Previous >>>>151280504Last time was 1972-1974 covering the beginnings of the students and teachers of Westview High School, seeing the introduction of characters like the title character, Les Moore, Fred Fairgood and Harry L. Dinkle who will go on to be the comic's mainstays. Today will cover 1975 where the strip and characterizations will begin to settle in and some of the early characters begin to disappear.
>second comicOne of the things that didn't hit me until re-reading stuff for these threads is that there's no indication in the first few years of the school or city's name. It's just a Typical High School in a Typical American City. I think it might be 1977 where the name "Westview" first appears and I'll have to check to see when they're first referred to as the Fighting Scapegoats.
Bump for your efforts, OP.
Between these prom comics and the preceding Crazy Harry ones, I think this is Batiuk starting do the format that will basically carry the rest of the comic of spending a week on a theme.
Basically by this point Marcia's stopped being the slightly out of step with the kids woman and is just there to allow Batiuk to do jokes about being a middle class woman or something. As you can guess, she's not lasting much longer.
I think Batiuk has said that strip with Les at the drive-in is one of his favorites.
I believe this is where the Funky as playground supervisor strips are replaced by Coach Stropp coaching the little league team which will last throughout the rest of Act I.
If the librarian character from the preceding years wasn't Ann, then this would definitely be her first appearance. She's going to have a weird trajectory where she basically replaces Rita and is a fairly prominent character throughout Act I, more or less disappears in Act II, and becomes more prominent again in Act III.
The first, but not the last, teacher's strike storyline. They'll crop up a few times and one of them will wind up being fairly important and get called back to quite a bit.Also, according to Batiuk since the Sundays were in color he'd leave Dinkle's uniform white so it could be colored which was, originally, supposed to be purple. He eventually realized that was dumb and gave him the black uniform instead.
>>151322863Should have mentioned that this is the first appearance of Junebug Jones. I'd say it's rather innocuous but she's never really an important character.
>>151322863>third stripI get the distinct feeling "fail to" in the first panel and "not" in the last panel were editorial changes.
>>151322952
>>151322971Of course nowadays she'd be considered thicc.
Ah, the leaves. Of all the sentient inanimate object gags they'll be the longest lasting, possibly even moreso than Holtron. They'll actually make it into Act II, even. Where it'll be explained away that Les was imagining what they'd say if they could talk.And I'm sure the Livinia poster(s) will appreciate the belly shirt.
It's kind of hard reconciling Holly from later on with the vapid grinning bimbo from Act I.
>>151323095Not going to lie, I love Holly.
I think Lucas Warm is the same character as Noah Vale as they're both Ohio's senator and look exactly he same. I'm guessing Batiuk just liked the latter pun more than the former and changed his name by his next appearance.
>>151323156>Funky predicts the 21st Century History Channel lineup
This is pretty much the most attention Junebug ever gets, unless you count the later Cheers For Losing Football Teams gag. But that's not necessarily specific to her or her character.
That's it for today, next time will cover 1976. Dinkle more or less finishes turning into the character he'll be for the rest of the strip, a few more early characters make their last appearances, and we get the strip's first wedding.
>>151322506Marcia and Roland, both causlties of the mid-70s vibe shift
>>151322613The rare pun on the old meanings of troll
>>151322283I like the computer. Did schools had computers in the 70s?
>>151323946Not all of them, usually it was just colleges
>>151323946There would have been schools with mainframe computers and some early computer classes, yes.
what's a winkerbean anyway
>>151324575Are you familiar with mares?
>>151322103OP I sure hope this is a dry run for your definitive scholarly work on Funky Winkerbean. Your commentary is fascinating and you really pulled me into this vortex. If you aren’t a writer you should be.
>>151324814I basically only had the bare minimum of knowledge of it based on things I half-remembered from like 15 years ago when Funky was the hot thing to mock and random times I'd see threads on /co/. I mainly know now just from having to read it as I was collecting it. I'd assume some of the Son of Stuck Funky people would probably have more knowledge than I do if only to better pick it apart and make fun of it.
