archive deep dive – Son of Stuck Funky

Attack of the Not-So-Clone

We’re back with the second installment in the history and examination of Sadie Summers, the character who Tom Batiuk wishes we’d all forget, which is exactly why we’ll be remembering her. She’d shown up in the final year of Act I as a visual Mini-Me of her older sister Cindy and proceeded to drive her into fits. But with 1992 comes the jump four years ahead to Act II. Funky, at this point, is bumming around while Les has gotten a job teaching at the high school he hated so much that he spent graduation trashing it and everyone there.

But much like Les, Batty was unable to let go of the old high school so we’re introduced to the new generation of Westview High students which, at the start, is basically just Wally Winkerbean, his best friend Monroe Madison and Sadie. Demon Seed’s Act II incarnation first shows up in early September in the requisite introduction week.

A few things to note. First is that much like her sister, Cindy’s designated role is The Most Popular Girl at Westview HS, a role that will later be filled by Jessica Darling (whose father, Jon Darling, was murdered), Rana Howard (whose biological father was blown up, first adoptive father was also blown up, and second adoptive father was not blown up), Mallory Brooks (cannot speak on father status) and Maris Rogers (ditto) with each being more irrelevant than the last. Also much like her sister, Sadie will have hangers-on though unlike Cindy, who only had Carrie, she’ll one up her sister by having two of them: the girl with the tall hair is Tiffany while the one with the longer hair is Courtney but don’t get too attached because despite hanging around during all of Sadie’s high school time they don’t have much in the way of characterization. So little in fact that Courtney will wind up being an early victim — possibly even the first — of the Tom Batiuk Name Change Special when her name is randomly changed to Brittany a few years later.

The second thing is that we’re introduced to the idea that having to follow in Cindy’s footsteps is somewhat burdensome to Sadie. It’s something that seems tailor made for an easy and long running storyline where she does things like, I don’t know, try and find her own identity instead of retreading the same ground as her sister. But I suppose that if Batty were any other writer this site wouldn’t exist so I’ll leave it to you to guess whether or not Storytelling Rd. is long and winding or a one way dead end.

After the obligatory introduction week Sadie, unsurprisingly, next shows up at the mall after having acquired a credit card.

*If this story happened ten years later we’d be talking about the Sadie Dies of Anthrax storyline.*

Like any rational person she realizes that she’s been sent free money and uses it responsibly by buying the first thing to catch her eye and immediately maxing out the card.

Unfortunately for Sadie, TB will not forget as this more or less begins the one major storyline she’ll be the centerpiece of. But before that happens, she pops up during the oft called back to week where Wally lugs around a band turkey on a leash.

Thankfully this is 1992 so *Doom has yet to be released to* corupt The Youth… but wait, Mortal Kombat has! Oh no!

But that’s just a detour for in December her credit card statement arrives and is found by her father.

Deciding that she needs to learn some responsibility and pay off her credit card debt, he forces Sadie to find a job and like any other teenager she’s thrilled about the opportunity to wageslave.

In a twist you’ll never see coming, she winds up having to get a job at Burger Barn, the fast food place that I assume rivals the previous Act I fast food hangout McArnold’s (not to be confused with that anime favorite burger joint, WcDonald’s).

Of course, Sadie treats this as the height of embarassment and pretty much every strip in this story involves her seething such as when she’s unable to take off for New Year’s…

…and her subsequent rage against the heavens for the injustice.

*Poor girl doesn’t realize that as a young woman living in Westview she’ll be unable to defy Godtiuk’s will and escape her hand-tossed fate.*

Showing how ahead of her time she is, Sadie takes to the job with all the enthusiasm of a generation that has yet to be born as she hits her customers with the Gen Z stare.

*“No cap this stank ahh food ain’t bussin fr fr.”*

After a few months of this indignity she hits her goal and is free, having learned a valuable lesson along the way.

