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I’m sure they’d be useful if Les encounters situations with which he’d need to play role of an outdated and culturally questionable jungle adventure hero and given the things Batty has done that wouldn’t have been outside the realm of possibility.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.
Act III began with so much promise for Summer Moore. As the daughter of what had become the strip’s ostensible lead character and his holy bride — the focal points of the Most Important Stories Ever — most would assume that Summer would naturally fall into the role of being the focus of the new generation. In a sense that is indeed what happened as of all of the so-called Funky Kids she’s clearly the one who up to this point had gotten the most attention… but that’s mostly because of how little Tom Batiuk seemed to care about them. She got her place as the centerpiece of the high school stuff almost by default and even then, by this point she had begun fighting for that position with Owen and Cody, characters that clearly resonated more with Batty as they were the requisite Funky/Les duo.
Outside of basketball stories taking place in the winter, Summer’s presence is mostly just that; present. A character who hangs around but doesn’t do much of anything. For her final year of high school that’s really not going to be changing all that much. Her knee having exploded earlier in the year, by the summer it looks to be mostly healed as she’s back to shooting hoops with Keisha in a set up for a week of already tired “Les meets weirdos at a book signing” strips.
She does at least make fun of him upon his arrival home, however.
She also gets to be a sounding board for Les’ complaints about how Hollywood is mucking up the Lisa’s Story adaptation.
“They asked if the masked death concierge was necessary and I was just so offended!”
With the ghastly gold digger exiled from both Westview and the strip, there’s nothing standing between Cayla and the man of every woman’s nightmares. Les decides that it’s time to do the most important thing he’ll need to do in his post-Lisa life which means a fancy dinner at Montoni’s and sitting Cayla down on Lisa’s bench to tell ask her if she’d be willing to be his favorite runner-up. Cayla, of course, gleefully accepts and they arrive back at Les’ wondering how to spring the news on their kids. But of course the “rents” don’t realize that Summer and Keisha are eavesdropping on them like 8-year-olds.
In celebration of his new engagement, Les gets invited to the cookout and spends labor day with Cayla’s family. Summer gets half-assedly drawn in the background of a couple of panels but the main event is getting to see Les hit in the face with a softball.
Hahaha!
Summer also gets to show up kicking off the requisite Lisa’s Legacy week which by now is beginning to feel like something Batty includes more out of obligation than interest.
Fall and the start of the new school year also brings with it one of Batty’s favorite stories: school levies! And surprise surprise, the ignorant clods once again voted it down so now the raises of Linda Bushka, Jim Kablichnick and the other two teachers at WHS are in jeopardy. But not just that, funding for athletics have been gutted too. Bull had earlier tried getting around this by implementing a “pay to play” scheme for the teams but that’s not enough and with the failure of the levy, it’s announced that the sports programs are being shuttered.
To add insult to injury, Les and Cayla decide to “cheer up” their kids by feeding them some Montoni’s slop.
But while everyone else mopes, Funky decides to do what characters in this series very rarely do and take some initiative. It turns out that he’s the head of the local Chamber of Commerce and he’s not about to take this problem lying down.
His genius idea is to hold a raffle and go around to local businesses so that they’ll offer prizes for it. I’m not really up on how all of this stuff works so I’m not sure if a raffle would actually be enough to subsidize an entire school’s athletic programs for the year which I assume would be in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollarydoos. But I suppose that’s why Batiuk is the somehow reasonably successful cartoonist while I’m snarking on his comic strip for free.
Funky gets to work and by “gets to work” I mean we get a couple of days of a travel agent pawning off onto him a trip to climb Kilimanjaro that they weren’t able to get rid of in something that is totally not foreshadowing.
Come the day of the big raffle, Les is naturally there to buy a ticket and Bull is there to, in a roundabout way, call him a loser. That’s how I’m interpreting it at least.
But TB is the master of dramatic irony so of course Les does in fact win a prize and what prize does he win? Why that Kilimanjaro trip! Beacuse like a master bowler, Batty sets ’em up and knocks ’em down. Les being who he is, he’s not exactly thrilled but Summer, being who she is, is excited.
