally stops dancing around things and acknowledges that he and Cayla are indeed dating. The two lovebirds share a kiss in what is surely one of the most infamous and unintentionally hilarious strips in the history of Funky Winkerbean.
With Lisa the Ghostly Cuckquean’s approval, Les and Cayla are official.
As for the main subject of this series, Summer shows up for the requisite random installment of the Dead Lisa Tapes and also makes an appearance during Cindy Summers’ (who insists she’s going by Cynthia now but that doesn’t last long) return to Westview.
She also shows up for an insipid story where Cory attempts to cheat by writing his answers on his water bottle. Now that I think of it, I feel like the only times in Act III where Les is shown actually teaching his class is for these stupid “a student has cheated and Les puts them in their place” stories.
We then get another summer story of Summer and Jinx’s softball shenanigans.
But this was all light fare to relax the reader for most of the rest of the summer after this is taken up by what is undoubtedly the most infuriating story in the entire strip. Wally comes marching home to find DSH John has cuckoo birded his way into his nest, beady-eyed nitpickers complain, Wally walks off into depression. It’s called writing.
Batty bookeneds that story with another Montoni’s Softball one.
He seems to have quickly grown bored of this setup though for this is the last we’ll see of the softball team and poor Jinx’s relevance to the strip disappears with it. Her spot as Summer’s best friend (I guess? She sure seemed to be) has by now been usurped by Keisha and eventually Jinx will disappear so thoroughly from the strip that she won’t even make it to the St. Spires Christmas concert which features damn near every other Act III character.
By this point Summer has just turned 16 and drops the news to her dad that she wants to get her license and that Bull is teaching driver’s ed.
Les spends the next week fretting over this showing that everything Bull has done for him since high school has been for naught. And with school starting up again, Batty also begins seeding the post-Summer class with the first appearances of Funky and Les IV: Owen and Cody.
In October, Keisha learns the benefits of being “part of the family” when it comes to the Moores: acting as free labor for Les’ ego stroking charity event.
Summer also engages in some practice driving and Les acquiesces to her desire to stunt all over Maddie.
Summer also wants to be able to get a car once she has her license and Keisha pushes her to get a job. Oh no. Summer and Keisha are female. They are young. They want jobs. You know what that means…
Say hello to the newest residents of Westivew’s Home for Wayward Young Women. Because Pete sure as hell is about to.
Just in case he wasn’t clear enough…
Yes, here is Pete trying, like the creepy little dweeb he is, to flirt with Les’ daughter and the half-sister of his best friend. Let’s ignore how awkward and nonsensical his flirting is and focus on what’s important. He knows, he fucking knows how old Summer is and still he’s trying to put the moves on her. Let me reiterate this: Pete Roberts is a man of around 30 trying to flirt with an teenage girl roughly half his age. A girl that he undoubtedly knows is underage because she’s the half-sister of his best friend.
What the hell was even Batty’s intention with these two strips? Was he trying to make Pete come off as cool and confident? Because he not only failed, he backfired in spectacular fashion. Pete looks like a giant tool. He looks like a creep. He looks like someone who buys a lot of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
I hate Pete. I really, really detest him. Darin is the world’s most boring person to be sure. Les is a punchable smug douchebag. Dinkle is an unbearable egomaniac. But Pete is something else entirely. He’s an annoying gnome who gets constantly rewarded for no real reason. At twentysomething he was the top writer in the comics industry. He bounces around from publisher to publisher, being given opportunity after opportunity and when he inevitably fails out of this or that one — because he’s a talentless hack — he fails upwards into better jobs. And it’s not just jobs. By the end of Act II he has Chien interested in him though thankfully Batty jettisoned her before he could shackle Pete to her.
Later on he’ll have poor Mindy enamored with him because… well, I don’t know. And how does he treat Mindy? He whines and berates her for daring to create a character he doesn’t like for his stupid comic book. He quits his well-paying and seemingly dependable screenwriting gig to force her to help him run a pizza restaurant and live in the shitty small apartment above it. There’s a strip later on in Act III where it’s heavily implied that Mindy is sending him erotic photos of herself and what does Pete do? Like the giant irredeemable asshole that he is, he shows them off to Darin as some kind of flex.
But it’s okay because Pete is a wish fulfillment self-insert for Batty in a way that not even Les is. He can never fail even when he objectively does and he can never, ever face a negative consequence for any action he undertakes. He can do stupid and despicable things, he can be the shittiest writer of comics this side of Chuck Austen and for some reason will be rewarded for it. He can be a giant creep and still get women way out of his league and everyone treat him like he’s just such a lovable cool guy.
