Foobonia and Points West.

I'd like to take this opportunity to head back to Westview, Ohio for a while to talk about a problem that I've noticed: the way that Batiuk has unintentionally turned Anthony "I HAVE NO HOOOOOOOME!!!!!" Caine into freaking Galahad by making Les Moore pole-vault over the moral event horizon. For those of you who have not read the horrible waste of an arc, I'll establish the setting a bit. It seems that for some reason or another, the Crazy Harry of 1979 decided to show a random selection of his classmates the time pool he had in his locker. Also, for some reason, Bull stupidly decided to steer the thing to Westview High's gym in the year 2015. This meant that Crazy, Bull, Funky, Holly, Cindy, Les and Lisa wound up looking around at a strange new era in which most of them looked like what a teenager thinks a person in their early fifties looks like (which is to say, exceedingly old). While Batiuk had a lot of fun mocking Cindy for reasons I'm about to get into and while he's currently having a lot of fun watching the gang of the late seventies try to cope with a Samsung Galaxy, the real problem is that Lisa Crawford looked around and found something that unsettled her: she wasn't there. We and the cast know that part of her is scattered illegally in the middle of Central Park. Where we and they part company is the need to try to make things easier to digest. The adult cast attempted to cloud the issue by making reasonably plausible excuses because of a need to spare her feelings because of a misguided sense of charity. The stupid idea they have is clearly "the poor dear is fated to die so let's make her think that her future self is happy in order to calm her down." This is nuts because there was an easy way to prevent her from dying that she'd have known about if she read the Great Big Book Of How Her Death Affected Someone Who Matters Because He Has A Penis.

This leads us to where it is that Les went from "passive, clueless, hand-wringing nitwit who didn't know what was going on around him" to "Complete Monster." You see, he read the book that his adult self wrote and hopes that he doesn't remember what he saw so that he won't have to act at all. What's more, he wants to keep Lisa from speculating overly much about the future because he believes that she, a mere girl, cannot handle a future that terrifies a man like him. The problem is that they do remember what they've seen. What this means is that teenage Les knows exactly how the future will unfold and refuses to do anything about it. He knows that Lisa will be raped by Frankie. He knows that she'll get pregnant. He knows that her asshole dad will disown her. He knows about the post office blast. He knows about the missed test result that will eventually kill her. He knows all this and does nothing to really help her because he can't abide a world in which a woman has agency. The idea is that if she knew things that could help her, she might leave him or something and he wouldn't get the girl he's supposed to have because he's a man and that's 'how things work'.

This leads us to what the problem Batiuk seems to have with women. After all, what is a woman to him? A woman is a mother who thinks that comic books are gaudy, juvenile trash that her son has to be made to outgrow so he can make a name for himself in the real world. A woman is a mother who thinks that being a cartoonist is a witless waste of talent and that a teacher is a figure of respect. A woman is a pretty girl who selfishly and cruelly fails to acknowledge that the best woman alive is lower than the lowest sort of man. A woman is thus someone who refuses to admit that he is entitled to her services because he's got a schlong and that's the deal. Since he prefers Lisa dead and dependent than alive and autonomous, Les Moore is thus a full-on villain protagonist.

As we know, Mike is a socially awkward dork who thinks that he was somehow born better than anyone else despite not having a clue as to how normal people actually behave. This is why he at one point wailed about how awful it was that he had to be the glittering but misunderstood genius his inferiors cruelly mistreated as well as why he confused having to be treated like one of said beefwitted nonentities who weren't as excellent as himself as a demeaning form of torture inflicted by the incompetent on his excellent self. Add in the tendency that this self-absorbed nitwit has to smirk like an idiot when he triumphs over the inferiors who want to enslave him with their family politics and his pathetic mewling when he doesn't get his own way and you quickly realize that you're dealing with a Canadian Content version of another eminently punchable human being that goes a long way towards explaining why newspapers are dying: Les Moore from Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean.

Much as it is with Mike, there isn't a social norm Les is able to wrap his pea brain around. The same man who says gibberish like 'solo car dates' never quite manages to figure out that most of why his students don't thrive like he wants them to is that he's a droning jerk who radiates contempt for anyone not in love with the crap he loves. Rather than accept that he's an incompetent well past his sell-by date, Les joins his fellow failures in blaming the children they can't teach for the poor grades they get. Also, we had to spend a summer in agony watch the mewling nincompoop whine because some poor fool movie director tried to make his beloved book of cancer, loss, heartache, despair and wounds that can never heal into something people would watch without succumbing to darkness-induced audience apathy. Worse, the dick tried to sabotage the thing because the bone they threw him wasn't nearly big enough. It's like watching Mike moan because Gluttson asked him to actually act like a senior editor when that might expose him to criticism. Granted, Michael has yet to make a snippy comment about how people who can't stomach abuse porn are silly people denying reality but that's just because the curtain came down on him before he could whine about the beefwits.

