I gotta wonder. He seems to put the characters in Funky Winkerbean through more shit than any other strip I’ve ever seen, culminated by today’s apparent death of Wally in Iraq, JUST after his (one-armed) wife gave birth AND they adopted an Afghan girl (who survived a bombing WHILE THEY WERE THERE).
Throw in the cancer that two of the main characters have had to repeatedly deal with, the drunken driving car crash by Wally that cost his future wife her arm, the arrest of the comic book store guy for selling adult materials…Jeez, I don’t know, I think there’s more, but that’s just in the last few years.
Why doesn’t he just kill everyone off in an asteroid strike and get it over with?
That whole page was freaking hilarious!
No way Wally’s dead.
He’s probably just lost two limbs, so Batiuk can one-up Garry Trudeau in the “Iraq War Needless Tragedy” contest.
Back when I was in college, I knew a girl who had Tom Batiuk as her 8th grade art teacher. This was, of course, before the comic strip took off (and maybe he just hated his job), but she said he was a sourpuss back then, and I suppose some things don’t change even in the face of success.
Who’s Wally Winkerbean? And where’s Funky?
Funky is co-owner of a pizza parlor, a recovering alcoholic and married to a recovering cancer victim. :rolleyes:
Kurt Vonnegut once said that the worst thing you could do to your characters was to give them an easy life. Give them challenges and they’ll become interesting people.
Batiuk’s characters seem to get more challenges than most people do, but then, his strip has headed down the topical route somewhat, so I won’t fault him for laying it on a little thick. Cartoons work better when working with extremes, whether you’re trying to be funny or you’re trying to make a point.
I’ve always had a lot of respect for what the man does and the way he does it. He remains one of my favorite writers in comics.
Hey, that’s nothing. Batiuk’s first strip, John Darling, was about a small-town anchorman who dreamed of one day being on the national six o’clock news. Well, one day, he got his wish: He was the subject of a special report, after spontaneously being shot to death in the studio. This all happened in one strip, which ended the series, without notice.
No, John Darling was originally a character in Funky Winkerbean, which debuted in 1970. John’s strip ran from 1979 to 1991. Incidentally, this article does contain at least one error – John’s daughter, now a cheerleader at Westview High, is named Jessica.
They still write Funky Wilkerbean?
It’s teacher Les Moore who is married to attorney Lisa, who recently battled cancer for a second time. Funky married local news anchor Cindy, and they were later divorced.
I concur
Feh. He can make his characters interesting in Crankshaft, if he wants interesting characters. I want my Funky Winkerbean to be just a round-headed teenager with no discernable personality traits, beyond “nice guy”; I want Les to be a perpetually dorky four-eyed social misfit who can’t get a conversation going with a girl, much less a date, and who wears his glasses in the swimming pool; I want Bull to be a moronic high school football player who approaches his coach and says, “Tiss my boo-boo” when he cuts his finger; I want Crazy Harry to be a long-haired slacker kid who wears a Civil War cap, sits in an overstuffed chair, eats pizza, and on October 4, reads the date in the corner of the strip and wishes everybody a happy Broderick Crawford Day.
Give me back my childhood, Batuik.
And who is Wally Winkerbean?
Yeah, but didn’t he recently remarry to a cancer survivor? Or are they just involved?
It should probably be renamed Little House on the Winkerbean. They could have a typhoid epidemic hit – Patient Zero would be someone working at the pizza parlor, naturally – right as a tornado swept through the town.
Of course, such a storyline might not involve enough suffering for Batiuk’s taste …
Make it a blizzard, and the survivors have to eat their own dead, and I think we might be getting close.
The Comics Curmudgeon is one of my favorite blogs on the Internet. If you thought the Funky Winkerbean stuff was funny, you should see the bizarre running commentary they provide on other strips, such as Mark Trail or (Death to) Gil Thorp.
P.S. More information about licorice can be found on the Internet.
Or, and this is key, For Better or For Worse…
This is a sure sign my youth has slipped away: I remember when “Funky Winkerbean” was an occasionally funny and slightly goofy strip about kids in high school. The fact that it suddenly turned into a heavy-handed and overly melodramatic soap opera strip has got to be the sharpest departures in comic strip history.