After this she generally stops being the sole focus of any major storylines herself but isn’t close to disappearing. She’ll continue to get the occasional week dedicated to her and a few months later in May 1993 she’ll share a strip for the first time with what will be probably her one real relationship throughout her time in school.

The favorite punching bag of Funky Winkerbean is introduced early in 1993 and a few months later she and Sadie interact for the first time in an otherwise inauspicious manner. We’ll have cause to revisit this pairing shortly but for now things continue to truck along as Sadie spends a week in June talking about her trip to the Mall of America.

*“I sure hope the malls don’t turn into the consumer equivalent of decayed Rust Belt towns!”*

She also tells Wally what his issues with the ladies are.

*That first panel is what we call grim foreshadowing.*

By this point One-Armed Beck’s introduction into the strip is still a few years away and Sadie, being the main high school girl, gets a few interactions like this where she basically calls Wally a dweeb. One gets the feeling that Batty had thoughts of perhaps doing an eventual romantic plot with the two of them; you know the whole pretty girl and schlub thing he loves. But similar to the couple of teased instances with Mopey Pete and Chien, if he did ever want to go with that then for whatever reason he got cold feet.

In November, Sadie joins the Poetry Club much to the surprise of Les though of course it’s simply as a scheme to try and get her grades up.

Being a woman of the people, Sadie has no need for high falutin language or fancy metaphors. Her poetry is blunt, showing her inner feelings with a refreshingly simplistic honesty.

She also makes time to talk with Susan.

*It’s the thing that drove Barry Balderman insane.*

A few weeks later Sadie and Mickey Lopez, the football playing daughter of Les’ work wife and eventual morose letter opener Linda Lopez, are at the mall when Sadie discovers, to her horror, that Cindy is working there and even worse is going to be moving back in with her family.

*She should be more embarassed of the fact that we’re now approaching the middle ’90s and Cindy’s still rocking a hairstyle straight out of 1988. But perhaps Sadie knows about pots and kettles.*

Act II (and beyond) Cindy is a far cry from Act I Cindy but there’s still a faint bit of that old sibling rivalry. Just with the roles reversed.

That closes out 1993 and with it the first couple of years of Act II. Sadie is a teenager and more of her own character so does Batty’s clone accusation stand up? While it’s obvious that he wants her to take the same mall obsessed queen bee role that Cindy had in Act I, at this point I’d say they’re still significantly different characters. Her popularity, beyond just kind of existing, comes off as being slightly less essential to Sadie than it did to Cindy. With Cindy the joke always feels like it’s just “She’s popular, isn’t that funny?” With Sadie, her popularity seems to be more about contrasting it with other things whether it’s putting her in situations meant to flummox her (like the fast food job) or by throwing her into something that otherwise seems at odds (the poetry club). Also, where Cindy was more vain and arrogant and cartoonish, Sadie comes off as a lot more low key. She’s a lot more deadpan and sarcastic than Act I Cindy tended to be.

The biggest difference between the two is that Sadie comes off as a lot nicer. Cindy in Act I is an absolute terror, one of the meanest and nastiest characters in the entire strip. This is the same girl who wanted Funky to admit that he was gay for breaking up with her (a joke that would not fly today and I’d bet was skirting the line even back in the late ’80s) and who had zero issue with trying to ruin anyone she saw as beneath her. Sadie, though, is a lot different. Granted she’s not necessarily nice to Wally as Wally was intended to be the lower rung loser of his generation but she’s not excessively nasty to him either. Nothing like Cindy basically treated Les as if he was a completely separate species as her.

Then there’s Susan. Not once does Sadie ever treat her with the level of disdain that you’d expect from an otherwise stereotypical alpha girl towards a friendless nerd. When she’s talking about how she doesn’t see Susan doing anything or asks her if all she does is poetry it never comes off to me as if she’s doing it out of any sense of meanness. It’s never done as a set up for her to put Susan down or anything like that, it just comes off as a blunt way of getting to know her. The worst you can accuse Sadie of in their interactions is being flippant but she doesn’t seem like she’s attempting to denigrate Susan or anything like that. Act I Cindy definitely would have but not Sadie. And as shown, Sadie is also friends with the ultra tomboyish Mickey, someone the Act I incarnation of her sister would have never been caught dead with. So while on a superficial level they can be similar, I still don’t feel that Sadie deserves TB’s dismissive classification of her.