But good news, Funky’s raffle scheme somehow worked and the season is saved. Summer gets her final season after all!
TB, being the master storyteller that he is, decides to wrap up this year of tribulation for Summer with some levity by having Bull rile her up a bit about her rehab.
It’s also Dopey’s birthday so Summer decides to rile him up by giving him AARP membership; LMAO. And of course St. Lisa has a tape for just this moment as well. Why she’d have a tape for a random birthday instead of a milestone one is beyond me but Lisa’s going to do what she’s going to do and inserting her desiccated visage at inopportune times seems to be her final act of revenge on the world and the people in it.
But with all the rehab, all the effort to save the sports programs, the Lady Goats begin the season with a losing streak potentially flushing everything down the crapper.
But Summer realizes there may be a solution and tells Bull of a mythical figure: someone who, prior to his arrival, managed to actually bring a championship to Westview. None other than Ann Fairgood, her half-brother’s adoptive mother.
Why Bull wouldn’t know this considering he was a student at Westview while Ann was a teacher and coach is beyond me but by this point we know that continuity for Batty basically only exists when the immediate story calls for it to. Whatever, he goes to the Fairgoods’ home to talk to Ann and brings her in to give a motivational speech about her own history.
But when she suggests some plays he decides to go one step further and name her the new assistant coach. This winds up paying off, unsurprisingly, and the Goats snap their losing streak.
With this, the Westview girls proceed to turn things around and tear up the (regional? conference?) tournament.
By knocking off Big Walnut Tech they’ve made it to the state championship game in a rematch from two seasons prior against Our Lady of the Cedars.
But alas, TB throws in a swerve when on the way to the game it turns out that Summer has become ill.
Yes indeed, in deciding to pull from reality Batty decides to reach 15 years into the past and equate Summer with the greatest basketball player ever by recreating the famous “Flu Game” from the 1997 NBA Finals where a violently ill Michael Jordan dominated and hit a legendary shot in the closing moments.
In the closing seconds, Summer takes a hard foul and it’s up to her to sink the free throws.
She takes the shot. Tension builds…
But of course, she did it! The Lady Goats are your new state champions!
One teeny-tiny problem though: this is not how basketball works. There’s no such thing as a “walk off free throw” as there would still be some time on the clock and the other team would have been able to either inbound or rebound (assuming Summer misses the second shot) and try to heave it for a miracle if there was enough time to do that. The game isn’t going to end then and there just because Summer hit a free throw even if it was effectively over. And the worst part? Batty knows this because there’s a strip prior to this where Les admonishes Bull about how there are no walk off free throws. So Batty is disregarding a basic rule of the sport that he himself acknowledged some weeks prior just for nonsensical drama.
If this is what he wanted to do, why do the free throws in the first place? Why not just have Summer hit a buzzer beater? This is not hard and yet he makes it more difficult than it needs to be by not taking five seconds to think about if what he’s writing actually makes any sense.
Anyway, having coached Summer to a championship and rehabbed her knee, Bull does one more solid and presents her with a highlight reel of her high school play that she can send off to colleges. A nice enough gesture although with Summer being such a highly regarded player wouldn’t she have been scouted and approached by recruiters long before this point anyway?
In April, the two tracks of high school that Batty has been working with finally come together when Summer shows up to save Cody from getting pounded by Wedgeman. Much like every high school generation has its loser male geek duo and its vapid popular girl so too must it have its loutish bully and Wedgeman is the current one in the line that goes back to Bull and Stoneironmarblehead Morton. And just like the vapid popular girl, it’s diminishing returns in terms of his characterization i.e. it’s nonexistant beyond “is a bully.”
Cody, of course, falls in love with her and can’t help but see Summer as Wonder Woman who I assume is also Tom Batiuk’s own waifu.
