In 1972 Tom Batiuk was a 25-year-old teaching middle school art. He'd been doing a cartoon called Rapping Around for the local paper for two years before reworking the basic concept and getting picked up by a publishing syndicate. On March 28th, 1972 the first Funky Winkerbean strip appeared.Originally a typical gag-a-day strip about high school students and their put-upon teachers, the series would run more or less unchanged until Batiuk's decision to do a more serious ongoing story about teen pregnancy at which point he decided that for the 20th anniversary he'd change the format entirely. In 1992, the characters graduated and time moved ahead four years to them fresh out of college. There were still gags but more and more those started to become secondary to more serious storylines about suicide, domestic violence and most famously cancer. In 2007 another time jump would see the characters firmly in middle age and Funky would plug along until its final strip on December 31st, 2022.By the 2000s, the strip had gathered a rather infamous reputation as a morose, depressing work filled with aging sadsacks where anything good was offset by two bad things. A large snark community had developed around following it to criticize the strip and pick it (and its author) apart with the most famous example being Dave Willis' parody "Cancer Cancerbean."But do Funky Winkerbean and Tom Batiuk deserve the largely negative reputation they now have today? Well, that's why I plan on storytiming all 50 years of the strip so we can find out and come to our own conclusions.Today we start at the beginning in 1972.
I'll be covering more or less a single year per thread. Monday through Saturday strips will be grouped together like so, Sundays will be separate.The first strip introduces what is ostensibly our main cast... but not really. Funky and Les will be around until the very end, of course, but within 4 or so years both Roland and Livinia will disappear from the strip along with a number of early Act I characters long before the shift to Act II in 1992. Funky himself will eventually lose prominence by probably the end of the decade to Les who becomes the defacto lead character, at least among the students.We also have the first appearance of guidance counselor/vice principal Fred Fairgood. He'll also be around for the rest of the strip's life although he won't escape unscathed.
First appearance of Derek. He won't necessarily disappear from the strip until affter the time jump but his prominence does diminish significantly by the 1980s. He still hangs around but he's mostly group scene filler.That last strip with Roland will be later used as justification when he shows back up as a transgender woman named Rolanda in 2022.
The first appearance of Wicked Wanda. This will be a running gag throughout Roland's time where despite his progressive, leftist beliefs he has a blindspot when it comes to feminism. Both Roland and Wanda will disappear after a few years.
I believe this is the first mention of Mary Sue Sweetwater, the most popular and desirable girl in school. Again, like a lot of early characters, she'll disappear eventually and in this case will be replaced by Cindy Summers in the 1980s.
First instance of Les as a hall monitor, a gag that will continue up to the end of Act I.
First mention of Bull Bushka, Westview's "star" football player, Les's bully, and one of the strip's major characters.
The librarian here MIGHT be the first appearance of Ann, a teacher who eventually marries Fred. It looks a lot like her but it could be a case of Batiuk eventually reusing the design for a different character.
I enjoy the brutality of Les always getting shot down in Act I knowing what a prick he turns out to eventually be.
When I was originally saving these strips I hadn't quite decided on the format of just doing the whole week even if that meant rolling over into the next month yet. But I quickly decided that was the easiest way to do it.
lurking. never read much Funky before. it reminds me a lot of Peanuts but in a bad way. it's also really obnoxious how often the characters will look directly at the reader; it's just driving me nuts for some reasonisn't this also the Crankshaft guy? that i'm more familiar with
That fifth/Friday strip is a reworking of I think the first Rapping Around strip. At least it's a reworking of a strip Batiuk posted as the first blog post on his site so I assume it's the first one.
>>151280947The "characters looking at the camera as part of the joke" is going to continue until the timeskip so be prepared for 20 years of fourth wall glances.>isn't this also the Crankshaft guy?Yes, Crankshaft is a spinoff as the character first appeared in Funky and has been running since 1987 and after Funky's ending is the last Funkyverse strip going. He's started folding some characters into Crankshaft since Funky Winkerbean ended, notably Pete Roberts and/or Reynolds since he's dating/engaged to Crankshaft's granddaughter Mindy.
First appearance of Coach Jack Stropp (Batiuk loves his dumb pun names), Westview High's football coach. He'll stick around until the late '90s where he's forced to retire and replaced by Bull.In true Funkyverse fashion, he dies of cancer in 2011.
>>15128050450 years times 52 weeks per years is.... 2600 pages. Anon are you sure you want to do this?
>>151280504Thank you for this, OP. I'm interested to see this evolution unfold before me.
