Summer – Son of Stuck Funky

Outside the circumstances of her birth, life has been pretty simple for Summer. I mean true, she is a toddler so it can’t really be all that complicated for her but still, things have been going pretty well for the Moores and the residents of Westview in general minus the occasional hiccup. Sure, John got his hopes up that maybe the pretty one-armed pizza lady was going to give him the time of day only to have them cruelly dashed when that bastard Wally returned.

But Tom Batiuk is an artiste with a vision and soon the misery miasma will blanket Westview once more for he shall unleash upon it’s hatchet-faced denizens his masterpiece.

However at the start of 2005, things are going so good that after only their second date — which followed her being ghosted for most of the previous year — Funky and Holly get engaged! Wally and Lefty are as well so it’s going to be a double wedding at Montoni’s. This wedding stuff will take up well over half of the year and so for a lot of it Summer will only be making some token appearances. In fact it won’t be until February when Summer makes her first appearance of the year, starting to talk and being used to prank her Lego-headed father.

But February is also when we start getting the first hints that things will be taking a decidedly darker turn as Wally begins trying to deal with his PTSD and Roberta Blackburn appears out of nowhere to pester her daughter and son-in-law to be. But she’s also there looking for a gift for Becky’s cousin who just so happens to like comic books so Becky directs her moralizing mother down to Komix Korner where some Japanese works catch her attention and soon, the cops are taking John to the slammer. Presumably for having shit taste in manga.

*“Sir, we’re taking you in on one count of actually liking Rent-A-Girlfriend.”*

So Lisa’s got her big plot for the year, trying to uphold the sanctity of artistic expression and fight obscenity laws and you know… I really in a broad sense do agree with Batty on these types of issues whenever they do come up. After all, I live in the state that produced Jack Thompson and a lot of my formative and not-so-formative years involved hearing about his antics against music, video games and the like. But Batty makes it so damn hard when his arguments for them is delivered in a manner that tends to be overly self-assured in spite of their shallow insipidness. Like Les will go “These articles are important because free speech!” which… yeah? No shit. Or Lisa will stand in front of a jury and go “Comics… are art!” and yeah, of course they are.

But come on, Batty! This is an issue you seem passionate about so whenever you bring it up maybe show a little more fire than “[thing] is good, actually” and then leaving it at that.

With all of these events going on, it’s months before we see Summer again as she shows up during the Winkerbean double wedding in June.

Which then causes her to have marriage on the brain.

*In the end, I don’t think he’ll have to worry about that.*

But once again there’s no time in summer for Summer because it’s taken up by Wally and Becky’s honeymoon to beautiful Afghanistan. Which includes this rather bizarre strip just before Wally leaves.

In a case of Batty just grabbing characters from other works, the implication is that La Choi San — the outdated cariature who doubles as the grandmother of Jade Dragon owner Liu Lin — is actually the Dragon Lady from Terry and the Pirates and is giving Terry’s flight jacket to Wally. It’s a jacket that Wally will wear all throughout the Afghanistan story that takes up a full two months of the strip’s focus, ending with he and Becky deciding to adopt Rana, the younger sister of the girl who rescued Wally during his original MIA phase but who was blown up along with the rest of her family by a car bomb.

Naturally, Lisa adds “adoption” to her plate of legal work to help them bring Rana over to the U.S. just as Becky’s taken the assistant band director job at the high school that was vacated when Kara became Big Walnut Tech’s band director.

Summer is still kind of there, hanging around during a multi-week story about Taj Moore-hal having bats in the attic… Batiuks, if you will hyuck hyuck.

John’s trial occurs and Lisa has her big success with the rousing argument that John can’t be guilty of breaking obscenity laws because comics are art and also the “child” that was in the store when Roberta purchased the pornography — part of the reason John was being charged with breaking obscenity laws — was really an adult midget. It sort of feels like TB wasted months’ worth of time just to get to that punchline too.

The year winds down with some ligther fare like a pun worse than my bats in the attic one.