Thus starts a rather nonsensical storyline for the next few weeks where Cody decides to send an anonymous text to Summer declaring his love for her and, can you believe it, she sends an anonymous text back! How Cody would have her number to even do this I have no idea. Owen, though, spends the whole thing acting dismissive and when she fails to show up for a promised date at Montoni’s (of course) the ruse is revealed. See, it was actually Owen sending those texts to Cody the entire time because he was also in love with Summer and he wanted to I guess disappoint Cody so he’d have her all to himself? I don’t know, none of it makes sense.
But Cody is undeterred and decides he’s just going to tell Summer how he feels in person. However, he sees her talking to Chad and decides to slink away in disappointment even though she’d turned down Chad’s request for a date.
Of course there’s one final twist as someone sends Cody an anonymous text declaring how much they like him. Because of Owen’s stunt Cody dismisses it oh ho it turns out it was a real girl who really does like him. This is of course just an ending stinger and is never again followed up on.
Truthfully, that’s really about it for Summer’s importance during the waning days of her time in high school. The next big storyline is Roberta’s protest over a gay couple being allowed to attend the prom and Summer does seem to be the instigator in starting a counter demonstration against it.
But aside from that she otherwise has nothing to do with the story which is mostly about Nate giving a big speech about how there will be no discrimination at his school. Then Becky’s father tells his wife to shut up and that’s effectively the end of Roberta Blackburn’s time as an antagonist in the strip. The most notable thing about the storyline — besides the milquetoast way that Batty presents his stance — is the biggest unsolved mystery in Funky Winkerbean — who was behind the castle?
During the prom there’s a couple of strips where a person — of who only an arm can be seen — thanks Nate for what he did for “me and students like me” while declaring that they’re not ready to come out just yet. All while Nate looks like he couldn’t care less. Seriously, why does he look so bored?
So who is Nate talking to? We can really only use process of elimination to narrow it down to a few options. Given that the character is hidden that would obviously imply it’s a known character, otherwise why hide their identity? Of the seniors, the only notable male from this generation is Cory who for reasons of “marries and later has kids with a woman” doesn’t fit; also the person looks shorter which implies it’s probably a girl.
Given the light skin that also rules out Keisha. It probably can’t be Rana given later developments that would make her being gay, although not impossible, very unlikely. So you’re left with three options: Summer, Maddie and Jinx.
Summer did very briefly date a boy early in Act III but at this point that seems like an abberation. But on the other hand, the sporty short-haired tomboy also being a lesbian seems to be such a trite stereotype that it might even give Batty second thoughts. Maddie is (supposed to be) the eccentric girl who marches to her own beat but she’s also effectively a non-character.
Jinx was there for the start of this story and is the one who announced that Nate and his wife were voted prom king and queen. Based on that I’d say there’s a reasonable chance it could be her, you know clumsy hinting from Batty and all. But who knows?
Maybe later strips can be read in a way to make you look back on this and think it was Summer or Maddie. Maybe they’re all gay. Or maybe that hand poking out from the castle wasn’t a real character and was just the representation of gay teenagers which seems like the kind of cop out Batty would do. But unless someone ever asks him directly or he does another Untold Tales (fat chance) we’ll never know.
We can speculate until we’re blue in the face but seeing as we’re likely never getting an answer we may as well just move on. In the final few weeks of school Summer and Keisha receive invitations get evaluated by, where else, Kent State. Things go well and they both receive athletic scholarships thus putting a bow on the last lingering bit of their high school storylines.
And with that done it’s now time for them to die graduate.
Which is immediately followed up by yet another cancer tape.
Just where will Summer’s heart take her? That’s for next time in what will be, for a long time, Summer’s last hurrah.
Because by the middle of next year Summer’s appearances are going to dwindle drastically. She will continue to pop up for the odd appearance or week once or twice a year post-2012 but once Batty shipped her off to Kent State he was also effectively putting her into semi-exile as his interest shifts more and more to comic books, Hollywood and characters like Darin, Pete and the yet-to-be-introduced Mason Jarr(e) and in the exciting world of elderly geekery, there’s neither time nor place for a jock who doesn’t fawn over the latest MCU flicks and Star Wars movies.
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.
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.
After wandering through the wreckage of the abysmal Eugene and Lucy story, this week’s Crankshaft explored Harry Dinkle’s alleged self-esteem issues. We will talk about both of these stories today, how they’re connected, and how this led me to a surprising realization about my own life.
