Tag: sadie

Attack of the Not-So-Clone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or Tom Batiuk could forget the plot!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That first panel is what we call grim foreshadowing.

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

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

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

She also makes time to talk with Susan.

It’s the thing that drove Barry Balderman insane.
“She doesn’t get out much.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Car Season

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

No, not that.
Not that either.
There we go!

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

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

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

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

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

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

And some times they mess with one another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Don’t Have To Live Like A Refugee (More Predicted Funky Winkerbean Character Appearances In Crankshaft In 2024)

Don’t forget to vote in the 2023 Crankshaft Awards! Voting remains open for about another 5 days.

In Part 1 of this series, I predicted the seven Funky Winkerbean characters that will appear most often in Crankshaft in 2024. Here’s a recap of characters we’ve discussed so far, ranked by predicted most appearances:

  1. Mopey Pete Roberts/Reynolds (probability of appearing at least once in 2024: 99.9999%)
  2. Mindy Murdoch (99.9999%)
  3. Les Moore (99%)
  4. Dead Lisa (probability of being mentioned 99%; probability of actually appearing 20%)
  5. Dinkle (100%; has already appeared)
  6. Atomik Komix staff: Flash Freeman, Phil Holt, Darin Fairgood (55%)
  7. Pizza Box Monster (98%)

Dinkle’s off to a fast start, while Les and Lisa aren’t out of the gate yet. Continue reading “You Don’t Have To Live Like A Refugee (More Predicted Funky Winkerbean Character Appearances In Crankshaft In 2024)”