Foobonia and Points West.

Dropping a look at a foolhardy eleven year old boy and the hatefully judgmental people that surround him and a dom-com about insane suburbanites who no-one likes can be considered an exercise in the elimination of redundancy. After all, I already watch Foob so I don’t need to follow Curtis when I want to see prickly, humourless people jump down a child’s throat for irrational reasons that have more to do with their own repellent vanity and abysmal ignorance than any sort of right and wrong and I don’t need to follow Sally Forth if I want to look at a horribly damaged human being driving herself and her family insane trying to do what she thinks is right. There are plenty of strips out there that have horrible people who fear and hate a generation that won’t live their lives exactly as they do and plenty of strips stocked with know-nothing know-it-alls nailing themselves to crosses to please people who should be spurned like rabid dogs. The reason I’m glad to no longer follow anything by Tom Batiuk is slightly different than the other two. Marciuliano and Billingsley may be a lot of things but to my knowledge, they’ve never lied to me. Batiuk, on the other hand, has.

That’s because back when he did that ridiculous “time frog” trick roughly four years ago so that he wouldn’t have to depict Les slowly putting his life back together after the traumatic (and, to my mind, pointless) death of his beloved wife Dead Lisa, he’d promised us that the third phase would be dedicated to the second generation of characters. Events, sadly, have proven otherwise. We started things off watching materialistic dumbass Funky run a promising franchise into the ground because he was too busy trying to give a middle finger to his successful ex-wife to notice that his business model was dependent on junk bonds and wishful thinking. Then again, given his failure to realize that her good fortune is owed mainly to no longer having to stoke the ego of a corpulent, materialistic and arrogantly misogynistic blowhard with a moronic name, we can’t expect clear thinking from him. His stepson seems to exist only to cause him anxiety but is otherwise a scowling non-factor. Most of the energy not devoted to keeping his business above water is directed to ignoring his nephew’s PTSD and his second wife’s untreated case of clinical depression.

We continue on with the theme of ‘our children are here to drive us crazy’ as we look at how Bull finds it nearly impossible to relate to Jinx’s path in life. Good thing for her and bad thing for us that most of what Bull is up to is letting Anne Fairgood coach the Lady Scapegoats so that they finally put a trophy in Cancerview High’s empty, empty trophy case.

Next, we have to contend with Crazy Harry’s daughter Maddy; what she seems to be is a bizarre genetic experiment in which we combine her mother’s looks with her father’s bizarre personality and tendency to making weird asides.

Finally, we come to the closest Batiuk comes to fulfilling his promise: Summer. Most of what she is is someone Les can worry about because of his need to fulfill a promise to his dead wife. Her having actual athletic and social skills perplexes and depresses the awkward, awkward main character. Other than that, though, she might as well be ‘Generic Teenager #7’.

What really hammered home the fact that the kids exist as cheerleaders to the established characters was his stumbling, bumbling attempt at having two gay kids come out at the prom. We never met the two before and will never see them again but that’s not important. What is important is that Nate Green stood up to Becky’s mother; this led to the supposed inheritors doing their real job: congratulating a real main character on beating a secondary one.

Another interesting thing about Crankshaft is that he has at least one close friend his age left in the world: Ralph Meeker. Ralph's purpose is, of course, to remind us that Ed is more that merely a gruff boarder in his son-in-law's house, the bane of a bank teller's existence or a capricious, surly and inept government employee; Ed is also a man with a past that explains his present, with faded hopes and ruined dreams that explain but do not excuse his hateful nature. What he, Ralph and their other two friends do when they get together is talk about old times, wonder why life passed them by and go to funerals. This is sort of strange because even though the four men will soon wind up being escorted into the afterlife by the Phantom of the Low Budget Dinner Theater, their slot will be filled in the fullness of time. That's because I can see into the future; in that future, I can see a diner where four other men will talk about old times, wonder why life passed them by and attend funerals. Their names are Funky, Les, Crazy Harry and Bull.

As I mentioned a while back, Phase Two found Harry Klinghorn and Funky Winkerbean working for Tony Montoni; while Harry became a letter carrier, Funky stayed behind. He also ended up marrying the poor man's Veronica Lodge: Cindy Summers. While she would eventually try to make amends to the people she picked on in high school, back in Phase One she was something of a jerk, Phase Two found her as a reporter for the local ABC station. The problem, of course, was that at one point Cindy got a job offer from the New York affiliate; Funky's hostile refusal to leave Westview, animated primarily by his need to be the alpha male, was one of the factors that led to the dissolution of their marriage. The other factor, of course, was a secret he kept from everyone else: he was and is an alcoholic. His addiction and need to deny he had a problem darkened his personality, alienated his friends and threatened to ruin his life and the only reason he joined AA was because he ran a kid over. Part of his putting his life back together was remarrying breast cancer survivor Holly Budd. The two of them bonded because Phase Two had mauled her as badly as it had him; not only was she divorced from the idiot rat bastard who date-raped Lisa, the former perky baton girl had no real prospects, a child she couldn't handle and no idea how to turn her life around. What she did have was a second husband whose addictive personality was channeled into a temporarily more productive habit; the problem was that without Tony holding his need to come up with one dubious innovation after another in check, Funky's expansion plans were doomed to fail. More on that tomorrow.