There are two important bits of background. The first is Lucy’s Story, which explains what the abysmal Eugene and Lucy story actually is.
Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy is drafted into World War II, boy snail-mails marriage proposal containing “no response means no” clause, jealous older sister hides that letter, girl has mental breakdown, boy and girl somehow go another 60+ years without ever discussing the topic again, girl dies in 2009, boy is still longing for girl in 2026, boy has to move to a new home at age 99, Crankshaft readers wonder if they’ll ever find out where boy will be living now. (There will be a follow-up post about that.)
I know that summary got strange, but this is a strange storytelling world. If you asked the author to explain, he would say “It’s called writing.”
The other is Leaving Westview, which turned out to be perfect prologue for what I’m about to say. I’ll repost the important part:
I said or did every one of these things. For real. For real for real.
While this looks creepy on the surface – and is being done by a known creep – it is perfectly appropriate. We saw in the previous post that Lisa died on October 4, 2007. This is 15 days after that. It’s an emotionally powerful comic strip, which Funky Winkerbean was capable of producing sometimes.
But nothing will ever make Les Moore stop sniffing his dead wife’s clothes. Not 20+ years. Not a marriage to another woman. Not raising a mixed family, both racially and in the step-parenting sense. Not a phone call from Lisa from beyond the grave. Not a house that seemed to generate new Lisa artifacts every couple years. Not being handed a freaking Oscar trophy for a Hollywood movie about Lisa, which Les was sabotaging at every turn. Not other chances Les had to work through his grief.
Les smelling Lisa’s clothes is accurate and quite sympathetic. The aromas left from loved ones onto clothing, triggers memories in a very powerful way.
This is very true. A scent or a sound or song or a noise or a place or an object can trigger long-forgotten emotions, and turn you back into the person you were when you were having those emotions.
My first experience with this was when I was 21 and in college. I’d had a particularly triumphant night out clubbing with my best friend, Todd. We were staying at his parents’ house, and when we got there, they had some cheap bathroom product. The scent reminded me of my high school girlfriend, Susan, whose bathroom had that same product. I had no active feelings about Susan at that point. But the scent of flowers and petrochemicals in a $1.50 pharmacy item turned me from a young man happy about a rare successful night meeting women into… well, Eugene.
I recently had this experience again. Something very specific reminded me of my high school The One Who Got Away story (analogous to the Eugene-Lucy story), which helped me finally understand why she got away (the Dinkle story). This is all about people and things I haven’t thought about in a very, very, very long time. Which led me to into even deeper rabbit holes in my own head. And it finally showed me the bottom of the rabbit hole.
I’ll try to keep my story from getting too cringe. But today, I’d rather be cringe than whitewash uncomfortable realities. So buckle your seatbelts. This flight will be experiencing turbulence. Trauma dump up ahead.
I went to an emotionally abusive Christian elementary school that gleefully took a flamethrower to my self-esteem. I was a shy and introverted child by nature. The people my parents trusted to educate me used me as an object of ridicule and scorn. That piled an avalanche of self-doubt, which I didn’t previously have, on top of my shyness.
Long story short, the Christian school shunned me. And I have no idea why. Apparently, at some point between 6th and 7th grade, somebody decided I wasn’t the kind of Christian they wanted their Christian school to produce. Even though I was an agreeable child who did everything he was told, read the Bible, and got mostly A’s. But I’d already seen them do the same thing to other kids who deserved no such treatment either. There seemed to be about one kid a year who randomly got on the school’s bad side. It made no sense to me. And Christian schools aren’t in the business of teaching the critical thinking skills that might result in someone questioning their judgement.
So I’ve been dealing with self-esteem problems most of my life. Mine were caused by that very specific and identifiable thing. It wasn’t a combination of factors, or a vague, whiny Freudian Excuse like Crankshaft is pushing this week.
