It really started quite a while back, when Les was put in charge of organising his highschool reunion - an event at which people who see each other all the time anyway would get to see each other in a slightly different location - but that was just the usual Funky Winkerbean stuff: Les feeling sorry for himself; Les complaining; people inexplicably putting up with Les; other people doing the thing Les was supposed to be doing; Les continuing to complain about having to do the thing that he's not actually doing; etc.
The reunion itself started just like any other Funky Winkerbean plot (see previous paragraph) but then a flight of whimsy struck old Tom Batiuk. in the July 10 strip, "Crazy" began blathering about some nonsense that turned out to be time travel. The following Monday brought us a flashback to whenever the hell the Funky Winkerbean cast were supposedly in highschool now - time jumps where characters age but the year stays the same make for confusing chronology.
Turns out, there was a time portal in Crazy's locker (which for some reason he's the only one who remembers). Never mind the fact that this group of people weren't friends and wouldn't have been hanging out together at the time, long-time readers noticed that one of the kids about to travel to the future was Lisa. That same Lisa who ended up marrying Les and dying of cancer. Why would you include her in this story? This is about to get really awkward, isn't it? It gets worse.
Cindy met herself. Funky met himself. Holly and Bull met themselves. Crazy met himself. And it had to come to this eventually - Lisa began to feel left out. So, they took this opportunity to warn her about her entirely preventable death, right? Ha ha, no. If they did that, Les would never be able to write a terrible book about it and then get paid to sabotage the film adaptation, and this, like everything, is all about Les. It gets worse.
You may have noticed that while everyone else was meeting their past/future selves, I didn't say what Les was doing. Well, not much up to this point, but while the present-day cast members were doing their best to make sure their friend stays dead, young Les was doing some snooping, and what did he find? Oh, just the book describing the entirely preventable death of his future wife. So he immediately went and warned her, right? Of course not. In fact, he did his best to drag Lisa back to the past immediately so she wouldn't have any opportunity to find out about her entirely preventable death.
But hey, it's generally agreed that you shouldn't mess with the past, right? If you change the timeline, who knows what might happen? Well, that would probably still be a pretty shitty justification even if Crazy hadn't given his younger self a smartphone to take back with him. Who cares if history gets altered as long as Les still gets to write his terrible book? It still gets worse.
Today's strip hits us with the final insult. Surely, you're thinking, even Tom Batiuk couldn't make this worse now, right? And the kids have gone back to their own time, so what could it possibly be? Oh, I know, how about it was all a dream? Yeah, he was just stringing us along this whole time. If he was always going to cop out like this, he could have had them warn Lisa like as though they were decent human beings and still had Les keep his precious cancerwife backstory.
Or. OR. He could have left Lisa out of the time travel story like as though he was a decent human being. Why would you do this you fucking hack? Did you just want to make sure everyone remembers the tragic story of Lisa's tragic cancer death and how tragic it was for Les? Trust me, we remember. We fucking remember.
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