The interesting thing about the Harry of the Third Phase is that the youngest of his three children is more or less a female version of the odd human being he was in high school. Sure, she inherited her looks and red hair from her mother but she inherited her need to spout non-sequiturs and wear a hat at all times from her dad. More interesting still is that, unlike most of the second generation, Maddie's life isn't filled with too much drama; she isn't like Summer or Keisha who are probably destined to watch as Suicide Girl does what she did back when Les and Lisa were floundering romantically: playing the "I want my beloved to be happy" card. She also isn't wandering around like Jinx Bushka wondering why her adoptive father frets about how athletic she isn't. What she's got is a father who might finally have to deal with a touch of the same stresses that his peers do; that's because, as we know, the postal service is falling on hard times. Since the iron rice bowl has rusted through, we're probably in for Harry coming in and cleaning up the mess Funky made of Montoni's.

Now that I've gotten my hatred of how Batiuk has made his characters look haggard and aged off my chest, I'd like to talk about the other member of the Core Four who isn't a mess: 'Crazy' Harry Klinghorn. He bears a distinct similarity to Bull in that he was able to transcend who he was in high school and carve out a decent life for himself. His beginnings were not all that auspicious; what greeted our eyes back then was a shy, somewhat eccentric young man wearing a cap who really didn't seem to fit into the blackboard jungle. Just as Les's machine gun turned out to be a prop, his living out of his locker seemed to draw not on his being the fun-personified character we saw but on, well, his having a rather unhappy home life. Where he really excelled was at the local arcade; the problem, of course, was that even there he faced an uphill battle. That's because he always had to face another gamer: a mysterious figure wearing a motorcycle helmet called the Eliminator. 'He' was tough competition. 'He' was relentless. 'He' was a young woman named Donna. More about the two of them in the next installment.

As we know, Batiuk made a bit of jump when he aged the characters the first time around; when he did so, we found our friend Bull working as a coach at Westview High. As I explained yesterday, he was a calmer version of the belligerent ignoramus who bullied Les into letting him cheat off him; not only was it due to his seeking therapy, Batiuk also needed to deliver an Aesop about how coaches tend to downplay their charges' need to study. The interesting thing about Bull was that he and Linda Lopez had fallen in love and gotten married; he had to work out how awkward it was to relate to her daughter Mickey and, well, deal with his low sperm count. I have to say that he handled both a lot better than Les or Funky would have; after debating the issue with himself, he shrugged off worrying about how things looked, talked it over with Linda and adopted Jinx. He was also there for Les during Lisa's cancercancercancer; I wonder if he realizes that Les took his joking comment about slugging him in the arm if he messed up seriously. I also wonder if he sometimes envies his predecessor his happiness as a salesman at Foot Locker.

To complete our look at Les, we have to remind ourselves that he'd have been strictly nowhere as a man without Lisa's presence in his life. As Batiuk's flashbacks remind us, she started out as a more or less distaff counterpart to him; she too was sort of shy, sort of geeky and the rest. If her parents hadn't transferred her to Westview's evil counterpart Big Mountain, their lives would have a damned sight easier. As it was, she wound up getting date raped by some creep named Big Frankie; originally, it was consensual but, well, Batiuk had to amp up the misery. In any event, Mister Crawford never forgave Lisa for that; it was always an obstacle that kept him from acknowledging her and her accomplishments; Mrs Crawford stood in the background, passively wringing her hands instead of her husband's fool neck so, well, we had to deal with the spectacle of a fairly competent figure estranged from incompetent parents. Despite Les's attempt to be a stand-up guy, give up on University and start a family with her, Lisa gave her son up for adoption. The sad thing is that she'd thought that she'd have time to get to know him when she was older. In the mean time, she'd become a fairly competent lawyer who defended the characters from their enemies; her signature case was keeping John Howard's comic book shop from being closed down by an army of idiots with a bug up their asses about obscenity. Her personal life, of course, was complicated by her being the easily-antagonized female in the standard Belligerent Sexual Tension pairing; Les would say or do something stupid without intending harm, she'd get all huffy, lather, rinse and repeat. One must also note that Les had acquired an annoyance that got in the way: Suicide Girl. In any event, they eventually got together and finally got married to the relief of their exasperated peers. Since the God of the Batiukverse is a bit of a bastard, they did not have a happy ending. What they did get is her pretty much willing herself to die because saving her life would have been too much like work. It was it this point that Darin found out he was her son; at the time, we were all wondering if the two of them would get together and connect before she died. We also had to contend with the fact that her idiot father finally showed up seeking closure; since her dying was the only thing that stirred the dunce to get off his high horse and admit that he was proud of her, we can safely call that admission as worthless as he is. Lisa now manifests herself as sort of a dead hand that guides Les's behavior; not only do we have the creepy-ass videos she made for Summer, we have his needing approval from her ghost before seeking a relationship with Cayla Williams. Sadly, there is still a presence from his past that threatens his happiness; Suicide Girl thinks that now that Lisa is out of the way, the same Destiny that made her try to kill herself when he rebuffed her has ensured that she will finally be the Mrs Les Moore that she wanted to be when she was a high school sophomore crushing on an oblivious dope with a helmet-like hairdo. His opinion in the matter being as it is optional ensures cheap theatrics and annoying smirking.

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.