Funky Winkerbean appealed to me in 1988 because I related to Les Moore’s high school struggles, as depicted in the above strips. It was the only thing in media that seemed to understand what was going on in my head. So when its attempt at ripping off Peanuts ended with the girl wishing Les had asked her out, I felt personally betrayed. Even 16-year-old me didn’t believe that. That was the day I became a critic. It is my villain origin story. Mwahahahahaha!
I also shared something with adult Act II (1992-2006) Les Moore: wanting to be a writer, because of my perceived skill at it. I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up. It appealed to my writing skills, my sense of justice, and my failure to foresee that newspapers would become an obsolete medium. I would ultimately get a college degree in journalism, with a broadcasting focus. I promptly switched careers to Information Technology in adulthood, which I still work in today.
I’m honestly embarrassed to tell this story, because 50-something men should not be still processing failed high school relationships. But it’s too important to the larger story to omit, gloss over, or be vague about. And it’s a universe less creepy than anything Eugene does. More importantly, I refuse to worry about embarrassing myself anymore, for reasons I will soon make clear. So let’s go.
In high school in 1988 or 1989, I had creative a writing class in 2nd period, and journalism/high school newspaper class in 5th period. In both those classes was a girl named Christine. I still remember her last name; it was similar to that of a 1980s game show host.
One day, out of nowhere, Christine approached me before 2nd hour Creative Writing class about needing to talk, with this look on her face like it was something really important. I couldn’t imagine what this could be about, but I didn’t want to deal with it right then, so I said “talk to me in 5th hour.”
The truth is: despite my general cluelessness about how these things worked, I sensed Christine was going to tell me she had a crush on me. For some reason, I didn’t want that. And there was no logical explanation. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this girl. Not even by the sadistic social standards of high school. (Cindy Summers, I’m looking at you.)
I really liked Christine as a person. We worked together on the school newspaper. She was pretty. She was nice. She got along with people. She had no off-putting qualities. We had the same sense of humor. Considering that my defining trait in high school was doing open mic nights at legitimate adult comedy clubs, that should have been huge. (It was the late 80s. Everybody, including me, was trying to be the next George Carlin. Too bad none of us ever succeeded. Well, maybe Jon Stewart a little.)
By the time 5th hour arrived, I still didn’t want to deal with it, so I avoided her. The next day, we went back to being flirty/friendly with each other. That status quo remained for the rest of high school. But she never directly approached me again after that day. After graduation, we went our separate ways.
I tossed my high school yearbook in the trash decades ago. But I recently remembered what she wrote in it. “…and remember the girl who always STARES at you! Love, Christine.” With the game show host’s surname in place of her own, because that was a running gag between us. My God, how many times did this poor girl whack me with the clue-by-four?
But I had severe self-esteem problems. So severe that I sabotaged a potential relationship that I actually wanted. The idea that a desirable girl had a genuine interest in me made no sense in my mind.
It’s hard enough to approach the opposite sex when you’re an introverted, awkward, not-terribly-attractive teen. It’s impossible when you’re mentally convinced there’s zero chance of success, and that any failure will end with you being dragged in front of another classroom for another round of humiliation. So I friend-zoned myself. I threw away the chance to make a sweet, intelligent, pretty, funny girl I genuinely liked my first girlfriend. When all I had to do was stand there and let her initiate it.
I was so convinced of my own worthlessness that I couldn’t let that happen. I blocked her like Dikembe Mutombo.
I never rejected Christine. I rejected myself. I played the parts of both Lucy and Lillian. Christine tried to send me a love letter, and I hid it from myself. It was the most honest case of “it’s not you, it’s me” in the history of relationships.
That’s what a self-esteem problem looks like. So watching Crankshaft throw a pity party for Harry goddamn Dinkle severely pisses me the fuck off.
Harry Dinkle is not a person who had childhood trauma and self-esteem problems. Harry Dinkle is a person who caused childhood trauma and self-esteem problems in thousands of people over his career. (Including the elderly choralists who are following him on this journey.) He plays the role of the Christian school in my story. Not the victim.