>>151281136Like you can see, I'm doing it by week essentially so that'll make it go by much faster. Doing a year a day means I'll be finished with this in just under two months. If it was one strip per post then I wouldn't bother.I've already done the legwork of collecting everything (and thus reading it) beforehand. That took around 3 or 4 months to do. Which actually gets into a weird thing thanks to GoComics. For whatever reason, they cut off like 6-8 months worth of strips from around summer of 1974 to March or so of 1975 and are only adding them back as they get to the appropriate rerun. So I have up until the middle of November 1974 meaning there's about 4 or so months worth of strips I don't have and I'm not waiting that long to grab them. But it's just daily gags and nothing particularly major happens in them I assume so whatever.There's also two strips later on (in Act III) I'm missing because GoComics, incompetently, didn't upload them correctly. But other than those hiccups I have everything else.
>>151280504We've had Funky Winkerbean storytimes before, and its the later stories where shit got real that interest me. I could have called it lame and gay and tryhard, but nah, it JUST WORKS. Tom Batiuk has the writing chops to make you stick around and want to see what happens next.
Les and the diving board is going to be another common running gag until the late 1980s when it actually gets an ending and is subsequently retired.
>>151281364The comic really went from being goofy kids doing hijinxs to depressed 50 year olds lamenting what they’ve lost so gradually it’s almost hard to notice. Crankshaft is just straight up depressing now though
Cultural note regarding that fifth strip: residential A/C wasn't common until about the 1980s or late 1970s so Les's family definitely has shit over most of the time.
>>151280504https://youtu.be/u4rniUnd-B0?si=J5Yo0GITFfvhsek8
>>151281398I've likened it to if Garfield suddenly started being about Jon and Liz having to deal with serious issues like Liz miscarrying and shit. Or I guess Loss.
>>151281434The funny thing is that this episode aired during the year Funky was struggling with alcoholismThe fact that Marge recognized then current-Funky makes me think she was reading the comic at the time
Two debuts in this one. First is Al Burch, WHS's principal. He's around until his retirement in 1986 and is the rare Funky character who more or less gets a good ending. Al is my favorite Act I character because he's the archetypal bitter, beleaguered admnistrator figure which are always funny.Next we have Jan, who seemed to exist to highlight the differences between slightly older progressive types and Today's Youth at the time. She gradually loses this quality and is another character who is phased out within a few years.
>>151281454I think it says a lot about the cultural staying power that Funky had in that despite running for 50 years as a major strip, the most anyone remembers from it outside of cancer is a joke from the Simpsons about lame characters. And a lot of people who saw the joke thought it was something the Simpsons writers made up
>>151281451I appreciate him wanting to change as an artist he pretty much just changed into a full on soap I think eh just didn’t realize that soap operas need young and sexy to replace the humor as the balance
Another character introduction. Rita Wrighton was the younger, slightly more idealistic teacher to contrast the more jaded Fred and Al. Again, these traits will be gradually dropped and she disappears a few years from now soon after getting married and leaving teaching.
>>151281552He more or less said that after doing the teen pregnancy story, it was kind of impossible to go back to goofy strips about tests and stuff.Also, I think Batiuk liked the attention he got from it for doing a serious story and thought that validated his desire to be a REAL writer. He's spent the time since desperately trying to achieve the recognition and validation he always wanted to make up for being rejected by Marvel and DC before he did comic strips.
You see that second strip? Pretty innocuous, albeit dark, gag right? It's going to be used as the basis of one of the stupidest and meaning retcons ever 40 years from now.
First appearance of Crazy Harry. His gaining prominence coincides with Roland's gradual disappearance. Crazy's going to be around until the very end.>>151281620Speaking of firsts, I forgot to mention that this week's strips was the first physical appearance of Bull.
In probably the first somewhat real story arc, Funky runs for student council president. His opponent might possibly be an unnamed Barry Balderman since he vaguely looks like him but it's more than likely a random one-off student as Barry doesn't properly appear until the 1980s.
First physical appearance of Mary Sue. As said, though, she's never really important and disappears.She shows up later on in Act III and, as punishment for having turned down Les who is now the Funkyverse's perfect man, she gets very fat.
First instance of Les and the gym rope, another running gag that will keep getting used until the end of Act I.
>>151281907And then somewhere in the final years of the comic it's mentioned that she passed away
>>151281655You’d think that by now he’d have the pull to at least get a mini from one of the big two
>>151281977The problem is that around the time he had the pull, comics shifted and the people in the comics industry who liked his stuff were no longer in powerIIRC I almost want to say his last contemporary link to the comics industry was Sean McKeever and his career got derailed because of Didio and Berganza's bad decisions
First gag related to Crazy Harry's locker doubling as a living space.