That finishes part 2 of our Sadie retrospective. Next time, we’ll cover the middle years of her time in Act II to see whether or not any of this holds up.

Car Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And some times they mess with one another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max And Hannah, Part 2: The Valentine Years

This is Part 2 of our deep dive into Max and Hannah. Part 1 is here.

Max and Hannah bought the Valentine Theater from Ralph Meckler in 2016. October 10, 2016 was their first week of ownership. It was a disjointed mix of them fixing up the place up, receiving their first customers (Jeff, Pam, and Ed) and Max being tired from the stress of working two jobs.

Citing burnout, Max quits his job at Channel 1 on January 12, 2017 to run the theater full-time. Both Pam and Ed Crankshaft point out that Channel 1 is paying the better part of his salary (even though Max gripes about being underpaid), so this may be an unwise move. Nobody ever points out that Hannah has been working the same two jobs, and is not depicted as being fatigued, despite her having the more physically demanding Channel 1 job of camera operator.

I never noticed it until now, but women are much expected to be much tougher than men in the Funkyverse.

Again, I was a broadcast journalism major in the 1990s, so trust me on this: those live TV-grade cameras are heavy. But Max is the one who’s falling asleep on the job, Peppermint Patty style.

On January 25, 2018 during a blizzard, Ed Crankshaft brings a busload of school children to the Valentine, who have to spend the night there. The incident gets positive coverage in the Centerville Sentinel, back when it still published news stories. July 26 is another round of Pam and Jeff helping to spruce up the theater.

On March 31, 2019, Jeff visits an apartment and says “I appreciate you two having me over for dinner,” implying that Max and Hannah are now living together. This apartment building isn’t the same one Max moved into in 2008. It’s probably another real-life building Tom Batiuk and his wife lived in at some point.

June 3, 2019 is almost identical to last week’s arc. Hannah and Max go to Pam and Jeff’s house with a major announcement: they’ve decided to incorporate! Which, combined with the last week’s strips, and the “we’re buying the Valentine” announcement from 2016, means they bait-and-switched a marriage announcement three different times. And I guess they never incorporated either, because incorporation was a declined option on March 6, 2026.

But it doesn’t end there. In October 2019, they invite Pam and Jeff to the theater with yet another surprise: Hannah is pregnant!

There’s teasing a big reveal, and then there’s just being jerks. When it’s the fourth time you’ve done this, and you order custom printed balloons before you’ll tell your own mother what’s going on, you’re just being jerks. Smirk your heads off, you smug bastards.

That story ends on October 20, 2019:

And we have the answer to the question many of you have been asking! Yes, Max and Hannah having a child out of wedlock is established Funkyverse lore. As Pam explained it at the time, they wanted to “focus on more important stuff.” Given the bizarre priorities of Funkyverse characters, you’re welcome to guess what those might be. Lord knows Tom Batiuk doesn’t tell us.

On February 10, 2020, Ed Crankshaft and Mary Marzipan show up for a Butter Brinkel marathon during a blizzard, necessitating a second overnight stay. This was also the very beginning of the real-life global pandemic. Why do people in this town insist on going to shows during life-threatening conditions, like COVID and blizzards? Remember Dinkle’s “Christmas Messiah” near the end of Funky Winkerbean?

It is during this second overnight stay that Hannah gives birth to Mitch. Infamously, Ed Crankshaft helps with the delivery. Which may be the most unrealistic thing in the history of the Funkyverse. I’m not a woman, but I think that if Ed Crankshaft offered to help me give birth, my immediate reaction would be DO NOT LET THAT MAN ANYWHERE NEAR MY HOO-HAH FOR ANY REASON.