Calling him a tool would be understating what a rotten ugly little troll man Pete is. I hate him. I loathe him. And I can only hope the end of Crankshaft is a nuclear missile striking Montoni’s after Mindy has finally wised up, grown a spine and locked him and his precious comic books inside.
Moving on to actual matters, we close out the for Summer with a family gathering.
That will likewise close out this entry. But while 2009 may have been a down year for our budding little savior, 2010 will be a year that’s looking much brighter. Probably because I won’t have any more reason to rant about how much I hate Pete.
When last we left this examination of the life and times of Summer Moore, the retiring Betty Somethingorother was replaced as Westview High’s secretary by Cayla Williams. As we all know, Cayla will eventually be Les Moore’s second wife and Summer’s stepmother. She also happens to be the daughter of Smokey Williams, a pro baseball player who had appeared much earlier in Crankshaft being mentored by the crusty old bus driver. Cayla’s future position as Queen of the Taj Moore-hal will not be for a while, though Batty will get to kindling that fire in this, the year of love.
But love can take many forms of course such as the bonds between parent and child which will be somewhat tested this summer when our Messiah finds that her genetic contributor will be spending the time off from school making a nuisance of himself at her hangout spot.
In fact, Sporto Spice already has a backup plan by spending the summer playing youth softball which dear old dad sees as a potential gravy train.
Not pictured is the fourth panel where Les’ eyes turn into dollar signs with a CHA-CHING sound effect.
And it’s not just going to be Summer because Linda has noticed Jinx giving her father the typical teenager attitude because they’re just, you know, so opposite and all and decides to solve this problem by meddling. First by signing her daughter up for the same softball league behind her back.
While also signing up Bull to coach behind his back, christening it a bonding exercise for the two them and gloating about how her scheme is already working.
Now on the subject of love, Batty gives us this rather peculiar Sunday strip at the beginning of July.
Tension isn’t the only thing building.
This has nothing to do with anything, of course, but when I was collecting material for this piece I came across this and just had to grab it. This has to stand as one of the most bizarre strips in the comic’s history, right up there with Zanzibar, the Gun-Wielding Primate. Now I can clearly guess that Batty’s intention was just a simple “Pete gets pulled over and the cop’s amused by his wit and lets him off” kind of gag but I mean… he and Ayers had to know what they were doing right? The dialogue, the little knowing looks between them and the cop’s fierce way of walking away. A big Pride float filled with leather daddies going down Westview’s main street wouldn’t be near as homoerotic as this exchange between Mopey and Officer Sassy.
And now that I’ve given the yaoi fans the fuel that they’ve undoubtedly been craving, we go to the opposite end of the spectrum as Jinx is just thrilled, positively elated even, to be on the same team as Summer.
TB was really on something this month.
But ultimately this is more of a Jinx story where Summer is just along for the ride and it’s about her one shot of relevance in the strip’s entirety.
Meanwhile, while the girls play, the douche has been away having been sent off to New York by Funky to “take care of some things” at Montoni’s NYC location for him.
What that something is we never actually find out because instead Les’ entire trip is spent wandering around NYC talking to Cindy, bemoaning his so-far-failed writing career or reminiscing about his and Lisa’s honeymoon… anything except doing his goddamned job which will be a startlingly common thing with him going forward. It’s during this trip that we also learn that love never dies, it just remains trapped in a depressing purgatory that leaves you looking like an utter lunatic to everyone around you.
That’s right, everyone’s favorite wraith has made her entry into the comic ready to show up at only the most inopportune and awkward times.
Les returns home to news of The Coming Reunion and decides to spend all day moping about getting old and telling his bemused daughter that the ravages of time shall be visiting her too.
By this point Summer has turned 16 and her hospital is throwing a party for all the NICU kids like her who are also turning 16 this year.
And not content to haunting this earthly realm in spectral form, Lisa has left Summer a little birthday present. We get the first of Lisa’s video messages so she can lecture, chastize and threaten the world of the living from beyond the grave. She takes advantage of this inspired bit of forethought to tell Summer the harrowing story of how her half-brother was almost named Econoline.
“Now, my lovely daughter, I want you to find my diary so you can have all the filthy details. This, your mother commands!”
By the way, Lisa sounds like Doris Grau in my head whenever these cancer video strips pop up.
In September a new player enters the scene when Susan Smith returns as a full time teacher at Westview, crossing paths with what will be one of the other parts of the most nonsensical love triangle imaginable.