Now we have an actual major debut. This is the first appearance of John Darling who will disappear after a few years due to getting his own spinoff. John Darling will run until 1990 where, for a myriad of reasons, it ends with Batiuk having John killed off.His murder will be solved some years later in Funky Winkerbean and his daughter Jessica Fairgood (whose father John Darling was murdered) will eventually become a major character in the strip.
>>151281977>>151282009Plus there's also the issue of having to keep the comic going daily. He also probably got paid more back then to do a comic strip than he would've to write a comic book for the Big 2
>>151282009Batiuk had some loose connections, mainly by being buddies with John Byrne, but by that time the ship had long sailed. And if the Act III stuff is any indication of how his comics would be it's a good thing he never got the chance to actually do anything with the Big Two.>>151282081To be fair, Batiuk actualy stopped drawing Funky in 1994 with Crankshaft artist Chuck Ayers also taking over art on Funky. Batiuk still wrote but by that point was inking Ayers's pencils, not penciling himself.
>>151281541It's partly cause while it ran for 50 years it wasn't in a lot of papers and never had some kind of big media spin-off. Like the only cartoon appearances Funky had were>Simpsons episode>Morning Funnies commercial>cameo in that Comic Strip special that Loni Anderson hostedOther comics that didn't have media spin-offs had to be vastly better in art/storytelling/etc (ie Calvin and Hobbes)
This apparant Uncle Fred I assume is the father of Wally Winkerbean.
>>151282199He stopped penciling but he would've still had to plan out months of storylines and gags, approve Chuck Ayers' art, and ink dailies and Sundays. Writing a big 2 comic would still cut into that time because he'd also have to be working with the editor at one of the big 2
>>151282230Was that Wicked Wanda's first appearance? She is briefly bought up in a 90s reunion, shows up again in the 00s
>>151280550Spoliers
>>151281724>Roland's gradual disappearanceI get the feeling that Batiuk had no love at all for that guy. Roland is supposed to be this dorky revolutionary hippie, but he has no real beliefs and just complains all the time. He might be the first Karin in comics.Funky and Les are losers too, but their struggles are everyday teen struggles that most people could find relatable. In short, they're characters. Roland just exists to get shit on because he's a wacky caricature of a hippie. Which could be funny, but it isn't.
>>151282302Damn, somehow didn't see>>151280603
That wraps up Funky Winkerbean's debut year. Next time will cover 1973 which is most significant for the debut of the closest thing that Funky Winkerbean ever had to a breakout character: Harry L. Dinkle, the World's Greatest Band Director.Just in case anyone asks, I'm only going to be doing Funky and not any of the spinoffs. With Crankshaft, I don't read it and have no real interest in it and trying to do that in addition to Funky would likely drive me insane. For John Darling, that's complicated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be any full archives of it anywhere, all that's available is whatever Batiuk posts on his site. Even if there was, I don't have much interest in that either.Anyway, I'll leave you with this: Skunky Funkybuns. A stand-up bit from deceased comedian Dan Rolan parodying Batiuk and Funky.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8peyDxadxU
>>151282334And like usual, I wrote my post but forgot the actual image. Anyway, that's it for real. See you tomorrow for 1973.
>>151282310On second thought, I put way too much thought into a gag character. And he actually kind of rules >>151282284Crazy Harry definitely mogs him tho, even if I do like his 'fro better.
>>151280636>It will be a lot easier to meet girlsIf only that was true.
>>151282310>>151282426Act I Funky is honestly a fairly cynical strip and most of the characters are comedically negative takes on archetypes. Funky is just the typical shallow, listless teenage slacker. Les is an extreme loser who doesn't even have the beneffit of being particularly bright (a contrast to how he's portrayed later on). Livinia is the modern, slightly feminist and conscious young woman but also doesn't really seem to actually understand most of it.Roland is just making fun of political radicals. He's fighting the power but is also a smug hypocrite and, as the stuff with Wicked Wanda shows, his radical progressivism ends where feminism begins. Batiuk has always been a fairly liberal guy. For isntance, I'd say that casually having a black guy just hanging around as a main cast member and nobody really making a big deal out of it is somewhat radical in and of itself for the time period. But he also wasn't against skewering something if there was a joke to be made. Roland disappears mostly because the archetype he represented (the Vietnam era political radical) was effectively dead by the mid-'70s whereas Crazy is also kind of a hippie and a stoner type (although it's stated later on that he's never actually done drugs) but is more absurd and whimsical and thus isn't as tied necessarily to a specific point i time and can be moved away from it without radically changing the character.
>>151281211Second strip is pretty funny.