*Also, web blog? Where do you think the word “blog” comes from Batty?*

And some Christmas shenanigans.

But poor Summer opens up the next year having caught some kind of bug leading to a week of Les having to care for his sick child.

After heroically puking all over her father, she again takes a backseat to Lisa and Holly’s cancer support group as well as Becky learning she’s pregnant. We do get what I believe is the first appearance together of Summer and Cory though.

But it’s the calm before the storm. Things look as if they’re going well and Les is even going to have his story published in the New Yorker which means Summer, and we, get to watch him do a dumb little dance.

But as Lisa’s expression in the last panel indicates, something is wrong. She’d gone in to participate in some genetic testing but something came up and she gets the confirmation just as her and Les are heading out on a vacation to New York.

That’s right folks, it’s been twenty years since The Story That Changed Everything and with his creative fires fueled, Tom Batiuk has decided to give us The Story That Changed Everything II: The Lady with All the Cancers. Les and Lisa go on their vacation but of course the shadow of cancer looms over everything. When they get back, Lisa makes sure to give her daughter a hug and give the audience one of Funky Winkerbean‘s patented cursed close ups.

I would assume that deciding to bring back Lisa’s cancer is when Batty decided to do a second timeskip and it seems to have really put him in a mood because this is when we’re getting all the stuff that seemed to catch the attention of the broader internet in the mid-2000s, making people fascinated by how damn miserable this strip was. Because this is also the same timeframe where Wally gets dragged away from his family and back into active duty in Iraq which, spoilers, will not work out well for him. At all. This is right after construction on the street in front of Montoni’s forced the Jade Dragon to close as well.

But it’s not all bad, at least in-universe, because this is also the period where Darin and Jessica Darling, Whose Father John Darling Was Murdered, become an item when she’s impressed by some quick thinking he pulled to unforunately save Pete from getting his ass kicked by the Rough Riders from Crankshaft. And this is when Bull Bushka gets married to walking buzzkill Linda Lopez, who’d hooked up during summer break the previous year. It’s the kind of story you think we’d actually see but no, because Batty loves his shocking twists and so figured it was best to have everything happen offscreen so he could randomly spring it on the readers.

Why let a story get in the way of a good surprise?

A lot of the rest of 2006 goes back and forth between Lisa’s cancer — which includes repeated appearances by the worst doctor on Earth and a trip to the Grand Canyon — and the stuff with Darin and Jessica. Interspersed is also a goofy story about Montoni’s being profiled by the Food Network which culminates in some kind of Iron Chef style pizza cooking competition show.

Summer’s last significant appearance of 2006 and her first one since showing up in the background before Les and Lisa leave for Arizona isn’t until December.

Batty was too busy with other things to deal with Summer. There’s Becky giving birth, John continuing to pine for her and setting up things that will have zero payoff by establishing Mooch’s relationship with Mindy Murdoch and Crazy Harry’s second kid, both of which will disappear shortly into Act III.

But 2007 starts off with a seeming bright spot for Lisa.

Joy of joys, Lisa’s results are looking good and she’s in remission which seems to be putting her in a much better mood as she can actually appreciate having a kid again. The one she actually has mind you, not the one she gave up and pines for.

Unfortunately for Lisa we’re in the misery porn era of Funky Winkerbean so it’s not long before she learns that her doctor has in fact been utterly incompetent and that they’d mixed up her results with someone else’s.

Now given all of this — that Lisa had gone off her chemo and other treatments for a few months because of their screw up, the fact that said screw up even happened at all — you’d expect the Moores to do something right? I would guess that they probably have a pretty clear case for a malpractice lawsuit. But nope, they just throw up their hands and say nothing can be done. There’s a constant thing whenever Lisa is brought up about what a strong fighter she was right up until the end but no, not really. She immediately gives up and just allows herself to rot away over the next few months.

Because as we all know, Lisa is destined to die and it’s in the summer when she gets the news, delivered to her by Dr. Screwup in the most tactful and courteous manner she can muster.