>Over here, Funky!
>>151324575So you don't know
Thanks for posting OP, I’m going to try to keep up with reading it.
>>151322696is there a list of named characters and how often they appear? I think it would be a neat thing to have
>>151327021I think a list of named characters would be pretty big and I don't know who's going to have the patience to go through 50 years of strips to calculate the exact number of times they all appear. Especially ones like Les and Dinkle who appear a lot (and Dinkle's now a regular in Crankshaft too).
>>151322536I'm kinda not surprised that Batiuk loves Les so much. At least in these early years, Les is the most relatable character, in a weird kind of Daffy Duck way. Funky is just kind of a bitch that gets shit on all the time. Half the time, the joke with him is just that he'll make a stupid face while looking directly at the reader. I find him annoying.>>151324625that's dangerous talk anon
>>151327110Funky's the everyman but that kind of means he doesn't have the comedic potential Les has in a gag format beyond acting as straight man. Derek was kind of the straight man too and falls off significantly but in the first maybe two or three years he feels like he's more sighing at how stupid and inane everyone else is. Might be why Funky gets put through the ringer by the start of the 2000s.Les becomes too much of an author avatar later on (ignoring literal self-insert Batton Thomas) whereas here he's just the comedic loser. Fred is more blatantly Batiuk's avatar in Act I and Ann is blatantly Batiuk's IRL wife.
>>151322424wow, this is still almost a decade before TMNTwhere did that phrase originate from?
>>151327579From surfers. I almost want to say it was around at least in the 1960s
>>151322103Hey OP, are you the guy who storytimed “For Better or For Worse”?
>>151327656There's a decent amount of slang terms that come from '60s surf culture. Cowabunga, gnarly, kook, rad and stoked are probably the most obvious ones.>>151327706Yes
>>151322656nice groucho marx shirt
>>151322788Isn't it a little early to be having bicentennial strips?
>>151328554It would seem that way, but it actually wasn't. They had some bicentennial events in 1975, so Batiuk was likely reflecting that.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bicentennial
>>151323065That 3rd strip did make me smile. Also, the first Livinia strip of the year and it's in october :(
>>151322223Come to think of it, Roland's dad is the only parent of any of the kids we've actually physically seen so far right?
>>151322536I know it's cross-hatching to indicate night in that drive-in strip but I can't help but see that as rain, which actually makes it even funnier to me.
>>151328658The only parents we ever see are him, Holly's mother Melinda and Cindy's parents in Act I. Of them, Melinda is probably the most used. Funky's father Morton is a regular character too but not until Act III.
>>151328875Lisa's parents too and Becky's parents, I forgot about them.
>>151323336Took me forever to get that capitalized joke...
>>151324575It's just a random name. He says on his blog entries (which are largely taken from the book entries) that he and his wife thought up some names and he asked students in his class to contribute names too. So it's possibly something a teenger came up with thinking it sounded funny. The original placeholder name he'd had for it was Moondog and one of the other possible names was Three O'Clock High which is later on the name of the in-universe comic strip done by Batton Thomas, Batiuk's explicit as opposed to various implicit, self-insert.
>>151328698oh shit i really saw that as rain too. which amplifies the joke from being a pathetic loser to a full charlie brown sadsack
>>151327110I had forgotten just how prevalent the 4th wall break mugging was. It's like fully 50% of the strips, fucking parody levels.
>>151322613>we're going to do a little trollingI get the original intent, but the fact it's phrased in exactly that way is pretty fucking funny.
>>151323095Living the Funky-life beat all the fun out of poor Holly.
>>151322148Kek at the second comic
Thanks for doing this OP.I feel like some of these strips are sensible chuckle worthy when they aren’t eye-rollingly bad, bottom of the barrel puns. Can’t wait to see how it somehow pivots into doing serious drama
bumping
>>151332329Yeah, the gag version of Funky can be reasonably funny when it's not doing Bazooka Joe tier jokes.