In October it’s time for another Lisa’s Legacy run with everyone oohing and aahing over Summer for how she’s helped organize the event. She’s also shown hanging out with Cory who’s been forced to come by his parents.
Unfortunately all the money raised this year has been stolen but Funky graciously offers to have Montoni’s cover the amount which Summer has to accept on behalf of her dithering dad.
Of course we immediately find out that Cory stole the money, Holly and Funky know and Funky declares it the “last time I cover for you.” As should be expected though, the shock of Cory being the thief is what’s most important so this is never again followed up on. Cory stole thousands of dollars and basically got away with it. Great writing, Batty!
And speaking of the complete opposite of great writing, soon after Les is moping around because yet another of his crappy stories has been rejected.
How could they reject “Majors League: The Unauthorized Biography of Mike Majors”?
In despair Les tells Summer to file it away with all the other garbage. But our curious as a cat savior spies something.
After a quick perusal of it she tells her father to use it instead.
And thus is born Lisa’s Story, the third part of the unholy trinity that will allow Lisa to forever haunt this series for the rest of its life.
With school back up in full swing and Summer now on the varsity squad, life decides to throw her a few curveballs. First up is the loss of the team’s coach who like St. Lisa before her decided to leave Westview for Seattle. Forced to take her place, and still fretting over coaching girls, is newly minted athletic director Bull Bushka.
And he’s not the only new arrival because also transferring is Big Walnut Tech’s star player, Keisha Williams.
Summer is naturally none too happy that she now has competition for the spot of being the team’s star player.
I will give Batty some credit in actually giving Summer a somewhat negative character trait but not overplaying it too much. One would expect someone with the competitive drive to be a star athlete to also have a bit of arrogance to them and not really take kindly to threats to their status. Of course it’s not overplayed for the reason that almost all of his stories ultimately go nowhere but hey, it’s something.
Les decides to take the opportunity to tease Summer about her feeling threatened.
And in a Sunday strip we get Summer tagging along for the incredibly rare Maddie-centric comic as she buys a hat that’s just like her father’s.
Thankfully TB didn’t also have her decide to start living in her locker.
Les and Cayla both show up to basketball practice and Cayla decides for some ungodly reason to begin flirting with Les while also revealing that she’s Ketamine’s mother.
At this same time Summer gets picked to be part of the court at the Winterfest dance but is bemoaning not having a date. We also learn that she has apparently been dating — and broken up with — a mysterious “Ron” the whole time so I amend my statement a bit from the previous entry. Now if you thought that showing Summer with a boyfriend, you know the kind of thing that would good both for her and for doing stories about a father dealing with his kid growing up, would be important… well you’re not Tom Batiuk. Maybe Ron just went to a different school in Canada so we couldn’t see him, who knows?
A big school dance would also require a new dress which leads to another Ghost Lisa appearance in what is a favorite strip of readers of this site wherein Les basically yells at his daughter to stop dressing like a tramp.
Cayla, like Les, has signed up to chaperone the dance and makes very subtle come ons to him.
Summer continues to curse the cruel whims of her Flash-obsessed creator. She’s the dateless loser while her dad is going on a date with her rival’s mother? It’s utterly preposterous! Les, of course, plays the role of dense harem manga protagonist to a T just to make him even more annoying.
But lo, the tables turn because Cory has been “volunteered” to ask Summer to the dance.
Cory, despite his protestations to the contrary, doesn’t seem particularly thrilled. I assume going on a date with the school’s popular star athlete was his “punishment” for stealing thousands of dollars from a charity event and maybe he realizes what a farce this whole story and indeed series is.
I don’t know if Batty had any intention of actually doing some kind of a romance between Summer and Cory but if he did then he rightly realized that actually putting Les and Funky’s kids together would have been too lame and cliche a move even for him because this is immediately dropped. One thing he didn’t drop of course is the one between Les and Cayla.
As we can see, TB seemed to be in a bit of a lovin’ mood in the back half of the year. 2008 was the year where he’d had his car crash so maybe that close call led him to a bit of reevaluating that he decided to temporarily reflect in Funky. Whatever the case most of it will end up going nowhere: Summer’s love life, Pete’s flirty little brush with the law, not a one of them.
Summer at least is actually getting a reasonable amount of focus now compared to most of the first year or so of Act III but of course you can still see issues. Batty’s love of doing something shocking only for it to go nowhere is evident in Cory’s stealing of the Lisa’s Legacy money; as I said maybe the date for the Winterfest is the “punishment” but if so then that’s a pretty poor cap to that. Les takes a job at Montoni’s which mostly seems to exist as a reason for him to go to New York so he can mope about his failed writing career and see Lisa’s ghost.