Now let me digress a bit here to ask, what was Batty’s intention with this character? Was it to portray someone who was ultimately a good and caring doctor who made a little whoopsie doodle because we all make mistakes? Or was she intended to be representative of the real or perceived cold indifference of the American healthcare system? I suspect something closer to the first one given that neither Les nor Lisa treat her with the scorn she rightly deserves for messing up in such a massive way.

And that response? “Months… but don’t ask me how many.” Double fuck Dr. Dipshit. It’s easy to want to criticize various characters for various reasons in Batiuk’s works but I don’t really think any of them are as bad as Dr. Hallet. It’s not just the incompetence but the callous flippancy with which she tells Lisa that she’s going die that makes her so unbelievably repugnant in a setting filled with repugnant jackasses. Les at Bull’s funeral comes close but really, she might be the absolute worst person in the history of the strip.

While this has been going on, the other major story running through the year has been Darin, at Jessica’s urging, searching for his birth mother. There were some starts and stops but eventually the information is released and he learns that Lisa is his bio-mom and decides to convey this via creepily watching Lisa and Summer play in front of Taj Moore-hal.

Maybe someone can tell me whether I’m right or not but I get this feeling that this is a go-to Batty likes to employ as part of his forced dramatics. The whole shot of someone staring at others from their car. I don’t think this is either the first or last time this type of thing occurs but maybe I’m wrong.

From here Darin basically plays real big brother to Summer who now has to face her dying mother though of course is still to young to fully grasp what’s happening.

Shortly after this she enters kindergarten as well.

Lisa’s state is rapidly deteriorating and by September she’s hit the point where she can’t go up and down the stairs and so effectively enters hospice care in the living room.

Batty decides to get in one last minute instance of both closing off a plot thread and setting things up for Act III by having Bull and Linda pop by with the kid they’ve spent most of the year trying to adopt. At that point it’s pretty much the endgame for Lisa. Her parents show up one final time so her dad can apologize for not being there for her even though they’ve been around plenty the last few years.

Finally Masky McDeath appears to usher Lisa into the Great Phantom Zone Beyond and it’s over.

And we immediately smash cut to a goateed Les lying on a couch, speaking to a therapist as it flashes back to him dropping off Summer with the Winkerbeans while he heads to New York to spread Lisa’s ashes in Central Park.

Now Batty’s rationale for fast forwarding through and past everything was that he didn’t want to turn the comic into an extended grieving process but given what happens in Act III that’s obviously a load of crap.

The simple fact is that he wants to tell this grand ongoing narrative but is incapable of thinking of stories as existing beyond themselves. When the Flash beat Weather Wizard that was the end of it, it didn’t affect the next issue and it’s the same approach that Batty likes to take with his stories. Which is fine if you want to do a bunch of loosely connected but self-contained stories but that isn’t what he’s doing. We can see that in the currently ongoing Dinkle Pity Party in Crankshaft where 50+ years of Harry L. Dinkle, the World’s Greatest Band Director is brushed aside as a mere persona created by a man with daddy issues. All the haranguing, egotism, band turkeys… it was just an act to hide Dinkle’s insecurities. None of it was mentioned before this story and I would bet that once it’s over it’ll go in the same box and shoved into the same closet as all the other important stories and revelations like Danny Madison or Bull’s having protected Les from even worse bullying.

Or like Lisa’s death and the fallout from it. A story this big needs to dive into what happens afterwards, how the characters react, how Lisa’s passing affects them. But Batty is incapable of thinking about any of that and to him it’s not important anyway. Lisa dying was what was important and once her life ended so to did the story and it was time to move on to the next one. So the two weeks that TB allots for the story of Les’ NYC sojourn is all we get. This was his big masterpiece of a story and it’s treated with all the gravitas of the ending of a Silver Age comic book as that’s what his storytelling sensibilities are stuck in.

And back to the actual story, we get a little bit with Les returning to tuck Summer into bed and stare forlornly at his now empty bed.