>>151281296Did Rap meant something else in the 70s?
>>151282719Yes, rapping was an older slang term meaning to basically have an open conversation and in the 1960s protest scene basically meant giving an oration. Batiuk was born in 1947 and was definitely part of that scene (which likely influenced his use of Roland).>>151282304I suspect that eventual thing was done in part because Batiuk is also close friends with fellow Cleveland native Tony Isabella. Isabella came out as transgender earlier this year but I assume Batiuk likely knew of it for some time prior and decided to do that because of it.
>>151282651That's pretty far out, man.>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4M5T6th6N0
Oh just to go with that, here's the Rapping Around strip in question from Batiuk's site. Same joke and dialogue and everything.>>151282876Also, I should say that that's where rapping in terms of how we think of it now comes from. It meant one thing, was picked up by the protest movement which filtered into the black music scene which then evolved more broadly into a name for a style of music in and of itself.
>>151280504Hey kids look its Funky Winkerbean
>>151283128Over here, Funky!
So it ran for 50 years...Does anyone ever call him Funky Stinkerbean during all that time?
>>151284195No but there's at least one "Is that your REAL name?" joke every few years.
>>151282009McKeever was literally broke and had to work part time at Target last year to make ends meet while working as a writer for some obscure mobile game. It's really sad how DC completely destroyed his name given how high everyone was on him in the 2000s.Anyway I know he ghost wrote Funky for a few weeks in 2006 but I have no idea which strips specifically he did.
>>151281259The evolution is interesting enough. You can see a couple of times where he starts doing more longer form story arcs that might last a couple of weeks but it's still gag-oriented. in the mid/late '80s he also tries a couple of more serious storylines. Act II actually takes a little bit to switch over into the style that would become the norm for the rest of the run and then from there, there's pretty clear demarcation points where you can point to and go "things shifted significantly after this".
>>151280504Neat I always wanted to read this.
>>151281041So how does that timeline even work these days? Isn't Crankshaft set ten or more years before when Funky ended?
>>151281976Yeah it randomly happens in the final year and it's not even about her, just Les and Funky doing their usual moping about getting old.
>>151280504Seeing his current work on Crankshaft. He deserves every bit of criticism.
>>151285870you're really gonna diss my boi Crankshaft like that
>>151280573I like Livinia, she's cute. Also what the hell type of name is Livinia?
>>151285675>So how does that timeline even work these days?Nobody fucking knows, I don't even think that Batiuk does. The Funkyverse is low key close to Hawkman levels of confusing because Batiuk, frankly, didn't seem to care about keeping things consistent.The Act II timeskip didn't matter that much since it was only 4 years and Funky and Crankshaft weren't really crossing over in any significant way. It's the Act III timeskip which messes everything up because it jumps 10 years ahead except the only thing that really changed was the ages, the date never actually does. So it's more like everything got shifted 10 years back ten years as Funky's crew graduated high school in 1978 now instead of 1988 as was the case throughout Act II (a 2008 storyline is about their 30th reunion).This becomes a problem because in the last decade or so of the strip, Batiuk started crossing over characters more often which leads to nonsensica things like Ed being fine and normal in his own strip while simutaneously being a decrepit old geezer on death's door in Funky while Crankshaft character Lillian Mackenzie is completely unchanged when appearing in both strips. This is taken to absurd extremes when Emily and Amelia, tweenage twins from Crankshaft, show up in Funky as teenagers having moved to Westview and transferred to WHS. They graduate from high school in 2022, then Funky ends, the next year they show up in Crankshaft and are back to being tweens despite the literal time janny having supposedly fixed the timeline (spoiler alert: there's a time janny). Then last year in Crankshaft they were back to being teenagers or college-aged young women.And all of that is ignoring that in 2022 Batiuk again retconned it so that now Funky's class graduated in 1972 and the horrifying image of the now nearly 70 year old Cindy Summers (but not looking a day over 35) revealing she's pregnant.Don't try and make sense of it. It's impossible.
>>151286084I also forgot that one of the conceits of Act II was that it was supposed to move in real time ala For Better or For Worse except that's pretty quicky thrown out the window when Wally's class takes 6 years to graduate. Then there's Dopey Darin and Mopey Pete's class taking 9 years.I'm also ignoring the convoluted family tree that includes the Crankshafts, Darlings, Moores and Fairgoods.