>>151333922Funkzooka Jokerbean
>>151322103What the hell is this?
>>151323095I could believe it. I don't know what Holly's final appearance in Act 1 was other than the final pre-timeskip comic's throwaway panel (which was just an image of the cast), but then she has a cameo in Act 2 during the 1998 reunion rejecting Crazy's attempts to hit on her. I don't know if she had any other 90s appearances other than that but then she shows up again in the 00s and becomes a regular. She was married, had a kid, got breast cancer, got a divorce, all before hooking up with Funky in the 00s, so there's probably a lot that happened to her off-screen to change her
Today is 1976
I think this is the last ttime Wicked Wanda appears as an actual character. She gets one more cameo in a yearbook page but that's it.Until an arc in Act II
>>151334984A comic strip. They run in newspapers.
>>151335067>so there's probably a lot that happened to her off-screen to change herThis is a problem the strip has in general. Characters just show up changed and it's all done off-panel with characters stating things after the fact. The stories could have actually been shown but Batiuk didn't seem to have much interest in that.
>>151335996>guy with receding hair, full beard and glasses>that wallpaper>that suit>those pantsOh yeah, this is super '70s.
Giving a bump
>>151336145I should point out that by eventually you are going to see a LOT of these types of jokes where it's students taking tests and stuff and the goofy answers and puns, with the students more or less being interchangeable art filler, being the main thing.
I believe this is Marcia's last appearance. Jan I think lasts slightly longer but not much.
Unlike when Coach Stropp was fired previously and nothing actually happened, Rita actually does get married and resign from teaching in what I'd guess is probably the first real status quo shakeup in the strip. She'll hang around for another year or two but gradually fade out.
For anyone who liked Livinia, I'm sorry but this is her last appearance.Unless you count her picture randomly showing up on an In Memoriam display at one of the reunions.
>>151330834Yeah it kind of undermines the jokes at times.
Like I said before, I'm fairly sure Lucas Warm was just an earlier punny name Batiuk thought up for the senator before going with Noah Vale. Senator Vale will be a regular Act I character going forward. I think he appears in Act II but I can't remember off the top of my head. I know he's not in Act III though.
The first instance of Holtron being a Star Trek geek which will wind up replacing the "computers are better than humans" shtick as one of its main gags.
I hope things start getting off the rails soon. I can only binge read newspaper strips so much before my eyes just glaze over them.
>>151336772That's not going to be for a while, it's not really until the mid-'90s when it really morphs into its more famous form. The first few years of the timeskip are basically a continuation of late era Act I with the addition of adult Les and Funky.1995 is the real turning point year I feel as that's when Lisa returns on a permanent basis and you get the story arc where Susan attempts suicide which is what really gets the ball rolling on the depression train. The next few years after that include Lisa getting caught in the post office explosion, Wally and Becky's drunk driving incident, Les solving John Darling's murder, the domestic violence story, and Lisa's initial cancer story.But I'm not going to skip ahead because the purpose is to storytime the whole thing from beginning to end. I definitely think the middle years of Act I from about the late '70s until the mid '80s is kind of rough though. Batiuk falls way too hard into just doing repeating shticks (student handbook and other stuff, tests, sentient inanimate objects) I guess because it was easy. Cindy coming in really reinvigorates things but that's not until like 1987.
>>151337004oh well I'll just have to bear with it. I don't want to miss out on this transformation.
I think this may be the last time Jan shows up. Maybe she shows up a few times next year but she's insignificantt and not actually memorable like Mary Ellen.
Band candy has been brought up before but this is the first time we see Dinkle shilling it. Both Dinkle as salesman and the band selling various tthings to raise money are going to be stock jokes basically right up until the end of the strip.
>>151337189The introduction of another stock Dinkle joke: A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.I've only ever heard Ninety-Nine Bottles though. A Hundred is just awkward in terms of rhythm, cadence and stuff.