*Don’t worry, Lisa will quite literally be there with you in spirit.*

And, uh, sniff Lisa’s clothes like a giant creepy weirdo.

He finally sits Summer down to explain death to her and that Mommy isn’t coming home at which point we get one final Sunday that transitions to older versions of Les and Summer.

With that, Act II officially closes and we enter into Act III starring the middle-aged Les and the teenage Summer… for now, anyway. We’ve jumped ahead ten years but not really as infamously the timeline was instead shifted back by a decade because I guess TB is so lacking in imagination that he was unable to think of what life would look like in the far off year of 2017. Perhaps it would have had flying cars and ray guns and look like something out of an atomic age sci-fi comic book but maybe not. Best not to risk being wrong.

What will the future of Funky Winkerbean and Summer Moore look like from here? Next time we’ll gaze into tomorrow to look at the future-present of Westview and Batty’s attempts at making Summer into an actual character.

The Littlest Accessory

I will be honest, once I finished the first part of this Summer retrospective I figured I would just take things up through the end or close to the end of Act II. See, it’s kind of hard to talk about Summer in Act II because she’s really not much of a character given that she only just starts kindergarten in the final few months of it. For most of it she’s just a baby or a pre-schooler and really doesn’t seem to exist as an actual character as much as she is a kind of thing that’s drawn into scenes with Les and/or Lisa.

She’s more of a living, baby-shaped accessory than anything else. She’s not a baby who’s secretly an evil genius or anything, she’s just kind of there to add color to scenes. There’s a part of me that wanted to just get through this period as fast as possible because of it but I just couldn’t do it. For one thing, I realized doing that would make this a mega-sized entry and we don’t really need one that’s as long as this insipid Larry Dinkle storyline over in Crankshaft. But I also realized that maybe there’s at least a little value in using Summer’s presence to give us a sort of quickish overview on the last few years of Act II.

By the by, Batty’s inability to keep to a timeline rears its ugly head once more due to a teeny tiny problem. That problem is, once again, the presence of Durwood and the rest of his high school class. Summer is born in summer 2002 and at the end of summer/start of fall in 2007 she’s entering kindergarten which would mean five years in-universe have passed. I’m sure the readers can already see the issue but just to make sure it’s clear to everyone, when Lisa said she was wanting to get pregnant she mentioned that Darin was a junior in high school. Even if we give that Batty doesn’t actually know high school grade names and Darin is actually a freshman, he still should have been out of high school by around 2005. Yet Summer’s entering kindergarten and Darin’s class graduating happens at the same time. So is the Class of ’07 just exceptionally slow? How did it take them six years to finish four grades in high school?

Ah well, there’s no use getting myself worked up over it. Let’s get to what this is actually about. Batty decides to open up the year with some biting humor about how guys like football and some times they get loud while watching it.

Les also shows that now that the new car smell is gone he cares about his daughter roughly as much as he cares about everything that’s not his precious writing.

*Haha, it’s funny because she’s suffocating!*

Now it’s around the period of John Byrne’s stint as artist and all the attempted dramatics of DCH John’s attempts at wooing Becky and getting tossed to the curb because Wally has shown back up in Westview, having survived being blown up in Afghanistan. Inbetween weeks where John’s mother sits forlornly with a Superman cake and John purchasing an engagement ring so he can ask Becky to marry him after like one or two dates, we get a week dedicated to Lesisa deciding to ignore Summer while she cries in the hopes of getting her used to sleeping normally.

With this hurdle cleared, Summer seems to be taking to other major infant milestones quickly such as hitting the point where she begins doing a Michigan J. Frog impression.

This is also the time period where Lisa was starting out as a lawyer with her first job being helping out at a women’s legal center to help deal with a guy who was going after an employee for having breast cancer. That job lasted for as long as Batty needed to do his “Lisa fights for cancer victims” story because the minute the case is over the legal center shuts down forcing Lisa to get a new job. A word is put in for her to work as a public defender in the state’s capital appeals division where she meets yet another sexist jerk when she’s forced to bring Summer along with her to her first day on the job.