Dinkle’s ego must be fed at all times, and doesn’t care how many people he has to grind up for meat. He’s a pervert, and this is how he gets his rocks off. The Colonel Khadafi outfit he wore like fetish gear doesn’t disprove that theory. And, as is often the case, he’s protected by a system that refuses to do anything about it.
What the Christian school did to me in 1983 made me reject Christine in 1989, and I didn’t even realize that until 2026. She liked me, and I liked her, but I rejected her. Why?
Now, I want to be very clear about a few things. One, there was never any sexual or physical component to this abuse. It was psychological only. Two, I had/still have a great family that was very loving and supportive about the whole ordeal, who made the right move. They yanked me out of that Christian school overnight, and put me in public middle school.
I probably could have used some counseling, but I think they didn’t know how to help me, and I definitely didn’t know how to ask for help. On top of all the debris that was in my head, I could be a difficult child in my own right sometimes.
Third, the psychological abuse was mostly traceable to one teacher at that Christian school. I don’t want to say that person’s name, because I’m afraid I might summon them, like Voldemort. So let’s leave that person in damnatio memoriae. And in hell, where they no doubt are today, according to the rules of their own belief system.
This is how abuse perpetuates itself. Someone hurt me, which ultimately made me hurt someone else (even though declining interest in a relationship is not a hurtful act if done tactfully). I never realized until now that tearing myself down, which was basically my coping mechanism, was also painful for the people who cared about me to watch. No wonder some them gave up on me.
Six years ago, I wrote this about the Dinkle family Thanksgiving:
Look how many details in this strip are about (Harry) Dinkle’s toxic workaholism. The house decoration and the choice of Thanksgiving meal are based on his career. The annual band turkey sale makes Harry tired of turkey, so turkey must not be served, no matter what anybody else wants. His daughter entered the same career as him, so you can guess what the table conversation is going to be about.
Look at (Dinkle’s wife) Harriet’s face as she presents the Thanksgiving non-turkey. Her weary eyes seem to be seeking his approval. Her daughter gives her companion an aside glance, as if to say “see, I warned you it’d be like this.” He seems to respond in kind, as if acknowledging he’s seen this in his own family. Harry is genuinely happy, because everything revolves around him, exactly as it should. And everyone knows it better stay that way.
This is the Thanksgiving of a family that revolves around a selfish, obsessive narcissist. And it’s a common theme in Funky Winkerbean.
Get the fuck out of my fucking face with that fucking bullshit.
I called this post Destroy Everything You Touch, because that’s what Tom Batiuk does to every “prestige arc” he gets his grubby, comic book-stained fingers on. His writing is so shallow he trivializes everything he tries writing about. It insults anyone who’s really experienced it. Which is why all those Lisa’s Story collections aren’t selling.
And Batiuk has tried writing about every trauma you could think of. Dementia, layoffs, freedom of speech, domestic terrorism, transsexuality, illiteracy, amputation, “climate damage”, bullying, war, PTSD, alcoholism, racism, coming out of the closet, football-induced CTE, suicide, cancer, and cancer incest. He did childhood self-esteem this week. Most of these things he’s tried writing about at least once.
(Also, musical titles are a recurring theme at this blog. And “Destroy Everything You Touch” is a god-tier banger.)
You. Do not feel. Do not know. What you steal.
Funky Winkerbean and now Crankshaft are misery porn. To the extent misery porn works, it’s because the storyteller spilled their guts onto the paper. Great personal memoirs don’t hold back about embarrassing and personal details that most people wouldn’t want others to know. Their brutal honesty makes them compelling to read, and helpful to people who are going through the same things.
Funky Winkerbean gives us this:
The greatest writer in the Funky Winkerbean universe is a not a man who spills his guts onto the page. It’s a man who’s too emotionally fragile to even read his own wife’s diary. So he passive-aggressives their daughter to reading an entry about her own mother being sexually assaulted. Nice guy, that Les Moore.
(Narshe, I apologize if I spoiled something you were planning to use in Part 4 of your story. But please do use it again. Because this may be the single worst thing Les Moore ever did. And there’s a lot of competition for that crown.)