But at least his writing career up to this point can be described as “failed.” Not so for Mopey who, if you remember, is reintroduced in Act III as a successful writer for Marvel. Not brought up here is that he’s now, somehow, moved over to DC to write Superman which leads a multiweek storyline about Pete feeling inadequate and going to Jerry Siegel’s childhood home where he imagines what Siegel (or Pete playing the role of Siegel) must have felt when creating Superman in what is the first of the Pete (and later Darin) flashback to the olden days of comics strips.
Les, of course, is a self-insert for Batty but Pete feels like an even more blatant one at times.
But that’s getting off track and is also enough ranting for one day so I’ll leave things here for now. Batty’s plots may be going nowhere and neither is this retrospective as brother, we still have a long way to go.
They laid Lisa Moore to rest in 2007, scattering her from Ohio to New York. It was a sad thing; so very sad that Tom Batiuk didn’t want to deal with it and have Lisa’s death drag the whole strip down. No sooner had she croaked than we were thrust a decade into the future. Les and the other Act I characters were now middle aged; 46-going-on-60. But they weren’t the only ones who’d aged up as Act III was promoted with a promise. It wouldn’t just be the old men and women getting the stories but their children as well.
That’s right…
It’s like an ad for a new totally radical syndicated Saturday morning teen show from 1994.
First off, I wonder who they got to do this art because these characters all bear only the vaguest of similarities to the characters from the comic itself. Second, we were indeed intended to be getting stories about the sons and daughters of the Westview High School Class of ’92’88 ’78 but as we’ll see, Batty eventually seemed to have his own ideas.
Why that is, who can say? In the last couple of years of he’d been getting some writing help from Sean McKeever, a comic book writer who’d been making a name for himself at Marvel on books starring teenaged and college-aged characters. His scripting duties (for I assume he was scripting based on Batty’s plots) included the Senior Skip Day story that started the Dopey/Jessica romance and I suspect almost all of the stuff with them was done by him as well as he’d also done the story about Darin learning that Lisa was his birth mother. I was, and am, a fan of the stuff he was doing for Marvel from that time period and a lot of those strips read like watered down versions of the kind of things he had been writing. McKeever, in an old interview from the COVID times, had said that Batty actually wanted to bring him on full time as a co-writer but by 2007 he’d just signed with DC to write Teen Titans which had been his dream book so turned it down.
I suspect that had McKeever taken up Batty’s offer, he would have been doing stories with the high school characters and without him Batty, who showed less and less interest in younger characters the older he got, just kind of shrugged. But he did still make an attempt at writing them which means it’s now time for the fourth entry in our examination of Summer Moore’s history.
The very first thing Summer gets up to is tagging along with her father on a trip to New York for the (first?) Lisa’s Legacy run.
Remember, he didn’t want the spectre of Lisa’s death hanging over the strip.
And tagging along is the right term because while she’s there, she’s just sort of around to throw in a comment or something. While in New York, the Moores meet up with Cindy who takes them to the grand opening of Montoni’s NYC location where Summer promptly gets hit on.
And we also get our first look at Act III Funky who’s become balding and fat.
Summer is having no part of Funky’s crap and frankly I’m right there with her.
In November we also get the reveal that she’s a jock as Summer takes the opportunity to make fun of her father. Also, her teammate looks like she could be the sister of that one balding kid from the final generation of WHS students.
Around this time is also when we’re properly introduced to the rest of the Funky Kids, the next generation who will theoretically be carrying the strip. Aside from Summer we have Jinx Bushka, adopted daughter of Bull and Linda Bushka. She’s introduced in a way that would make you think she’s a performative theater kid type but if she was that disappears immediately.
There’s Rana Howard, formerly Rana Winkerbean. Batty seemed keen on the idea that all the kids were the opposite of their parents so while Rana’s the daughter of a band geek and comic store owning dweeb, she gets to be the requisite Most Popular Girl In School right down to what I believe is stealing an old Cindy joke.
But on the flipside there’s Maddie Klinghorn who’s set up as being her father’s daughter. Except you’ll never know it because she gets absolutely zero focus and thus very little in the way of actual personality. Like even Jinx will get a couple of stories focused around her, Maddie gets absolutely nothing. She’s pure scene filler.
She’s got nice hair at least.
Rounding out the group is Cory Winkerbean, the bad seed. A big story throughout the first few years of Act III is how Funky’s focus on business has led to neglect of his family and so with the money that Funky provides but not the terrible puns, Cory’s turned out to be a moody troublemaker.