She gets assigned to working on a case involving a death row inmate named Danny Madison, a Vietnam veteran who’s up for execution for a robbery and murder. Working with Misogynist Man — real name Mark Potter — we get the impression that he’s less a misogynist and more just an incredibly jaded guy due to the high failure rate of his line of work. I mean if your job was fighting losing battles to keep people from dying you’d probably have a case of the Mondays too, so his introduction kind of sticks out since these sexist tendencies never really crop up again.

For most of the rest of 2003, then, Lisa is busy trying to find any evidence to exonerate Danny. From statements about his PTSD from convenient war buddy and Westview High vice principal Nate Green, to shaky justification for unreliable witness testimony because one of the witnesses to the murder was a shut-in which I guess means her eyes didn’t function or something. So while this is going on, it’s up to Les to play Mr. Mom and take Summer on a playdate where he reacts to lady talk about the way you’d expect him too.

But he manages to overcome his fear of cooties and win the Mom Squad over with pretzels, beer and football proving that old canards about what planets men and women come from wrong (Les, for the record, comes from Hisanus). While Les is wooing the Westview MILF Brigade though, things aren’t going so well for Lisa. Her clever legal tactic of throwing agoraphobes under the bus fails to have much of an effect and it’s looking more and more like Danny’s not going to make it leading to this heartwarming Thanksgiving strip.

As time continues to run short for Danny, Les attempts to introduce Summer to sports.

April finds out that Kortney’s been using sex chatrooms while she’s supposed to be working but Ellie can’t bring herself to fire her, while Liz has started student teaching– wait, that strip’s got me all mixed up.

Anyway, all of Lisa’s efforts have failed which means Danny’s execution is imminent. This leads to the delightful Christmas tale of Lisa having to go to the prison and watch — at his request no less — Danny being executed. Misogynist Mark had told Lisa when she started that he thought she didn’t have the spine enough to stick with the job and after having earned his respect, Lisa decides to prove him right by immediately quitting.

Danny had learned of Summer when talking to Lisa a little before Thanksgiving and when Lisa had come in to tell him that they were out of options, he in turn tells her that he’d made Summer a Christmas present. After his execution we see that it’s a snowman carved out of what I presume is prison soap.

*I suppose it’s better than a shank or prison hooch.* Or a toy made out of the gun that killed your grandfather.

I get that Batty was trying to give a touching end to an otherwise grim story but man, that second panel there is just kind of weird and the emotion doesn’t come through at all. Maybe it needed Ghost Danny or something, I don’t know. But Danny’s more or less forgotten as soon as he’s gone and to start 2004 we see that Les’ inadvertant indoctrination is beginning to take hold and Summer is on the path to becoming a filthy sporto.

Batty also can’t help himself by bringing back one of his favorite tropes: dramatic irony.

*See, it’s funny because they are brother and sister!*

At this point, presaging her eventual future in Act III, Batty’s started getting bored of the little rugrat and so her appearances actually dwindle a lot. She gets some things like a customary appearance during Mother’s Day but she’s mostly just there to hang around as a prop for scenes. This includes a week in August about her birthday party — the prepartion and the actual party — where I’m pretty sure that Summer doesn’t actually appear because he’s more worried about sticking it to helicopter parents for some reason.

One of the big storylines running throughout 2004 is the Moores deciding that being well into adulthood with careers and a kid, they should start looking for a house. More precisely, Lisa decides this while Les pouts and grumbles the whole time. All of their initial attempts, including a crossover week with Crankshaft where they were checking out Lilian’s house, go nowhere. And then in the fall, they find it; the place of their dreams. A cozy little home in a cozy little neighborhood.

*I’m not passing up opportunities to see Les get hurt.*

The Taj Moore-hal has arrived and it hates Les because there’s a running joke for a while of him hitting his head on a low-hanging pipe every time he goes into the basement.

