He’s got high-school age kids of the main characters to torment as well. None of the younger generation has gotten cancer yet, after all.
Partial answer to “what’s going on”:
Click the upper-right hourglass if the print is too small.
So it definitely involves the idea of time travel, but could still involve him slowly bleeding to death on the side of the road and hallucinating this or having one of those “It’s a [del]Horrible[/del] Wonderful Life” moments.
With Batuik, you can never tell. One of his previous strips, John Darling, ended abruptly on a Thursday, with no warning at all, with the main character getting shot to death.
It seems like he (CC) is always riffing on the same galdanged ten strips, over and over. I guess some people like being predictable.
Because those same ten strips offer lots of opportunities for jokes, being either serious or intended to be humorous but failing. He’ll bring in others from time to time when he notices something interesting.
Why else would anyone read Mary Worth or Apartment 3 G?
I remember when I was in High School, Funky was kind of like the “Archie of the '80’s”. It had a lot of relatable stuff to the typical Ohio High School age teen- Funky really appealed to the geekier kids, and especially the Band geeks, a lot of inside band jokes. Kind of grown up with it and well, it’s dealing with age appropriate topics to Tom Batiuk, now… It’s just like small town life in Ohio, growing up and dying there, very realistic, very current, very “Ohio” and weirdly prescient.
I liked it in the '70s and '80s too, before the first time jump when Funky et al were still teenagers. I remember one sequence in which Holly, the majorette, had a dispute with a band member that ended with him losing the plume on the front of his cap. I’m assuming it was Funky himself; I don’t think it was Les. Anyway, Harry, the band leader, intervened, saying gently, “All right, Holly, give Funky back his plume and let’s all make up.” Holly (who always wore her cap so low you couldn’t see her eyes) stood stiff with indignation, and on Harry’s command, huffed, “I’m SORRY!” and jabbed the plume at Funky’s chest so hard she cracked a rib. And cracked me up. Because that is so high school: still holding a grudge over some little nothing thing.
Years ago, “9 Chickweed Lane” was actually funny. Its current plot: for the past 6 months or so, a melodramatic soap opera, with no end in sight. Someone needs to put Chickweed out of its misery :mad:
A melodramatic PERIOD soap opera! Is Grandma still telling stories of her slutty WWII days or has she finally finished?
Last time I glanced (about a week ago) she’s still going on and on.
Understand, folks, that we’re talking about a tertiary character (Edda’s grandmother, who’s only ever been around to put in a Sophia-Petrillo-crossed-with-the-grandma-from-Malcolm-in-the-Middle quip or two and act as the (thank Og!) never-actually-explicit girlfriend of the resident crazy person/intergalactic ambassador-philosopher character). And she’s been going on about her days as a USO chanteuse/American spy/international ho during WWII every freaking day for MONTHS.
Someone must like it. The Post-Dispatch dropped it about a month ago. Three days later it returned. (Might have been different had it been replaced with a good strip instead of whatever piece of crap they tried.)
And yeah, it used to have a subtle, sardonic sense of humor in its slow-moving stories; now it just has slow-moving stories. It’s moved into the <ahem> Funky Winkerbean category now: comics I don’t read.
Not to mention her being torn between her love for a Nazi officer who has a great singing voice (McEldowney’s “good” characters value Art above all those common, everyday jobs and duties) versus the American officer - who punched out a British officer who’d called her a whore and was sent to the D-Day invasion front lines for that attack, and was lost in combat. She was actually devastated to find out that this nice American officer had turned up alive, because she’d had Herr Nazi all to herself and a happy little future planned out, and someone decided to shower a little guilt on her parade.
(Oh, but he’s not a bad Nazi of course, just following orders and all that - they made just anyone a higher-ranking officer, right? He has a lovely singing voice and such beautiful blond hair. And McEldowney actually published a strip of her schtupping the enemy on Memorial Day. Thanks, WWII vets!)
So explain Funky Winkerbean’s aging process to me. I get it – he’s not in high school any more. But just how much time has gone by? I was under the impression that the previous cast was supposed to now be maybe middle-aged, with their kids in high school. But Funky himself is drawn as what looks like a 65 year old paunchy bald guy. If the characters in the strips had aged more or less in step with “real time”, Funky would be maybe 40-50 – he’d look like someone’s dad, not their granddad.
Batiuk supposedly did a 10-year jump, about three years ago, I think.
There have been two jumps. The first one took the original gang to middle age and brought in Wally and his bunch. I was ok with that. The second one… lost me. The high school part seems to be centered on Les and Lisa’s kid, who was maybe 2 when they did the second jump.
OK, so I have been following the strip solely to see how the current ‘time regression’ plot works itself out - today’s (July 5 2010) strip Funky sort of realizes he’s in the past cause of the trees being smaller etc - but in yesterday’s strip he point blank asked some 70s looking dude w/ glasses when am I - wouldn’t the dude have looked at him a bit funny, but then answered its the fourth of July…then prompted for the year by Funky, he would have probably told him (say 1975 or whatever) while thinking this poor guy is a bit senile. Anyway, Funky would have had his answer.
Another alternative, It could just be a gratuitous artistic reminiscence. maybe that’s what he wanted to draw, or draw and revisit… They are quite polished strips in craft.