>>151286065The Act I art, especially in the '70s, is rough but there's a certain charm to it and I think Batiuk does a really good job of making the characters look contemporary (for the time) in how they're dressed, their hairstyles, etc. Fashion-wise, they actually look like how people at the time would have looked. So if you mean cute artwise, well I guess you'll like seeing a lot of girls in stuff like halter tops and tube tops and other hallmarks of '70s fashion.If you mean personality, I do like her despite being The Girl. I guess you can say she doesn't have much of a defined character but I think she does. She's the smart, tough feminist who's actually kind of bubble-brained.
>>151280686Restroom line is a truly sigh-worthy pun
>>151286003Crankshaft, I assume, is a lot like late era Funky which means lazy writing. From what I've seen the art is awful too. It's being "drawn" (loosely, since he uses a lot of cut and paste and swiping from Ayers) by Dan Davis who's also been the "artist" on Garfield for a few years.
>>151280504I haven't read this since it was storytimed probably a fucking decade ago. Looking forward to revisiting, stay funky OP.
>>151286065Alternate spelling of Lavinia; she was Aeneas's wife. At a guess, it's a joke about her being a redhead since The Aeneid had a story about her hair catching on fire. >>151286084>the horrifying image of the now nearly 70 year old Cindy Summers (but not looking a day over 35) revealing she's pregnant.Hell, she looked about as the same age as Mindy despite being almost three times her age. Though I think there was also a period where Mindy and Holly worked at the pizzeria at the same time with Holly being a few years older before it later jumping to a two decades or more gap.
>>151287026I will never not get over everyone oohing and aahing over Funky's new car and him treating it like it's his pride and joy despite the fact it's a goddamn PT Cruiser. I don't even think Batiuk was being ironic or jokey about it because it was literally his car IRL. Dude just loved the PT Cruiser I guess.>>151287099Yeah, Mindy shows up very late in Act II, gets one storyline where she starts dating Mooch and then then the timeskip happens and it's a long time before she shows up again.Also, almost all of the Batiuk Blondes look the same but that might also be Ayers just getting lazy in the strip's final years. Even Cayla eventually looks almost indistuingishable from Cindy despite being black.
Good luck on your long and arduous journey, OP.
>>151287195>I will never not get over everyone oohing and aahing over Funky's new car and him treating it like it's his pride and joy despite the fact it's a goddamn PT CruiserBoomers fucking LOVED the PT Cruiser when it was new but it went from being beloved of old folks to a cheap shitbox driven exclusively by poorfags within the space of the ten years in was produced, mainly because most owners died of old age.
>>151280659>This predates "a trekkies tale" and there's a small chance it might have even inspired it.
>>151287026I will always remember that /co/ obsession with funky about a decade ago because i think it actually helped me being depressed as fuck reading all these sad awful comics
>>151280511I see the wavy Ls were there from the beginning.
>>151287569This will at least mean the story gets finished since a decade ago would have missed out on some of the truly deranged late era shit like Zanzibar. Also I would assume that prior to the GoComics move, a lot of the old strips weren't as easily available unless you bought the Complete books or were willing to track down microfiches or old newspaper archives. I think King Features had a classic Funky section but IIRC it only went up to a certain point or started at a cerain point, something like that.Truthfully the current Dumbing of Age shitshow plot combined with it all being easily available now basically gave me the impetus I needed to actually go and collect everything and do this.
>>151287504Didn't they have a tendency to roll over if you even looked at one wrong? I seem to recall they had a pretty bad safety rating for a car that size, which probably played a big role in the line being retired.
Thanks for posting! I'll try to follow along
>>151287569People can laugh, but I honestly liked act 2 of Funky. Melodramatic as fuck, sure. But seeing these once happy go lucky characters fall into horrible situations was, well, not unlike life. At least Bakiuk had the balls to depict shit like alcoholism, cancer, PTSD etc. even if his execution was sometimes a bit off. The major criticism of it being unrelentingly bleak and joyless didn't really bother me at all.>>151287837Given that it sold very well I don't think many people cared about its safety rating. Particularly not old people who grew up with cars without seatbelts or crumple zones and a steering column that would decapitate you in a head on collision. But the styling did remind them of those cars, and they thought that was neat. My friend's dad had one and he was just as enamoured with it as Funky.
>>151285066I know that he worked on the storyline where Pete and Darren do the Senior Ditch Day, the one where Pete almost gets into a fight at the mall
>>151285675>>151286084>>151286114Yeah it's like1972-part of 1992 = Funky and friends' four years of high school; Funky and friends' graduation year is retconned to being 1988 instead of 19921992 timeskip to mid-2007 = Wally's four years and Darren/Pete/Jessica's four years2007 timeskip to 2022 = the timejump is 10 year but everything takes place in the present. three graduating classes, one of which was Summer/Cory/Rana/etcThe other problems that come up:Crazy marries Donna who had turned out to be the Eliminator during the 80s comic strips. That means the arcade games had to be around during Funky's high school years, so the first timeskip was okay since they graduated in 1988.But the Act III timeskip meant that they'd have to had graduated in the 1970s which makes this impossible unless you pretend video games were around earlier
>>151287569>sad awful comicsWhat at you talking about don't all newspaper comics have their main protagonists go through alcoholism arcs? Charlie Brown and Garfield must of at some point right?