Of course come December, we also get the customary dose of Lisa pining for the son she had to give up while the daughter she actually has sits in blissful, childish ignorance of being Mommy’s Little Runner-Up.

I’ll end things here for now with the close of 2004. There’s some other events that take place this year too such as the start of Funky’s relationship with Holly, which means the first appearances of Cory Winkerbean, as well as the birth of Maddie Klinghorn in the summer. That last one is another thing that throws the sacred timeline off because she’s a full year younger than Summer yet is in the same grade when realistically she shouldn’t be. If TimeMop can’t even keep the timestream clean, I can’t imagine what a poor job he does with the floors and bathrooms.

As I said earlier, it’s a bit hard to write about Summer specifically in Act II because she’s just a toddling prop more than she is an actual character. So I think that next time, for real, I’ll try and get through the rest of Act II and all the fun times with cancer that made this strip famous.

Making a Messiah

Over in Crankshaft, Batty is taking a trip into the distant past of the Funkyverse as three old farts stand around in a storage unit while one of them regales his enraptured pals and unenraptured readers about how his daddy played the trumpet and wore a suit. Larry Dinkle went all around the Great Lakes region but was never around the one place where — *sniff* — it mattered most.

But while Batty is looking back to reveal the Funkyverse’s past, we shall be looking back in order to reveal its future. So nestle in, dear reader, for this tale truly told…

It is late 2022 and Tom Batiuk has just dropped his bombshell via crotchety Golden Age relic Ruby Lith that it’s over. After fifty long years Funky Winkerbean would be coming to an end in but a few short weeks. A half-century of characters mugging at the fourth wall, life or death school levy votes, old men geeking out over even older comic books, Les Moore’s undeservedly smug face, cancer, alcoholism, band candy and murderous gun-wielding chimpanzees would finally draw to a close.

However there were still things to learn about Westview, OH and it was the job of one person to learn them. They had to, after all, for as it turns out only they alone could do this. Only they had the ability to sift through the information and see the patterns and find the clues that would allow us to become a better, more united people. And someone else was there to make sure that they did it.

Summer Moore had a destiny. She would write the book that would bring about utopia. The book that would help us realize that humanity was our nation. The greatest work of philosophy by the greatest one book author of all time. But how would she get to this point? What could have caused an otherwise innocuous young woman from a middling Rust Belt town to eventually become the Pattern-Finder?

In order to answer these oh-so-pressing questions, I’ll be starting a new series examining the twists and turns of Summer’s life. Because surely this will be a sensible and logical development and not just Tom Batiuk pulling something out of his ass at the last minute, won’t it?

But while the cat’s in the cradle over in Crankshaft, we’ll be starting with a different cradle entirely as examining Summer’s life means that we must first examine her pre-life which means going all the way back into the wilds of 2001. It was a year of great tragedy as Funky started it drukenly passed out on the sidewalk, his marriage rapidly crumbling around him. In these dark times though there was a bright spot as Lisa, cancer free and better than you, was working on her law degree and decided to let slip that there was something else she wanted.

The Moores decide to talk about Lisa’s sudden desire for a child with Les expressing his worries in his usual whiny and self-absorbed manner.

Being the insufferable turd that he is, Les decides to take this time to bust out his new character that he’s been working on — Armchair Freud — and begin psychoanalyizing his wife’s desire to have a child.

Of course Lisa did not decide on a whim that she wanted a baby. As we all know, Batty loves his meaningful anniversaries and in November 2001 it had been 15 years since the story that forever changed the trajectory of Funky Winkerbean and Tom Batiuk’s career. And what better way to call back to it than to get Lisa’s biological clock a-tickin’ and have her come down with a case of baby fever? For the next month then, the reader is treated to a complete retelling of the Pregnant Lisa Saga from 1986 and I suppose it’s a minor miracle that Batty got Ayers to actually draw the whole thing as opposed to taking the exceedingly lazy way out and just reprinting it.

