Previous >>151506847Today will cover 1990.Previously, Cindy Summers quickly took her spot as one of the main characters including suing Ginny for not giving her an A and briefly going out with Funky. Skip Townes became the manager of the Marching Scapegoats and they somehow became the music sensation of the summer. The biggest thing to happen, however, was Funky getting a steady girlfriend in the form of Tracy who will stay with him until graduation.
>chemotherapyToo soon, Nate. There will be plenty of time for chemo later.
>>151538477Good work OP
This is a recurring gag he'll try out a few times very late in Act I and I think even into the early parts of Act II but it never really goes anywhere. Probably because it's not all that funny IMO.
Two Leo Buscaglia jokes in one month? Also, way to be a menacing creep, Les.
In true Flinstonian fashion, a blow to the head has turned Cindy into a hippie.
Crisis averted
>>151539023This is the most expressive I've seen this art.
So Funky is simultaneously a nobody and was able to land a girl that everyone else was trying to get as his girlfriend?
I hadn't even thought of it since I was in school but looking it up, Channel One died in 2018.
>>151539563Roger that Mr Dinkle!
>>151538902>>151538902ok I chuckled with the last one
>>151539591This was actually a real thing Batiuk tried to make happen. It went nowhere though.
I can't remember if it's ever confirmed or not but I believe the band computer is the same as Holtron the school computer.
In another example of how the first couple of years of Act II is just the later few years of Act I with some new characters, these Dinkle/band computer/Skip stories will continue for a little bit after the transition.
>>151539563SIR YES SIR!!
Okay yeah, the band and school computers are the same character.
This won't be the last time that Funky Winkerbean characters end up in a Middle Easter desert nor will it be the last time it's addressed with attempted solemnity.
As is to be expected, nothing will come of this.That's it for today. Next time will cover 1991, the last year before the timeskip. The band gets caught up in a scandal while the football team finds unexpected success. And in preparation for the jump to Act II, Batiuk will introduce what turned out to be the character he most hated and the one he felt was his biggest mistake; it's the first appearance of Cindy's little sister, Sadie Summers.
>>151538518The afro returns for a bit
>>151540331The ones with Derek and Bull are definitely him just reusing old art.
>>1515399502nd strip gives a whole new meaning to >>151536301
>>151538996>>151539023Flannel came back in style much later in the 90s, didn't it? It's kind of funny that this and also her thinking (in the 80s) Donald Trump is President happenedBut technically this is where Sadie kind of ended up in Act 2 and she didn't have to get amnesia to reach this. I'd almost have expected Batiuk to retcon this story by saying that Cindy didn't "recover" and just went back to acting shallow because she realized no one liked her change, and just kept the act up for appearances (and it would tie in to why younger and older Cindy felt self-loathing in that one reunion story, even if it was allegedly a dream)
>>151540009>As is to be expected, nothing will come of this.I thought this but at times I kind of wonder if Batiuk was leaning toward that direction but then held back because it felt too obvious a direction; like the beginning of Act 3 is Les meeting up with Cindy in New York and much later in Act 3 Cindy tells Cayla about that New Year's, and Cindy and Les talking about it on the route to her home
>>151540009>the character he most hatedis it because of a reasonable reason?
>>151540755>Flannel came back in style much later in the 90s, didn't it?Not even much later, it would be around 1992 when grunge went mainstream and be like 1995 or so when it got supplanted. Cindy and Carrie's fashion/hair are definitely cartoonish parodies of turn of the decade style though that you would have seen in something like Saved by the Bell. If there was never a time jump Cindy probably would have looked more like she came out of Beverly Hills 90210 given that they were also rich white teens. Actually, Cindy keeps he (long outdated) hairstyle well into the '90s. Longer than is actually reasonable.
>>151541248I'll let him 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.Personally, I think he's wrong way too shortsighted. A good writer could have taken that negative and done a lot of work with it in regards to character development. He even shows some of that later on. But he quickly decided he hated her and that was that. Sadie is I think a good go-to example for misused characters in the series.
bump for reading, thanks for doing this OP
>>151541600>Dumb Character Phantom Zonelol is that where Roland went?
>>151539273It's amazing how quickly these jokes were dated
>>151542080Between the fax machine and the Dragnet reference, that second strip is like outdated Inception.
>>151541755The problem is Roland’s whole “hypocritical student radical” shtick wasn’t wacky enough for him to really fit in with the other zanier characters
>>151540861He might have been just because by now he'd clearly decided to move things forward so if he wanted Cindy back he couldn't have her as an adult still be the stuck up mean girl. But I don't think he was ever thinking about putting Cindy with Les. I assume from the moment he decided to age the characters he always intended to bring back Lisa.
>>151541600I agree, in that looking at that one Cindy story arc earlier in the thread, you could go with the idea that Sadie is luckier in managing to get out of the trap of being just Miss Popular Mean Girl sooner than Cindy did (like you see her being there to welcome Susan Smith back after her attempted suicide). Maybe Sadie just becomes Lisa Simpson at worst or something, but the idea would be that she is happier with her more authentic self and maybe Cindy resents or envies her a little for that.