>>151287710>This will at least mean the story gets finished since a decade ago would have missed out on some of the truly deranged late era shit like Zanzibar. Also I would assume that prior to the GoComics move, a lot of the old strips weren't as easily available unless you bought the Complete books or were willing to track down microfiches or old newspaper archives. I think King Features had a classic Funky section but IIRC it only went up to a certain point or started at a cerain point, something like that.I used to storytime these comics back in the mid-2010s. Yes, at the time Comics Kingdom only had Funky comics going back to around late 1998. Comics hubs on DC++ had files that had not only those comics but Sunday-only comics that dated back to around 1997, which means whoever made those files somehow found stuff that Comics Kingdom didn't upload yet. For everything else I needed to use whatever was available at the time (sometimes it meant Comics Kingdom might've posted a vintage comic or two accompanying an article, or I used Google Newspapers at the time to get daily comics from the 90s). I haven't used Comics Kingdom since the late 2010s so I don't know if they put up a Vintage Funky section and kept adding to it.The books are already up to Volume 15, which covers 2014-2016. I think I've only ever seen the first book scanned and uploaded.
>>151288329It can't even keep the timeline straight in its final year. The story where Crazy puts on the Eliminator helmet and goes back in time to Act I explicitly happens in 1980, like it's stated in the comic as such. Then a few months later it's the 50th anniversary which would directly contradict the story that an entire month was spent on 4 months earlier.Then a few months after that is TimeMop but the entire bullshit explanation makes no real sense and doesn't actually fix the fact the timeline keeps jumping around all over the place. The Act III timeline change also means Wally's story now can't happen because he would have graduated in 1988 and not 1998 and thus would have never had reason to ship off to Afghanistan or Iraq, to say nothing of how the final shift backwards would have made even him serving in Desert Storm questionable.The timeline was whatever Batiuk wanted it to be in whatever specific story at whatever specific time which would be fine if the entire point of the the change to Act II was an ongoing continuity.
>>151288521>The story where Crazy puts on the Eliminator helmet and goes back in time to Act I explicitly happens in 1980, like it's stated in the comic as such. Then a few months later it's the 50th anniversary which would directly contradict the story that an entire month was spent on 4 months earlier.Hell that's not even getting into how Crazy comes across a copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 on the comics rack, which would've meant it was 1962
>>151288521Also the other things the timeline shifts mess up like Cindy's character no longer making any sense because she wasn't introduced until I believe 1987 and her entire character (mall-obsessed mean girl) and design is tied pretty concretely to a specific moment in time that she no longer would have been in high school for. Cindy in general might be the most confusing character in the strip simply because of it. Funky, Les and Crazy are more timeless but Cindy wasn't, she was very much a product of a specific time period much like Roland was. Even then, Roland could be fudged a bit since it's not like the know-it-all hypocritical radical ever went away compared to the mall rat.
>>151280504>Funky would plug along until its final strip on December 31st, 2022./co/ why didn't you tell me when it ended?
>>151281330>Smoky the fishOk, first actual kek.
>>151280504Hey Funky, over here!
>>151282073>all you people in TV landSpooky.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYnk8a--fXQ
>>151288872I think there were threads when it happened.
>>151290425I'm fairly sure that Batiuk came up with this ending without even knowing or caring who did it which is why it's not revisited or even mentioned until years later. Darling had lost a lot of its circulation and Batiuk was just getting tired of doing it anyway. He was also in a lawsuit with his syndicate over trying to get out of his cotract. Darling had an opt out while Funky didn't so he decided screw it and ended the strip by killing the character so nobody else would be able to use him.
>>151289685lmao I didn't know this shit was an actual comic
>>151280504>>But do Funky Winkerbean and Tom Batiuk deserve the largely negative reputation they now have today?YesThe same goes for John Darling and Crankshaft
>>151291001There were
>>151281136I wanted to do this since the strip was winding down and had no idea how to do it so hush, you. Stick to it, OP. I'm counting on you.
>>151288379Thank you for your service anon.Can you recommend a paper in the Google archive that’s good for reading long runs of old strips? Is that even possible to do?