Tangenting here, and there may be more tangents as this series goes, but we see here some of Batty’s patented ability to completely disregard his own timeline. Lisa states that “Dopey” Darin Fairgood is a junior in high school which would mean, given that this is set around the time of his birthday, he’s just about to turn 17 years old. You’d think that wanting to call back to his most important story, Batty would just say “he’s a freshman in high school” to line up with the story’s anniversary.

Yet for some reason Batty is basically acting as if the last few years have been happening in real time even though time in this strip has always been a fluid thing — For Better or For Worse this ain’t. I mean it won’t be until 2007 when Darin’s generation, having entered high school in 1998, graduates. So for Darin to be a junior in 2001, his birth would have had to happen in 1984 which I guess lines up with when he started school but would then mean that, if we kept the original 1988 graduation date that Act II establishes, then Lisa would have been a freshman herself when she was pregnant which okay, fine. But in 2002, for the strip’s 30th anniversary, Funky will also celebrate his 30th birthday. With the Act I crew graduating college at 22, that would mean that Act II would have had to have started in 1994 and Funky’s group graduated in 1990 not 1988 which means Lisa would have had to have given birth, at the earliest, in 1986 which means Darin should be a freshman and not a junior which means…

God dammit, why do I put more thought into this than him?

Okay, back to the actual important stuff. After the flashback to Lisa’s nebulously dated pregnancy, she’s feeling frisky and decides it’s time to get to babymakin’ with the most sensual of come ons.

Wooed by those romantic words, in February 2002 we learn that Les was successful at implanting his miracle seed within his ovulating she-bride and that she now carries Ohio’s most divine child inside her cancer womb.

With the divine child now growing within her, life continues as normal for Lisa and Les over the next few months. Les does… uh, something — Les-type things I suppose — while Lisa graduates law school. At the same time both Funky and Crazy Harry are going through their own significant life changes as Funky’s in the process of getting divorced while Crazy has gotten engaged to Donna who, you’ll be surprised to learn, was actually the Eliminator the whole time! Betcha didn’t expect that, did you? Because of all these changes going on in their lives, the guys decide to go on a camping trip as this may be their last chance to do so, while at the same time Lisa is in Columbus taking the bar exam.

Everything’s going pretty well which of course means it’s time for drama to rear it’s head. Which it does when Lisa arrives back at Montoni’s and to her surprise ends up in a confrontation with an old friend.

*Leapin’ lizards! What a shocking development!*

Yes, while carrying the holy child within her Lisa is met with the appearance of Ohio Satan who, while not all powerful in his devilry, is able to draw upon his hellish powers to engage in minor annoyance. This annoyance comes in the form of Frankie demanding Lisa take him to his son — who ironically is right there unbeknownst to any of them — and he won’t take no for an answer. Because he’s evil, you see. So evil that he manhandles Lisa a little bit with dire consequences.

The stress of the situation causes Lisa to go into labor… I guess? I would assume that’s the reason anyway but who can really know? Godtiuk works in mysterious ways after all. Frankie takes the opportunity to skedaddle on out of the comic for the time being. With Darin and Lisa being the only two in Montoni’s it’s suggested that an ambulance is called but like a true Batiukian Hero, Darin decides he can get her to the hospital faster than the crummy professionals whose jobs it is to do this and who are basically their own traffic laws.

*How are EMTs even going to compete with a pizza delivery car?*

I mean how else was TomBa going to give us some hilarious dramatic irony and Teen Pregnant Lisa callbacks if the characters just left things up to the professionals like reasonable people? Don’t they know that there’s awards to be won? And oh man was Tommy Boy really in love with the dramatic irony for this story because he was practically ODing on it.

*It’s funny of course because he’s just reenacting his own birth.*

Okay, what the hell? Darin was canonically born in 1986 so he, if this took place in real time, cannot possibly be in the 11th grade. Unless I’m discounting the possibility that TB doesn’t actually know the difference between freshman, sophomore, junior and senior which maybe I shouldn’t be.

