“I know where I came from — but where did all you cancers come from?”
Or . . . the old geezer is Crankshaft.
Ed Crankshaft doesn’t give advice. That would require a “care what other people think of me” gland, which it’s quite obvious that he lacks.
Crankshaft offered to pay or partially pay for college tuition for a bunch of “at risk” kids. While he might not care about what most others think, apparently he does have a heart.
Time to return to the Comics Curmudgeon, to see what he & his minions make of this latest revolting development.
I’ve managed to avoid that Wretced Hive of Scum & Snarkiness since the Settlepocalypse…
Yeah, maybe I’m spending too much time at the Comics Curmudgeon.
Funky Winkerbean is real?
I thought it was a made up character for a gag on The Simpsons - you know the one where Bart complains that Springfield gets all the crappy balloons for their Thanksgiving parade and Marge says “What are you talking about? Look, there’s Funky Winkerbean! Over here, Funky!”
Yep, Funky’s a real comic strip (well, the “comic” part is purely categorical at this point, but…). It started out as a light-hearted strip about a bunch of high-school kids, but at some point in the 90s, I believe, the cartoonist either stepped into the Hellmouth or started to really hate his characters and it’s been pure bathos since. It’s gotten to the point where the cartoonist is some kind of malevolent demiurge inflicting cancer, death and a lack of all comfort and compassion on his strip.
Shortpacked’s take on Funky isn’t far off the mark. Although, along with cancer, there have been amputations, deafness (in the iconic bandleader character, no less), financial failure, and the ghosts of dead people creepily stalking their surviving spouses. Oh, and at least one case of near-incest.
When the cell phone didn’t have any reception after the accident, I just figured, “This is Funky Winkerbean, land of constant, dull, aching misery. Of course Funky is with Sprint.”
And because it’s a Batiuk strip, the comic is going to turn out to be worthless…
I flipped open the comics section of the paper for the first time in eons, and wept for humanity.
Funky, Luanne, and a bunch of strips that were comedies are now maudlin soap operas. And not even well-written ones.
Remember when the ‘funny papers’ were… y’know, funny?
You mean like Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr, Prince Valiant? 
(Two of those still run daily in the Chicago Tribune.)
Luann is really awful over the last week or so - she walked in on Gunther changing, saw him completely naked, and is blabbing about it to anyone who will listen and whining about why no one will take her “traumatization” seriously. Gee, how kind.
Yeah. The day after, when she was dishing about it in the cafeteria to her friends, my first thought was “What a biyotch!” I mean, she at LEAST considers Gunther a friend, doesn’t she? That’s what I’ve been getting out of the last few years of the strip, anyway. So why would you MAKE SURE that your friend’s most embarassing moment ever is spread throughout the school? And worse, spread to adults?
Oh, and the mixed signals are horrible, too. Luann has been switching between wide-eyed shock and come-hither eyes with Gunther ever since it happened.
I didn’t ever think Funky was funny.
So – what’s the latest theory? The speculation at my house is that he’s in a coma. Or dead. Can’t decide which.
If he were dead, you’d think the mime would have opened his car door for him.
I’m going for Twilight Zone time travel. It’s taking so damned long to play out, though, that I might decide something else in a day or two.
Well, maybe. But Masky McDeath would kind of spoiler the ending of the storyline in that case, wouldn’t he? Besides, Death obviously doesn’t need to make special trips for pickup in the Funkyverse. It’s everywhere, like God.
I hadn’t read Funky in years, and I come back to find him old and washed-up. Is Tom Batiuk looking to end the series soon?
No, just torture the characters.