Les being a giant smug douche – Son of Stuck Funky

Love Duds

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.

Funk Them Kids

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.

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.

*C’mon Summer, slug him! Right hook! Shoryuken! Something! He’s wide open!*

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.

Great Moments In Book Signing History

Some selected final panels of book signing-related strips, from as far back as 2010:

Notice how similar these all are, even though they’re different characters. Because they’re all here to indulge Tom Batiuk’s fantasy: that he’s an elite writer who attracts long lines at his far too many book signings. Then he laughs at his own unfunny/incoherent joke. And then he belittles you, because he’s a writer and you’re not. Next, please.

All of these were responses to perfectly reasonable questions or to harmless banter, from genuine fans. And they all got Bitter Les Face in response. Though it was kind of nice to see Les on the receiving end from Dinkle that one time. Look at his shocked, unhappy expression. You can almost see him thinking “wow, is this how I come off to people?” Of course, Les’ heel realization is never explored, because the Funkyverse can’t have that.

I get why an author might find book signings annoying, and mine a few jokes from the experience. But we’ve had several book signing weeks over the years, and it’s always this same collection of conceits: annoyance, self-aggrandizement, intellectual superiority, and the author’s rude dismissal of people who are fawning over him. And as is standard for the Funkyverse, not one of these fans ever responds to being insulted by someone they admire. If anything, they’re too dumb to even notice.

Which makes me wonder what Tom Batiuk’s book signings are really like for him. From the book signing pictures we see on his blog, I infer that he doesn’t get many takers. Which can also lend itself to comedy. But he never subjects his stable of writers to this treatment. “No one came to my book signing” stories tend to be discussions of things that happened off-panel, like in fall 2017.

Batiuk loves to control the narrative about his work. But he can’t make real-life convention visitors be interested in him. Especially when he appears at the same handful of local venues every year without fail; those venues are awkward fits for his audience; and he never sets foot anywhere else. He’s setting himself up to fail.

So what we get instead is a different kind of fantasy. “Batton” gets plenty of visitors, but they’re all mind-bogglingly stupid. Even though they’re flattering him to an absurd degree, like someone mistaking his work for Archie. And we’re the snarkers? It seems to me that Batiuk is venting at his fans for being idiots, when his real complaint is that there aren’t nearly enough of them.

If these stories are an accurate description how Tom Batiuk treats his fans, it’s no wonder he doesn’t have very many.

Why Is Giving “Fahrenheit 451” To High School Students A Bigger Crime Than Arson?

The Armor-Piercing Question is the moment in a story where a character (usually the hero) asks another character (usually the villain) something that unravels their entire world. It exposes the flaw in the villain’s worldview, reveals knowledge of something the villain had tried to hide, shows them the evil of their ways in a way that will hurt them, and so on. Wreck-It Ralph has a great one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW1XX2L7g7Y

The title of this post is my Armor-Piercing Question, for this story. Why is the severity of the protestors’ crime being ignored? Not just by the story, but by the town, and by the main characters. I think this is the linchpin of why this story fails.

Yes, there are stories where the main characters can’t go to the authorities for help, because the authorities are actively helping the villains, or institutionally corrupt. This plot device is as old as Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. And, the police has shown some pretty questionable judgment. Like covering up Bull Bushka’s dubious suicide, and arresting Adeela when they wanted someone else with a similar name. But there’s no evidence of that in this story.

No, Principal Nate, “Suggested” Means “Not Legally Enforceable”

After wasting a week on Dinkle and book signings, Week 2 of The Burnings begins with a huge exposition dump.

Before we get to it, a question: if Tom Batiuk hadn’t put out this puff piece in the Cleveland newspaper, would you even know last week was the beginning of The Burnings? Last week saw three authors, two of whom are nationally relevant, standing around smirking at each other during an unrelated book signing. Which is a very common story in the Funkyverse. The Act III links above show that Les alone did book signings in 2010, 2011, 2017, 2019, 2021, and now 2024. Most of them were multi-week arcs. Today’s strip feels like the beginning of the actual Burnings story.