>>151542799Oh no, I don't mean during the timeskip; I know he definitely intended for Lisa to come back. I mean like after Lisa died.
>>151542838Like I said, a better writer would have seen that Sadie was a pale imitation of her sister and used that for an easy ongoing story about her trying to figure out who she wants to be. Lkle just copy Quinn from Daria as a base and he would have been good to go. For joke purposes it can be a running gag where she's constantly flitting between identities.Her appearances before Wally ships out also could have been used as a basis for doing a love triangle in Act III between her, Becky and Wally for soap opera drama or even just her in Rachel's as she'd have more of an existing connection to him.I like Sadie in her few Act I appearances as basically trolling her sister too. She had more potential as a character than a lot of others but turns out to be criminally misused because Batiuk was too myopic.This is really a problem as it goes. There's lots of good or potentially good characters that get nothing and it's especially bad with any of the girls. Chien, Maddie, Jinx, Rana, Donna, even Summer. Corey, any high schooler after Summer's class. Just a lot of undercooked characters.
>>151542905Oh, that could be the case but maybe he thought it was too cliche. I think he went with Cayla so he could tie it back into Crankshaft however loosely and because he thought he'd get plaudits for Les marrying a black woman.
>>151542254I feel like they could go further with that
>>151538477bump
>>151538996>>151539023The flannel and hairstyle is actually a good look for her; shame it doesn't last.
>>151539479Channel One was such an odd thing when it started; it'd go from having some of the most vapid fluff pieces and ads for Super Mario World to flipping over to Anderson Cooper reporting from a war zone.
>>151541600>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.I can see the others being listed but Spike? Spike was still making appearances in the Peanuts strips until about a month before Schulz died.
>>151544445I think Batiuk just didn't care for Snoopy's brothers, because they felt redundant to himBut honestly while I could see that with Marbles and Andy (even though Andy's role is playing straight man to Olaf), Spike at least is distinctive enough from Snoopy; he wears a hat, he's got whiskers, he's extremely thin, he lives out in the desert and talks to cacti. Olaf also stands out in that he's fat version of Snoopy, wears a different kind of hat, is considered "ugly". Spike and Olaf are kind of extreme directions of Snoopy
>>151544445>>151544702Also strangely enough Olaf gets merchandised a lot in Japan
>>151545016Interesting.
>>151544702It's just funny to me that he'd stick Spike into the same category as Moon Maid, who was considered a sign (if not an outright cause) of Dick Tracy's decay as a strip and basically given the Old Yeller treatment the minute Gould was dead as a result. Especially seeing as how Rerun exists and definitely fits the theme.
>>151545456The redundant character theme I meant and not the "cast into the void" part like Sadie.
>>151545456Batiuk is at the age where he likely read Peanuts and Dick Tracy back in the 1950s and 1960s when they were in the papers, and would've probably shaped his view of them that far back. Spike was introduced in Peanuts when Batiuk was getting close to turning 30.It's kind of like how Charles Schulz didn't feel like Superman should be able to fly, he was like 15 when Action Comics #1 hit the stands and his view of how Superman should be was shaped in the earlier stuff
>>151545537When the comic stuff starts in Act III you definitely can tell that Batiuk's idea of a good comic is the late '50s and early '60s stuff he read as a kid. His comic ideas (via the fictional company) almost all go back to that style of sci-fi with ray guns and whatnot.
>>151545647>>151545537Nostalgia, nostalgia never changes…
>>151545647I mean he did say his favorite character next to The Flash was Adam Strange, so I wasn't too surprised. Starbuck Jones from the way he set it up seems like a kind of DC sci-fi hero from that time like Adam Strange or Captain Comet or something and it would be able to allow for doing the type of DC cover hook like the main character getting turned into a monkey or something
>>151538577Gotta fight the fourth wall there Dinkle.
>>151545896>cover hookI actually get the impression that he holds up the Silver Age covers more than he does the actual stories. One of his intros talks about how the first comic he ever saw was pic related and the cover blew his mind because it was Hopalong Cassidy but with some whimsical element thrown in. Same deal with his beloved Flash #123. The comic stuff never really talks about the content and story of the fictional comics, it's everyone gushing about covers which then sets up the Sunday cover strip. It's like he feels like imagining the story that the cover presents is better than reading the comic itself.>Adam StrangeI wonder what he thinks of the King series. Given his expressed views on then current comics via Crazy Harry, I'd imagine he wouldn't be thrilled.
>>151539756it's a shame crazy harry only appears in montoni's now.
>>151545975I mean in practicality he probably can't do a whole Starbuck Jones comic story in the comic strip. Even doing a lot of the covers was already pushing it, or some of the tangental storylines he was doing in the Act 3. He could have the characters talk about what happens in it, which he kinda briefly does, but that could only go so far. Other writers probably might be able to drop a few hints at a larger story but I feel like Batiuk would likely just get too focused on doing a Starbuck Jones comic to get back to the rest of whatever's going on in Westview.
>>151545896Batiuk does sound like an interesting guy, does he use Twitter or something?
>>151538748W-what did he do?
>>151538828Where’s the joke Batiuk?!
