Funky Winkerbean - dead or alive? - Forum 2.0

Mr. Silver Age June 25, 2011 at 8:19am

I hadn't seen it since he pushed them ahead into lmore middle-age, and those strips are just astonishingly depressing.

I agree with the commentary on the one where Funky wishes he had Alzheimer's and was living in an assisted-living place. My god. It's gone from being a gag-a-day with continuity to being a soap-opera strip with no hope, where every character sees misery and pain ahead, and you want to help the characters put themselves out of their misery. Who wants to read that every day?

-- MSA

ClarkKent_DC June 25, 2011 at 4:06pm

... and why does Batiuk want to write that every day?

Don Collett June 26, 2011 at 5:51pm

I checked the link, Doc, and that post is about a year old; follow-up research reveals that Funky traveled (through a dream or otherwise) back in time about 20 years, flashing back into his own past. He's still alive, still depressing, just like the rest of the strip...in fact, in the latest (May) summary, Chris' Sims most depressing FW strip of the month condenses the tone of the strip into three wordless panel. Be sure to read the accompanying commentary.

Jeff of Earth-J January 5, 2024 at 11:28am

Okay, here's what happened...

In the sequence which appeared June 23-24, 2010, Funky was in what appeared to be a near collision. The majority of this discussion is from July 1-2, about a week in. If everyone would have waited another week, the July 10 strip made it clear that Funky was in an actual car crash and was hallucinating that he had traveled in time.

The Story Behind the Story: Tom Batiuk himself had been in a car accident. As he describes it in volume thirteen of The Complete Funky Winkerbean, "I had just gone through the intersection ad was rounding a short curve when I saw an oncoming Chevy Trailblazer go off the other side of the road just ahead of me, overcorrect, cross back over to my side of the road, and slam into me head-on. I heard a horrendous noise, and everything went black." If you look back at those strips from June 23-24, 2010, that's pretty much exactly what happened to Funky. Photos of Batiuk's car after the accident were used as reference for Funky's car in the strip. Battiuk continues: "Okay, show of hands, is there anyone out there who didn't think that I would be writing about my car crash in the strip? Nobody? Good thinking, that. Well, heck, as long as it happened, I sort of felt it was my duty to write about it."

I also disagree with all those above who labeled the strip "depressing," but most for them are gone now.

Richard Willis January 6, 2024 at 2:57am

I used to look at The Comics Curmudgeon a little bit, but found its negativity hard to take. The Funky Winkerbean strip does have its amusing aspects, like real life. I read it for the real-life stuff. The people who say “comics aren’t funny anymore” seem to think the word “comic” mandates that the medium only have gag-a-day strips.

Jeff of Earth-J January 6, 2024 at 8:18am

That "the comics aren't funny anymore" refrain has been around almost as long as comics. Spike Jones even wrote a song about it. Probably the most famous (or infamous) example of a sympathetic character's death was that on Raven Sherman in a 1941 sequence of Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates.

But readers had already been complaining about the violence in Dick Tracy from the very beginning of the strip, a decade before.

Billed as "The Storyline that Changed Comics Forever" on the cover of the collected edition, "The Saga of Mary Gold" from The Gumps (1929) was published by IDW's The Library of American Comics Essentials in 2013.

Even before that, Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie drew the ire of a certain segmant of the reading public.

Let's face it: if you were born anytim after 1924, the comics have always been "not funny."

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