That closes out this year, next year covers 1977. There will be a few more debuts in teacher Nate Green as well as the janitor Harley, the most consequential inconsequintial character ever. Also, Westview finally, properly, gets is name.
Also, thankfully I should probably have just enough to be able to do the next year ITT since barring any other images being posted that would put the count at 291 when I'm done. The first few years, it's been easier to cram in 3 years because 1972 starts 3/4 of the way through March and on GoComics the last chunk of 1974 and first chunk of 1975 haven't been uploaded. Otherwise, doing the math each year will be around 104 or 105 images.With the image limit being 300, should I just do two years and then make a new thread? Otherwise I'd be having to make new threads while in the middle of a year and I'd rather just start each thread with a new year.
>>151335741I think someone said Wanda's last appearance was in 1977.Looking through these comics and thinking about the stuff that came after, it keeps making me imagine what someone would do for an adaptation with the benefit of hindsight, or like one of those Grand Design thingsLike for ease make Funky and friends attend/graduate high school somewhere in the early/mid 1980s. It would avoid the problems with a 1970s graduation (Donna would still be able to play arcade games and Cindy would still be able to be a mallrat during the 1980s) and putting it long before 1988 would make it believable that Wally attended high school in the 90s. If you have Lisa give birth to Darren during junior or senior year then Darren/Pete/Jessica/etc would be in high school in early 00s.Also because of the benefit of hindsight you could rethink the 80s Class and have them all there from the start rather than gradually introduced over time, like having Cindy, Crazy, Holly, and Lisa there from the start, also showing Cindy and the mean girls bullying Wanda, which was only hinted at in Act II but was never shown in Act I because Cindy was introduced long after Wanda was gone from the comic, and figuring out what to do with Livinia and others.Act III could be redone in the "correct" setting (like 2017 instead of 2007) with everything that's happened in mind, and then figure out what has to change to fit in. Like the 2010 story of Funky shutting down his pizza places in New York could easily be repurposed in 2020 to be shut down due to COVID lockdowns and loss of business
>>151323169I never even noticed that Funky's head in the title card changes for what seems to be the first time here.>>151323007>that third comicIs there just not a joke here? I feel like i'm missing something
>>151337004>I definitely think the middle years of Act I from about the late '70s until the mid '80s is kind of rough though.>Batiuk falls way too hard into just doing repeating shticksI already felt this way. You're telling me it gets worse?>>151337036Maybe i'm just being too harsh (I do miss Roland) but the Sunday strips suck ass in this comic. You only need the last three panels for this joke to work, the rest is just bullshit to fill space.
>>151338129>You only need the last three panels for this joke to work, the rest is just bullshit to fill space.That's actually deliberate. I looked at some old Sunday pages years ago on eBay and I forget which one, but one Sunday Paper only ran the bottom row of a Sunday Funky. Batiuk likely designed these so that if a Sunday page had little space they could just run the last four
>>151337882>I think someone said Wanda's last appearance was in 1977.It is but it's just a picture in a yearbook. This is the last time she appears outside of that context.If I was adapting it into a show or cartoon what I'd probably do is to first set any adaptation during Act II. Funky's class graduated in 1987, Les and Lisa dated for a few months in 1985 with Lisa transferring late in sophomore year, getting pregnant soon after, and Darin being born in December a few months early. It'd start in 1996 with them being already established: Les has been a teacher for a couple of years, Funky is at Montoni's, Cindy's just returned and taken up a reporter job, etc. Wally's class runs from 1996-2000 so he has the accident, enlists, and isn't in the army as long prior to 9/11 and shipping out. Wally was a little kid during the Act I gang's high school time, not a newborn. Darin and Pete's class runs 2000-2004 so Chien's story about being "different" happens as a freshman while she's still new.Lisa returns for the 10th anniversary reunion, where Susan has her whole thing. They get married but the cancer stuff happens, she recovers, Summer is born in 2002 still. Lisa dies in 2007, timeskip to 2017, Summer and her generation are freshmen and it goes in real time from there.