Especially if he’s going to make **that** face about it.

Mitch is first seen and heard on February 27, 2020. Jeff “covers for” Max at the theater for a week while they adjust to parenthood. On July 27, the Valentine is showing The Phantom Empire. Max takes Mitch to the theater “because it’s never too soon to introduce a child to culture.” Even though that child is five months old, and his irregular aging hadn’t started yet.

May 9, 2021 is the first sign of trouble at the Valentine. Max tells Hannah not to bother disinfecting the seats, because “their draw was an older audience that doesn’t want to go out to a movie theater now.” By May 21, a strip club is interested in buying the place. Here’s my version of that story:

“Why was there placenta on my seat?” may be my favorite sentence I’ve ever written for this blog.

On May 27, Pam and Jeff visit. Max calls them “the biggest crowd we’ve had since we re-opened.” They’re the biggest crowd we’ve ever seen, even before COVID, other than the night Ed brought a busload of school children.

They start vacating the theater. On June 4, Pam offers to let Max, Hannah, and Mitch move into the apartment over the garage. Oh well, at least it’s not the apartment over Montoni’s for a change. This move happens in September 2021. January 17, 2022 is the first time we see Max, Hannah, and Mitch around Pam and Jeff’s house. They would start appearing as background characters at that location, much like when Max was staying there between his 2006 graduation and 2008.

On August 1, 2022, Max and Hannah go back to Channel 1. This is what 17-month-old Mitch looks like now:

Apparently they were playing Jumanji, and Mitch aged ten years while he was trapped in the game board. That’s quite a screw-up, even by Crankshaft’s standards.

Amazingly, Channel 1 hands them their old jobs back. One wonders what happened to the cameraman and director of yesterday’s show, roles that must have been filled by someone. Which is another highly unrealistic depiction of media jobs. Max and Hannah are about as replaceable than fast food workers. Year after year, universities are still cranking out dozens more journalism graduates than there will ever be jobs for again. Not to mention the scores of self-made content creators thanks to YouTube, and affordable consumer-grade video production tools. So Channel 1 would have plenty of qualified applicants on file.

August 2022 saw the ransomware attack on Channel 1. It was Hannah who had the brilliant idea to air old John Darling episodes, since they were stored on physical tapes that weren’t held hostage by the ransomware. This kept Channel 1 on the air without having to pay the ransom of…

Next month, a Deus Ex Comic Books arrives to save Max and Hannah from their own passive idiocy.

Mason got all his money from making the Starbuck Jones movie, so this qualifies as a Deus Ex Comic Books.

It’s Mason Jarre and Cindy Summers! Note that the Valentine livery and movie theater entrance is still up, even though it closed down a year ago, and a strip club existed there in the interim. Timemop must have been a regular.

Mason immediately offers to buy the building from unlicensed guest character Lois Flagston from Hi & Lois, looking like a deranged psycho the entire time.

Ed Crankshaft happens to wander by during this conversation. Like most American small towns, Westview/Centerville has no concept of privacy, so they discuss this celebrity couple’s financial business right in front of this complete stranger. Ed conveniently mentions that his grandson and his wife once ran the theater, so Mason wants to take them to dinner. Of course, they go to Montoni’s. Mason tells Max and Hannah he wants them to run and manage the theater “based on their experience there.”

Which is even more ludicrous than them being re-hired at Channel 1. At least they were competent Channel 1 employees, which is more than can be said for their management skills. They’re the ones who ran the Valentine into the ground with their endless Phantom Empire screenings, and insistence on remaining open during blizzards. Once again, the story acts like they’re the only two people on earth who could possibly do this job.

On October 1, they get their first paycheck from Mason. Of course, it’s gigantic.

And the Funkyverse business cycle is complete!

Be from the remote outskirts of Cleveland.
Have Tom Batiuk-approved opinions on How To Do Media Things Correctly.
Find a rich person who shares those opinions.
Wait for the rich person to throw money at you to manage it for them. Because rich people have zero interest in ever making a profit, or in hiring people with any useful skills.

