Les Moore in Phase Two.

As I sort of mentioned yesterday, Batiuk didn't do what Lynn did when he divided his strip into its three eras; what he did back in the late eighties is jump ahead in time from graduation to about ten years later. That meant instead of seeing Les as a university student working towards a B.Ed., we found our helmet-haired protagonist teaching English at Westview High. The interesting thing about that is that his mentor Mr Fairgood was now principal and thus his boss. The other interesting thing is that Les, while being good at his job, was still sort of awkward outside the classroom; this, of course, ensured that he spent most of Phase Two fumbling the ball when trying to connect with his lawyer girlfriend Lisa Crawford. The only reason that they did eventually get married was that Suicide Girl finally admitted to intercepting some sort of letter from Lisa expressing her feelings. In a kinder world, that would be the part where they lived happily ever after; sadly, this is the Batiukverse so they had a rather crappy life. Since he and Lisa never really had much, they had to start off living in the apartment over Montoni's; we also had to deal with Lisa's first brush with the cancer that eventually killed her, her having to give birth in the ICU because she got caught in the first WTC blast and, finally, her slow, lingering death from the cancer that Doctor Lethal failed to catch in time. All the while, Les stood there with his baffled frown doing his best to be supportive despite not having two clues to rub together. He thus ended Phase Two mourning his wife, raising their child on his own and not realizing that she was pulling his leg when she told him to wait until he was sixty or so to remarry.