>>151338344Lynn Johnston actually talked about this in commentaries in one of the FBoFW collections. Basically her editor told her that the top panels should essentially be their own joke while the bottom ones are another (but still in the same theme as the first) for exactly that reason. Basically, not every paper would run the entire Sunday strip so they might only run the top or bottom part. By making it so that there's a joke in each row, the Sunday will still work if only one row or the other is run in a given paper. That's the thing, a lot of this stuff wasn't standardized and a lot of stuff was basically at the discretion of individual papers. My local paper, for example, ran Doonsebury with the rest of the comics but I know it was common for other papers to put it in the politics section with the other editorial cartoons.
>>151338129>You're telling me it gets worse?You know those strips where it's just students taking tests and the joke is ust whatever the answer is and isn't actually dependent on which student is drawn there? Stuff like that will more and more become the norm. I guess because it was easy to write/draw. In that respect I get that Batiuk likely grew bored thus why he started doing more story arcs, including some more serious ones (Lisa's pregnancy wasn't the first or last of Act I, just the most famous) and eventually decided to change the format completely. Batiuk always wanted to write for comic books, he just kind of fell into gag writing and while I think he can be good at it when not leaning on samey jokes, it was obviously never where his heart was.Dinkle is the worst offender. I get that he was the breakout character but I guess reading it all in one go, he grew old to me pretty quickly because it's the same handful of jokes (you've basically already seen all of them). Some times there's some more absurdity to the gags but it's the same general ones. In that respect the only character I felt whose shtick didn't eventually grate me is Coach Stropp. It's basically the same basic joke (he's an idiot and a loser coaching even bigger idiots and losers) but it's one I find way funnier than Dinkle's. He's also a lot more likable compared to Dinkle being an overbearing asshole.There's certain characters I like most in the context of each individual act but for the strip as a whole, Stropp is definitely my ffavorite character.
Am I missing something or is /co/ moving faster than normal for some reason?
>>151338512For the hell of it my favorite/least favorite characters.>Act IPrincipal Burch, Cindy, Barry>Act IIChien, Wally, Becky, Bull, maybe Kara>Act IIIMuch harder because of how bad the writing gets. Probably Summer, Owen/Cody/Alex are inoffensive. Marianne is about as decent as a very late era character gets. Maddie's a great design that's utterly wasted.>Least FavoriteToo many terrible characters over time. Dinkle, John, Darin, Pete... anyone associated with Atomik Komix, Mason, Act III Les, Cayla... they all suck.
>>151335996>>151336009For some reason I feel the 70s to be more antiquated that the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The aesthetic is like the new Coke of american culture, an attempt of something new that got quickly turn around.
>>151338491One of Bill Watterson's big fights with the syndicate was forcing it so Calvin and Hobbes would always run at full size in every newspaper so he could break out of that particular format. I'm not sure how it worked behind the scenes in terms of deals and such, but after a certain point newspapers that took Calvin and Hobbes on Sundays had to run the complete strips with no cuts. As far as I know, Watterson is about the only cartoonist to even try to do that.
>>151340607'30s/'40s is mostly because that was when you dressed up and the high class fashion of the time is immortalized in Hollywood. '50s, '60s, etc. is definitely way more dated. The '70s I think was basically continuing on the backlash against the dull and repressed '50s culture that started back in the late '60s. If you take it as an outgrowth of hippie culture in a way it makes a lot more sense. Things are more dressed down and casual, women's clothing especially becomes a lot more revealing and they're largely not doing the made up hairstyles that were common in the '60s and subsequently '80s. Cooler earthy tones and more economical looking architectural/decorating design to contrast the perceived excessive garishness of the '50s/'60s space age aesthetic. The tackiness of a lot of the designs and suits and stuff I figure is because, again, it's fighting back against what was seen as repressiveness by going full bore the other way. That also goes into the overall mood with more transgressive films and television shows and music. Like disco was basically the soundtrack for libertine hedonism to get out of the depressing, stagnant hellhole the shitty economy had started turning things into.At least that's how I see it looking back. I wasn't alive in the '70s but I do find the decade really fascinating, especially when you see the ways that it can feel analogous to the times we're living in now. I like the '70s aesthetic too in spite of, or maybe even because of, the tackiness. I find it a lot better to look at than the '80s aesthetic for sure. The '80s (thanks to the more overall Reagan inffluenced conservative values) were a lot less provocative and blander; the neon/pastel shit was basically a Florida thing due to Miami Vice; it's not at all representative of the decade's broader aesthetic sense.