Mason became to the Valentine Theater what Chester Hagglemore was to Atomix Komix, what Pink Productions was to Lisa’s Story, and what Mordor Financial was to the Centerview Sentinel. They’re the faceless entities that exist solely to swallow huge losses, so Batiuk’s beknighted small-town yokels can have mainstream media careers with complete creative control. And, of course, be paid big money themselves.

In spite of their new-found tax bracket, December 2022 shows Max and Hannah are… still working at the TV station?

Despite getting huge paychecks from Mason Jarre to do their dream job, and a Channel 1 paycheck on top of that, they were never seen moving back to an apartment. And they continued to make walk-on appearances in household stories. Which implies that they’re still mooching off Pam and Jeff to this day.

In 2023, Skip Rawlings shows up to ask about the theater’s reopening, which happens in May 2023. His interviewing skills weren’t any better then. The next month, Mason flies in for the grand re-opening. And we all know what the main attraction is!

This may be the most Funkyverse panel ever created. Especially if you don’t know who’s asking the question.

The pandering continues. Mason also wants to premier Starbuck Jones III: The Rise Of The ~~Disney Lawsuits~~ Bandelorians at the Valentine. And he wants to meet with Harry Dinkle, because he wants to use Claude Barlow music in the movie.

Which is mind-bendingly stupid, but isn’t worth any further deconstruction. Because Max and Hannah were never constructed in the first place.

Max and Hannah are the same as Atomik Komix. And Les Moore. And Lillian McKenzie. And Skip Rawlings. And Mason Jarre. And Harry Dinkle. And Batton Thomas. They exist to fuel stories about small town people who run a media empire the way Tom Batiuk thinks it should be run, and be handed ego tongue baths and piles of money for it.

Despite this couple’s obvious purpose as story enablers, Tom Batiuk has decided that their marital status was a loose end that needed to be tied up. He made a similar decision that near the end of Funky Winkerbean, that Cory Winkerbean and Rocky Rhodes needed to put a ring on it.

But that was justifiable in the context of Funky Winkerbean ending. Weddings are a great excuse to get all the characters in one place, so we can see them one last time. As stupid as that arc was, it was also the final appearance of characters like Keisha Williams, Maddie Klinghorn, and Rocky and Cory themselves. That’s not the case this time, though.

Or dare we hope?

Lucy’s Story

This week’s post will be an installment of This Week In Act IV, and also a historical deep dive into a past Funkyverse tale.

Crankshaft has been revisiting the Lillian-Lucy-Eugene love triangle. The week ended today with Eugene sailing a boat solo into the waters of Summit Lake, a real place in Akron. The story looks like it continues into next week, so we’re not going to cover it all today.

I say “we” because this post is very much a team effort between Comic Book Harriet and myself. There will be at least one follow-up to this post, even if the Crankshaft story ends at this point. (It’s hard to imagine how a story can end with an old man boating into a lake by himself, but Batiuk gonna Batiuk.)

We must also give an assist to Comics Curmudgeon guest host “Uncle Lumpy”, who made the definitive comment about this story 13 years ago.

Eugene, Lucy — this is not romantic, touching, or poignant. It is stupid, and you two deserve exactly what you got.
https://joshreads.com/2011/10/friday-post-3/

WallyWorld Sprint Tour

When we last saw Wally Winkerbean in this retrospective, he was staring with longing grief and acceptance into the eyes of his ex wife Becky, after having a major meltdown flashback at the Girl’s Basketball Conference Championships.

Funky lets Becky know that, as the main character, he’s taking it upon himself to facilitate Wally’s recovery.

*Sure, does Wally Jr. have any recently doodled spaceship designs he’d like?*

I waited in line for six hours to see Revenge of the Sith…and I promise you, this is NOT a quote from Yoda from that movie. At best it’s a paraphrase from lines in Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.