Since this thread is still up, I'll continue with 1973.Also, I messed up and mixed up Marcia's name with her friend who first shows up here. But it's not that important because, again, like a lot of early characters they're gone by around 1976.
I'll be honest, the machine gun is a pretty funny joke. It'll sit there at Les's hall monitor station throughout Act I. Like a lot of other earlier gag stuff, it'll get brought up much later with all of the humor and whimsy stripped away.
In this series of strips, Crazy Harry trips balls.
>>151294446
Crazy playing frozen pizzas on his record player will be yet another long running gag. Oddly enough, however, unlike a lot of the other fantastical elements this will never be explained away as imaginings or anything, people still go "yep, he used to play frozen pizzas" even late into the series.
Here we have our first reference to Dinkle. He's just sort of another teacher for a while but by the 1980s he's going to wind up dominating the strip and never goes away. So much so that he was fairly quickly transferred over to Crankshaft after Funky ended.
The first appearance of Vicki who will be Funky's girlfriend for a few months then disappear. Notable only because Batiuk would, in Act II, mix her up with Funky's girlfriend from the late portions of Act I.
>>151293971The one I remembered using for the 90s comics was probably the Toledo Blade. But keep in mind they have gaps in their collection at the time I was looking at it and the scan/print quality is pretty low on a lot of them. They were the two major problems for finding Sundays, especially
>>151294695Bull donating his brain to science will, of course, eventually be a darkly ironic joke but that's not for a long time.
The first physical appearance of Dinkle. He won't get his full name until later but I think it's in the remaining 1974/1975 strips that GoComics is still uploading, same as Wally's first appearance.
>>151294574I forgot to mention that this is the first mention of Montoni's. It will take a long time but eventually it's basically going to more or less become the nexus of the Funkyverse.
The I Chong is another Act I running gag that doesn't survive the transition to Act II though it does get a revival for a few strips in Act III. It was done because the I-Ching was popular among the hippie circles of the time and also as a riff on the old comic strip Ching Chow whose joke format was largely the same as the I Chong's.
>>151280959Man even though this just looks like Peanuts but it went through a "All Grown Up" style change, I still think Livinia is pretty cute. Damn I'm writing this book and that type of normal girl look combined with being average in intelligence is kinda what I'm aiming for in using for both of these two main female characters in two book ideas I have. One of them coincidentally deals with a girl being a ghost from the 1970's. Anyway, besides my blogposting, I hope OP's thread isn't snagged by some youtuber and is exploited for some video on this strip. Pretty comfy to just have storytimes like this. Also pretty wild that the blonde girl for once isn't getting with the nerdy jewish looking kid. Is he jewish? I dunno. Also from how this author sounds, him trying to get into the Big 2 is interesting. And he seems like a rabbit hole like the Dilbert guy. I guess doing a comic strip for so long makes one a bit crazy. Either way, 70's style cartooning is pretty influential even now. I had an art class in middle school with books with this type of style and funny animal cartoons that look like Garfield. Adventure Time kinda transposed this style from SoL to action pretty well for humanoid characters. If I get a cartoon made by someone else or I actually make myself have time to draw, I would probably do something inspired by this type of style. Good for comedy and animation. Maybe bad for drama but that's what close ups and lighting are for.
This would be an unremarkable series of strips except for the fact that this girl will randomly show up at one of Les's book signings in Act III. I guess by the mid-2010s Batty was feeling particularly reflective so you keep getting hit with random and obscure Act I callbacks.
Mary Ellen will show up for a few summors as Funky's playground supervisor/coaching a little league team before being dropped when that role is taken over by Coach Stropp. Kind of a shame, I like her and she could have easily been reworked into a Westview student like what happened with the Eliminator.
>>151294908>I hope OP's thread isn't snagged by some youtuber and is exploited for some video on this stripI don't really see why or how this would be a thing I'd need to worry about.
>that second stripI admit, I found it funny. But damn, that would not fly at all nowadays.
The debut of Westview's sentient school computer. It'll be a major recurring character up until about the late '80s, then get randomly brought back much later on and given the name Holtron. It won't be sentient anymore though. Maybe. A lot of the "sentient inanimate objects" that are a mainstay of Act I get handwaved as being Funky and the gang imagining what they'd say if they could talk and that includes Holtron but it's also possibly shown as still being sentient after that.
>>151294631I imagine that if you were searching papers, Ohio ones would be the one most likely to have it.
Bumping for others
>>151295443For what it's worth, there's no comic for 12/1/73 on GoComics. Either they forgot to upload (possible) or there just wasn't a new comic that day, I don't know.