Worst of all, both men are married to a passive-aggressive jerk who cheers on their every stupid move while at the same time tormenting them like a cat does a mouse. Granted, Les had to wait longer because his real wife told him to wait until he was sixty to remarry but both of them found their enabling tormentor. Cayla grins as she allows Les to slobber over Saint Dead Lisa and torments him with scary and wrong expectations that he'll act like a member of society instead of a bizarre freak who can't and won't understand the real world while Deanna allows Mike to fort himself away because she's a G-rated version of the freak from Misery.

As promised, here's my look at the most interesting part of Batiuk's career; as we know, there were two strips spun off from Winkerbean: Crankshaft and John Darling. The latter was an accounting of the day-to-day life of John Darling, local media figure and total flake; just as Funky was about high school life and Crankshaft about a malapropism-spouting curmudgeon, the third was about a broad parody of the blow-dried brains that bring us our evening news. Also like Crankshaft, it was a collaboration between Batiuk, who wrote the damned thing and Tom Armstrong who did the artwork. After the end, Armstrong would go on to write a strip about a malevolent toddler who resisted toilet training because he liked how having a load in his diapers felt: Marvin. The interesting thing was how the strip ended; from what I understand, Batiuk and the syndicate were in a dispute over who owned the characters so when the strip got the ax, he decided to render him unusable by having him get shot in the second-to-last strip. The last strip, of course, featured his casket being lowered into the ground. The odd thing is that Batiuk was content to leave the matter unresolved for years; the only reason that he did decide on a killer and motive was as a special storyline celebrating the twenty-fifth year of Winkerbean. He had Les Moore play investigative reporter in an attempt to position him as a junior-grade Ann Rule; it turns out that someone named the Plantman killed Darling because he got on his nerves or something. The other odd thing is that Darling's daughter Jessica was folded into the cast of the parent strip; this tells me that when Crankshaft disappears, the characters with the closest connection to Cancerview will do likewise. I'm looking forward to that 'cause I want to see what Mooch did to Mindy Murdoch.

The interesting thing is that a lot of the supporting characters started out as people Les taught in Phase 2. As by way of example, we have Susan "Suicide Girl" Smith to contend with. As memory serves, the young woman had a desperate crush on Les and tried to kill herself when it became obvious that he didn't reciprocate; her next stupid attempt to look for love in a wrong place was to hang out with an abusive jock who Les and Lisa got her to stand up to. Too bad that they weren't around when she married another dumbass; otherwise, she'd have avoided a crappy marriage and painful divorce. Another mainstay of the strip is Becky Blackburn-Winkerbean-Howard; her dreams of going to Julliard were cut short in a story line more or less commissioned by MADD. While she's reasonably happy as the replacement for sociopathic lunatic bandmaster Harry Dinkle, she still sort of regrets the loss of her arm. She also doesn't know how to react to the man whose stupidity did that to her: Wally Winkerbean; like his cousin, our boy has a drinking problem that he only acknowledged when something stupid happened. His response was to enlist in the Army and get screwed over by the system because Batiuk thinks of soldiers as people who a) go to university campuses and mow down protesters and b) go to the Third World and mow down brown people. Finally, there's the fellow who worshipped her from afar: John Howard. After graduation, he got into a spot of trouble because Becky's mother and other wanna-be world savers got together and tried to have his comic book store shut down on an obscenity rap; as I said earlier, Lisa handed them their asses on a tray.

Speaking of comic book fans, we must also consider Mopey Pete, the sole member of the latter class of Phase 2 to matter; he and his girlfriend Chien were more or less on the outside looking in socially because, well, of the over-emphasis the student body has on the athletic side of life. He currently hangs out at Montoni's where he writes for DC and waits for classmates Darrin and Mooch to show up. It should be noted that Mooch Myers has some sort of connection to Ed Crankshaft in that he broke up with Cranky's granddaughter Mindy after she tried to get him to settle down. Since he's a parasite and proud of it, he thinks that that's a good thing. Since Darrin is a bit thick, he doesn't hand the lazy shit his ass. What he can do is be grateful that Les managed to find out who killed his wife Jessica's dad, John "Ted Baxter Lite" Darling.

Before I start to discuss what's happening in Les's life nowadays, I'd like to remind you all of a bizarre phenomenon that seems to have taken hold in the Batiukverse; for some odd reason, Les and the other members of the Core Four look much older than they're supposed to. Much as a newcomer to FBorFW would assume that Gord and Tracey Mayes were John's friends instead of Mike's, someone who'd never encountered Funky Winkerbean would assume that Les is sixty-six instead of forty-six. About the only thing that distinguishes Les from the other victims of premature aging is that he finally looks good; the helmet-like hair that made his skull look rectangular has thinned and gone a pleasant salt-and-pepper tone and his mustache and beard are drawing attention away from his eyes. That being said, he's a good looking mess. Without Lisa to keep him stable, his need to protect Summer and his unawareness of the appropriate tend to make him fret about solo car dates and watch over her at practice like he's gone totally creepy uncle. Also, it took him years to move on after Lisa died; not only did his natural shyness inhibit him, he had to wait for the approval of Lisa's ghost before asking Cayla out. Another interesting side-effect of his otherworldliness is his inability to realize that his old friend Funky has become a self-destructive nitwit whose greed and stupidity bid fair to wreck a lot of lives.