Anyway, the whole situation means that that the Annointed One was born a little earlier than normal and so she’s put on a ventilator to help her survive.

While talking with the doctor, the Moores realize that with all the craziness going on this summer they forgot to decide on a name for their little girl. Lisa decides that craziness means that Summer is the name that they’ll be going with which means I can finally start calling her by her actual name too. With the newborn Summer now clinging to life in Doctor Depresso’s Breatheinator 5000, Lisa fills in Les — who’d zipped back from the camping trip because he somehow felt that “something was wrong back home” — on the events that led to their kid’s premature birth. Les comically threatens to kick Frankie’s ass if he ever shows up again.

While you’re thinking of people more qualified and able than Les to beat up Frankie — the newborn Summer for instance — our hero decides to start making a list.

Batty, of course, is milking the apparent touch and go nature of Summer’s situation for everything it’s worth.

But fret not for this is but a fake out and these are happy tears! It turns out that Summer has gained a pound and Les is overcome with joy, huzzah! Things are going well and Summer’s about ready to leave the hospital, so Les goes out to buy a fancy new digital camera so he can get Boy Genius to explain to him and Lisa how uploading a picture works.

By the way, giving me vibes similar to this gem.

But even back in 2002 uploading pictures of your kids onto the internet for the whole world to see could lead to some suspicious characters coming across them. Characters you might not want.

*I bet he also evilly narrates putting jelly on his English muffin.*

Who could this be? Frankie? Or someone even more sinister?

Why it’s just another fake out as Lisa’s dad and/or mom were sinisterly and dramatically narrating their every action for our benefit simply to fool us. Perhaps they’re aware they’re characters in a comic strip and understand dramatic tension. Who can say? Regardless of any potential medium awareness, they’ve decided to move back to Westview to be closer to their family and so Lisa can have a convenient babysitter. Summer soon after has her first Christmas and Les decides to end it with the type of uplifting positivity that only he can provide.

*The world’s crummy and maybe it’ll be slightly less crummy for you but still crummy. Merry Christmas, kid.*

With that I’ll close things off here for the time being. The future Messiah has been born and all is right with the world for now. There will be plenty of time for Batty to screw up his handling of this most important of all Westviewians later but next time we may possibly rocket through a good chunk of the remaining years of Act II. Or we may not. But there will be a next time because we’ve got a long way to go.

Murder In The Burnings: The Major Suspects

We continue our look at arson suspects with the more serious candidates. Some names aren’t on either list, because they will turn up later in the story. But let me know if I missed your favorite.

SUSPECT: Cayla Williams Moore (suggested by: bewareofevehill)

PROSECUTION: The wife of Westview English teacher, Les Moore, and personal assistant to high school principal Nate Green. Cayla witnessed her husband defy her boss’ mandate that books on the school’s not-approved list are also not approved to be taught. Les confided in Cayla about the plan to distribute the book via bookstores. Fed up with Les’s overbearing ego, Cayla used that information in an attempt to frame him for the arson. The damage was intentionally small, because Cayla had no other dispute with Ms. McKenzie.

DEFENSE: If she wanted to use fire to rid herself of her husband, there are more direct approaches. Doesn’t anyone remember The Burning Bed? Continue reading “Murder In The Burnings: The Major Suspects”

Pre-liminator

It’s probably just as well that TB is presenting this mini arc on his blog, as opposed to shoehorning it into his Crankshaft comic. If there are any readers out there who know only of Cranky and his pals, and are unaware of fifty years of Funky Winkerbean canon (big “if”), they’ve been confused enough by all these “new” characters turning up in Centerville. Also, kindly excuse my use of the word “canon” here, as Funky canon is, well, loose. We now know that “the ‘Eliminator'”, aka “Donald,” was really a young girl named Donna.

Continue reading “Pre-liminator”

Tag: Summer

Surprise! You’re On Cancer Camera!

The Littlest Accessory

Making a Messiah

Murder In The Burnings: The Major Suspects

Pre-liminator