Comet Kohoutek in 1973/1974 was supposed to be the "comet of the century" where it'd be bright and visible to the naked eye and whatnot and then infamously turned out to be kind of a bust. I think for a while it was basically used as a way of describing something that was overhyped and disappointing.Anyway, that does it for 1973. Next time, more high school antics and the introduction of Holly Budd. I'll likely make a new thread for that though because otherwise I'd wind up hitting the image limit well before finishing out the year and need to make a new one anyway.
>>151295594Thanks
>>151282876Thats fair.
Hi Funkee
>>151281330Must resist transphobic joke...
>>151295729This here is TERF country, what are you afraid of?
>>151295729I'm struggling to see what the transphobic joke would be.
>>151282219I do wonder why it never really got anything. The most it got was a play called Funky Winkerbean's Homecoming that high schools would put on. I can find references to it and the fact that apparently there used to be a video of a complete performance online but said video doesn't exist anymore.Here's a newspaper article about a performance of it though. Interestingly enough it says the popular girl is someone named "Suzi Peterson" who I'd guess is an OC for the musical because it would have been written after Mary Sue stopped appearing but just before Cindy started showing up.
>>151295594Thanks, OP.
>>151294421Now we know where all the cancer came from.
>>151295334Yeah I think that was how I came across Toledo Blade and some other paper, I forget which one, that I used to find 70s and 80s Funky
>>151295486Here it is
>>151298038GoComics incompetence it is then. I'm not surprised.
>>151295015>Mary EllenENTER... Best girl of act 1.
>>151298225I can already predict who the actual girl that people will latch onto will be one she's introduced. It's pretty much going to a no-brainer for very obvious reasons.Chien
>>151280504No thanks, I’m already sad as fuck.
>>151298428That doesn't come until later though.
>>151295167Is that the first Big Walnut Tech reference?
>>151298534No, it's this one >>151282035 which is also the first use of Coach Stropp's "they put their pants on one leg at a time" speech. I should have pointed those out.
>>151295134No slight on (You) OP, you're alright, but I couldn't resist.
>>151280504I was reading the strip already when the time skip occurred. It was weird to see a comic strip age but I went with it.
>>151299240Did your paper not have FBoFW or something? Because that had been doing it for a decade before Funky aged the characters and unlike Funky it stuck to being real time.
>>151281977>The summer I graduated from Kent State, I flew to New York City with an illustrated story and several story treatments in an attempt to land a job at DC or Marvel comics. As my plane circled over the city, I was suddenly struck by the realization that I had just crossed a line. If I didn’t make the attempt, I’d never fail; but it was too late for that, and the prospect of failure was now a part of the equation. I met with an editor at DC Comics who ripped not only my work up and down but me as well for having had the temerity to show up at his office with it. He must have felt a pang of compassion, though, because as I got up to leave he handed me a piece of original DC art and said, “Here! At least do it at the right size!” But it was only a momentary lapse, because as I reached the door, he yelled after me, “And don’t go telling everybody that DC is giving away free art!”>My reception at Marvel was much more gracious, and associate editor and writer Roy Thomas deserves a shout-out for knowing how to treat a neophyte cartoonist with a much gentler touch. (I should note here that Roy was a fellow letter hack from the pages of The Flash.) Although he told me basically the same thing that the DC editor had, he left the door open with an invitation to submit more work, and I left feeling more optimistic.The DC editor was 100% Mort wasn't it? Because that sure as hell sounds like a very Mort story.
>>151299305Yes we had For Better or For Worse.They aged in real time though. Not time skips.
>Funky WinkerbeanWhat a dumbass. Imagine getting your ass kicked by that clown.How come he doesn't get bullied? That seems like something this strip would do. His friends are kind of pricks already tho tbqh.
>>151300853Funky, well, this era's Funky, just seems to naturally get along with most people. He's just that lowkey guy nobody really dislikes.
>>151299434It wasn't Mort. I think it was Joe Orlando, based on the hint Batiuk dropped.
>>151301094Yeah, Funky's just sort of the chill guy who everyone likes and can get girls to contrast Les who's a neurotic, immature, dateless geek. I guess that makes Livinia Elaine and Roland Kramer.
>>151301580It might but I think Crazy would be way more like Kramer
>>151301934Probably, I was going off of the initial quartet but Crazy does pretty much replace Roland relatively quickly. There's not really anyone who replaces Livinia though. Mary Sue and Junebug are complete non-starters, Cindy doesn't come in until a few years before the timeskip and despite her later importance Lisa is really only around for portions of a two year stretch that equal out to maybe 6 months combined.
>>151299161If 4chan still did banner contests that would be banner worthy.