I consider what happened with Christine the biggest mistake of my life. Not because I’m Eugene, still sad about a girl he lost because he couldn’t be bothered to find out what her actual answer was. But because I lost the better man I might have become a lot sooner if I had given myself a chance in that relationship.
However it might have gone – and unlike Eugene, I make no assumption that life would have been perfect after that – it would have been a net positive. Whatever happened, this girl was never, ever, ever going to humiliate me. Which I now know is what I was really afraid of.
It would have ended amicably, given me confidence and experience, and probably helped me face my inner trauma a lot sooner than I did. Christine would have been a better high school girlfriend for me than Susan was, though Susan was a pretty good one. (Other than some things that were my own fault, which is the nature of high school relationships.) And I would have saved Christine a little rejection and confusion. Lord knows life already gives you enough of that. Especially in high school.
Or maybe I’ve misread this entire situation, and Christine just wanted to tell me my fly was down.
(That was a joke. This story needed to end on a lighter note. And I refuse to second-guess myself anymore.)
One other thing I want to mention, because it ties into the “some things trigger deep memories” theme, and because it’s funny. While I was working through all this, I found a playlist of 1988 hit songs on YouTube, and set it to shuffle. This was the first thing it pulled up:
Mwahahahahaha! I am the Rickroller! You fell right into my devious trap!
I’m kidding. It was actually this:
Debbie Gibson is another woman I hadn’t thought about in 30+ years. Nor has anyone else.
I have no particular memories attached to this song. But the overwhelming 1988-ness of this music video reinforced the feelings I was working through. (This isn’t what initially brought Christine back into my head. It’s not important what that actually was.)
But imagine me, a 54-year-old man, blubbering about a blown high school date while listening to an obnoxiously peppy Debbie Gibson song. That’s a pretty funny visual. Imagine that happening to Jim Carrey in one of his better movies. Or Jack Black. Or Chris Farley, if I’m being honest about who would play me in a movie. (And if I’m being too honest: Rick Moranis, if he ate Chris Farley.) Or it could be treated seriously, in a movie like Fatso.
I hope I didn’t bait-and-switch you. You came here for newspaper comics snark, and I gave you my dead chicken moment. Which is what this feels like: discovering what my real problem was. I’d been trying to find it for 40 years.
This is why I know a lot about neurodivergence, and why I frequently mention it as a factor in the creation of these comic strips. I thought for a long time that my problem was untreated neurodivergence. But I could always recognize emotions and social cues adequately. I just couldn’t act on them, because of my crippling fear of humiliation. I’ve been throwing darts at the wall for decades, trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. But I think I just did.
I’d like to leave a few ground rules for the comments:
I’m willing to answer any questions anyone may have, though I reserve the right to be vague or silent about certain things.
Being an abuse victim isn’t my whole identity, and it will not become that. I have accepted that it’s a small part of who I am. But it will not destroy anything it touches, anymore. While I would never question anyone’s approach to processing their own trauma, I personally think some people lean a little too hard into the victim identity.
I realize a lot of people went through a lot worse than me. So there will be no Trauma Olympics.
I’m not looking for a pity party, safe space, psychoanalysis, therapy-speak, or anything like that. I just wanted someone to listen to my story. If you’re reading these words, you’ve done that, and you’ve done me a great service. Thank you. I actually feel really good about this whole thing.
I’m not looking for closure. I consider it closed. I said what I needed to say. The people who have been living rent-free in my head have been evicted.
I am open to reconnecting with Christine, but I’m sure she has a family that wouldn’t appreciate that. It’s not her job to help with my recovery. My only purpose was to document the key role she inadvertently played in fixing something that was very broken in me.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but please do not try to figure out who Christine is, or who I am. There are enough clues that someone with connections to our high school class could figure it out. But I have very little contact with any of those people anyway, I now live 1,300 miles away from my hometown, and I don’t do the social media thing.
Calvin & Hobbes had a terrific story where they try to build a robot, so Calvin doesn’t have to make his bed. Here’s the ending (SPOILER ALERT):
Psychological abuse and self-doubt made me throw away an opportunity to get to know a delightful girl who could have helped me a great deal in life.
