Josh Fruhlinger’s April Fool’s Day post at Comics Curmudgeon included this remark:
This is just another example of (the main characters of Intelligent Life) responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval.
Which got me to wondering: is this blog just Pavlovian noises of general disapproval? Are we just throwing red meat at people who enjoy that particular flavor of red meat? Are we no better than the clucking, smirking, comic book-addicted clones of the Funkyverse, who stand around agreeing with each other that all Tom Batiuk’s personal tastes are really neat-o?
I think we are better. And I’ll tell you why.
If you pay $5 to go to a live show, a social contract emerges. You, the ticket-buyer, have an expectation that you will be entertained. You trust the venue to arrange a series of skilled performers that are worth $5 of your money, and two hours of your time. If they don’t deliver, you will be dissatisfied, and advise others not to visit.
The venue probably has expectations of you as well. They may have a dress code; rules about what substances you’re allowed to consume (or possibly required to consume, in the form of a two-drink minimum); and that you don’t disrupt the show to an unacceptable degree.
In comedy clubs, heckling is a part of the show, but there are well-understood standards about what’s too far. I’ve also known comedy clubs to forbid the use of certain words and subject matter. Because there’s a social contract between comedians and clubs as well: break our rules, and we’ll ruin your reputation.
Now think about newspaper comics. There’s a social contract here as well. If we turn to the comics page, then we, the readers, have the right to expect that the cartoonists have made a reasonable attempt to entertain us. We don’t pay that $5 cover charge, but we do invest a little time every day. But when we open the funny pages, what do we see? Roots country music. One man indulging his sexual fetishes. Incoherent sports drama. A parody of an 87-year-old movie. Millennial-bashing, raised to the level of gaslighting. NASCAR jokes that wouldn’t be good enough for a children’s joke book. Whatever Judge Parker is nowadays.
Who the hell is the target audience for any of that?
And I’m not even including strips like Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Curtis, Doonesbury, Garfield,Hagar The Horrible, Herb and Jamaal, Hi and Lois, the aforementioned Intelligent Life, and the many Z-grade Far Side clones. I’m not even including other strips I’m usually critical of: Luann, Mary Worth,and Pluggers. All these strips at least try to honor the social contract of being worth 10 seconds of your time. Though the word “try” is doing a lot of work here.
Now to Funky Winkerbean. It has three clearly defined eras: Act I, when it was a solid satire of high school life; Act II, when it shifted to drama but was still worth following; and Act III, when it became a self-indulgent shitshow about book signings, comic book covers, and multi-month self-interviews.
Who the hell is the target audience for any of those things?
I suspect most of us followed this pattern: liked Funky Winkerbean in Act I, tolerated it in Act II, and were disgusted by it in Act III. The social contract broke down in stages. It went from something that was pretty good, to something that was at least worth 10 seconds a day, to something that angers us so much that we spend a lot more seconds a day hating it.
And now Crankshaft seems to be trying to makepeople hate it.
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.
Son of Stuck Funky turns 16 years old this week!!! Celebrate with me that a child born when this shitposting haven started would now be legally allowed behind the wheel of a vehicle without adult supervision!!!
And what an auspicious start to our 16th year of nonsense. A brand new driver to take the wheel on posting duties and guide us through a scenic bus tour of Sadie Summers. Amazing, that this late in the game we’re still adding new crew to our roster. Narshe, we look forward to whatever you have in store for us.
Four years ago, when Funky Winkerbean was ending and Epicus and TFH were indicating they’d said pretty much everything they wanted to post about Batiuk’s silly universe, I had a big decision to make. I knew they’d let me truck on, but did I feel up to continuing?
I decided to keep the ball rolling, and I’m glad I did. You all have made it worthwhile, with your comments and engagement. New people keep finding this place. Old friends check in from time to time and make me smile. It is undoubtedly worth it.
But, let it be said, that I would have burnt out long ago if it weren’t for Banana Jr. 6000 stepping up to the plate and taking an equal, and sometimes outsized share of the workload. He’s the best. The bad cop to my good cop when it comes to prosecuting Batiuk. And taking the lead on some behind the scenes tech stuff I’m too analog brained to understand.
Thank you all for being here. And thank you all for the well wishes in the comments about my dad. He had a minor setback this week, a micro stroke which put him back in the hospital and made his projected road to recovery a bit longer. In some ways I’m back to where I was four years ago, with a big, long-running operation I have to keep rolling and decide what the future will bring.
But until all the grumpy old men in my life are ready to retire: Batiuk, Dad, Sorial Promise, I’ve decided I’m gonna keep it rolling, keep it Funky, keep it Cranky, and nitpick on!
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.
Many topics to cover today. And not enough brain cells to do it with!
First of all, Happy Easter to all who celebrate! May your plastic eggs be as full of sweet goodness as the tomb was empty of Messiah corpses.
Second of all, many thanks to commenter unabashedlyscrumptiousb3ecbcf7cb who has the breaking Akron News!
Hey CBH…hope you can read this article about Luigi’s band box I’ve attached from today’s Akron Beacon Journal. I tried to find a way to get it to you directly, but kept coming up empty. Maybe you might be able to get a blog post from it.
Not to worry folks, the band box is just out for repairs again. But I wish Mark J. Price had come to me to research his article, as there are numerous factual errors.
Error one. That’s obviously Crazy Harry talking to Funky Winkerbean, not Tony Montoni.
Error two. Ayers penciled that art, though at the time Batiuk was still taking full credit for the strip he inked, because…
Error three. That cartoon wasn’t drawn in March 2026. That was part of a Sunday strip that ran on July 28, 2013.
And now, third topic of the day.
On Monday my dad suffered a heart attack and needed emergency triple bypass surgery. I have been farming solo all week long, barring some assistance by the neighbors, which has been exhausting. While my dad is recovering well, he’s still in for more hospital time, followed by a recovery at home that will probably involve him puppeting me as his mindless millennial muscle while he sits with his feet up. Which, given the alternative, I’ll gladly accept.
While I fully intend to continue shitposting and snarking here, don’t expect anything super structured, coherent, or well researched from me for a few months. Banana Jr 6000 will have to handle the high effort posts for the foreseeable future. My posts are probably going to be more spontaneous and silly.
Son of Stuck Funky 