While it’s not directly related to Summer (yet), Mopey Pete Roberts (not yet Reynolds) returns to Westview having achieved the highest level of prestige in Batiukland: becoming a comic book writer. In this we’re also introduced to Maddie’s younger siblings Tyler and Abbey.
I am almost 100% sure that this is the only time in Act III that Crazy Harry’s other kids are shown or even mentioned. Donna was pregnant at the end of Act II which also makes this extra confusing. Because Maddie was born in 2003 but looks as if she’s a full decade older than her brother when at most it should be like 3 or 4 years. I guess it doesn’t matter because Batty memoryholed them but still, come on man.
It’s Christmas time and Summer, being 15, wants to go on a “solo car date” with a guy. Les responds to this in the way that only a loving father can: by laughing in his child’s face as if she’s the biggest moron on Earth.
But Les caves and decides to let Summer have her date, and Summer gets back at him by laughing at him for being a dork and trying to explain the birds and the bees to her. As she says, she’s a teenager with the internet so presumably she’s already been exposed to at a minimum Naruto and Harry Potter slash fiction.
There’s nothing you can teach her that she hasn’t already learned from the writings of xXSasukesGrlXx.
All of this is just build up to her date showing up for one strip so Les can play the role of embarassing parent while turning it into a sappy Lisa tribute.
Oddly enough, this is also the last time that Summer is shown being involved in anything romantic, at least on her end. There’s other stories that involve boys having crushes on her but never again is she shown having feelings for another boy, trying to date or anything like that really. Why that is are things we can speculate on much, much later so we’ll just move on to Summer’s last significant appearance of the year.
Just before New Year’s, she’s shown joining her dad and his buddies for a game of football and naturally, like the true jock she is, can’t pass up the opportunity to bully her father for being a wimp.
Meanwhile, Funky’s smug grin is growing to cover his face like lichen on a large rock.
She also shows up at the beginning of the year having attended a party that Cory threw to further the story of Cory being Problem Child (1990) as he’d thrown the party while Funky and Holly were out of town.
She starts getting some attention paid to the fact she’s an athlete in February which leads to a week of flashback strips where she climbed up a tree…
…and Les got stuck going up after her.
Should have left him there. I’m sure he would have been fine.
March begins a story wherein she leads the JV team to the conference finals.
Which is, of course, against Big Walnut Tech leading to the first appearance of Keisha Williams and Summer showing that, as great athletes tend to, she can be both overly aggressive and a little conceited.
She’ll eventually be your mommy too, Summer.
And being that kind of athlete means she eventually decides it’s time to play hero ball.
Which of course works, bringing Westview its first championship since some time during the Act II days. The excitement is so much that it almost kills Les, though unfortunately “almost” is the operative word there.
A month later the trophy arrives at Westview as Les and Becky gush over how amazing Summer is. I believe this is the first of the comic cover homages which will become an Act III staple. Apparently this is also the last professional work of the great Jim Mooney who passed away a few weeks before this strip was published.
She also shows up for a Mother’s Day strip that naturally flashes back to Lisa.
There’s also a few debuts and returns around this time. First off is Summer’s half-brother Darin who returns to the strip in order to welcome back Mopey who’s going to be living in the apartment above Montoni’s as all young Westview men must do.
Also Mooch is there and then promptly disappears into the void. Should have brought him back for that L.A. fire storyline.
At the end of the school year, long time secretary and walking pile of nothing Betty decides to retire and turn over her duties to another woman. A transfer from Big Walnut Tech.
Cayla is here (and has yet to undergo her caucasoid metamorphosis) and she, and her daughter, will play a big role in Summer’s life going forward.
But already we can kind of see how things are going. Despite all the proclamations, a lot of that initial year or so of Act III is spent largely on Les, on Funky, on the adults in general. I didn’t mention it before for instance but at this time Les takes up a secondary job of becoming the new night manager at Montoni’s. A lot of time is spent on Funky being so focused on success that he’s letting his personal life and business go to shit while all his employees are beginning to dislike him.
Summer’s around of course and has yet to be completely sidelined (that’s for later) but aside from the month or so focused on her basketball prowess, around is all she really is. She’s just sort of there and that, I am sure, will bode well for her future usage under the Batty’s pen. That still puts her as better than Jinx and Maddie and at least she hasn’t disappeared into nonexistance like Crazy Harry’s other kids. Small miracles I suppose, but it’s a rather inauspicious start for humanity’s supposed savior.
Since we’re at the end of Summer’s freshman year of high school I figure that this is as good a place as any to leave off for now. We’ll take a look at how things go for her in her sophomore year next time.