>>151335741Square dancing being taught in schools is such a weird footnote in education. It basically grew out of people trying to invent a national cultural identity in the 1920s and lasted all the way until the late '80s. Things basically started falling apart for it as a movement when people actually started buying into square dancing as a unifying All-American concept and started lobbying groups solely focused on badgering pretty much every single state into naming the square dance as the official state dance. Quite a few states went along with it but quite a few said "Wait, what the hell does square dancing have to do with the Great State of ______?" It pretty much disappeared from school curricula not long after that since people basically did collectively realize how stupid the whole concept was.
>>151337887Les has a bike visibility flag while jogging. >>151336482Color edition in her honor.
>>151341167>lasted all the way until the late '80sLonger than that. I was in elementary school in the mid-90s and they would have us do it in our PE classes. Just entire classes of having to do square dancing to Cotten-Eyed Joe, Electric Slide and Boot Scootin' Boogie.
>>151341503I guess a better way to phrase it is that it lasted longer in some states but square dancing being something that was in pretty much every public school curriculum in US started dying out in the '80s.
>>151336373My dad was class of '76, from Washington High. His graduation went all in on the bicentennial.
>>151341387God bless 70s female fashion. I unironically find it incredibly attractive. Early and mid-2000s had the same sort of casual, dressed down sexiness thing going on too where a girl just needed like a tight Hollister or some other mall brand shirt and some jeans to look good.
Stay (on the board) Funky!
>>151342179I have no idea what's been going on with /co/ today but it's been moving way faster than normal it seems.
>>151342602Yeah, I noticed that. It's been like 30 mins from the top of the catalog to page 10, it's normally at least an hour. Is twatter still having cloudflare issues? Maybe everybody came here when they couldn't get their dopamine fix elsewhere.
>>151342643There's not all that many new threads being created from what I can see unless they're instantly being deleted and still pushing things down the page.
>>151336482She will be missed :(
>>151341387wow, she's even cuter with the red hair
>>151336552>3rd and 4th stripsBatiuk is getting daring with his tv panel composition this week
>>151336482Batiuk really did Livinia dirty like that.What a fucker.>>151338344I'm aware of the newspaper trade's practice of cutting the top panels off of Sunday strips. That's why I prefaced what I wrote with "maybe I'm being too harsh." It was just the industry standard at the time, completely understandable. I still think the strip could be tighter/better but i'm aware that not every artist can be Bill Watterson, and I have no idea what Batiuk's workload was like back then. He might not have had the time to focus his attention on any one particular strip.>>151341387>Les has a bike visibility flag while jogging.ah, that's it? that ain't no fucking joke. I look like i'm laughing?what a bunch of bullshit
>>151336796best one of 76 so far
>>151343278He definitely has a bit of that darker, more biting sense of humor and when he allows it to actually appear it honestly is legitimately funny. Skip Townes, the crooked music promoter who shows up in the '80s, is a very Simpsonsish character IMO. Not as good mind you but in a similar vein I feel.
>>151337106I've never heard the term gun moll so I looked it up and I must say this is quite an odd thing to test students on...
>>151339794I feel like a lot of these there are ideas there that could work. Like with Les the idea is there in Act 1-Act 3, a complete sadsack during high school gets better in Act 2 but then a horrible tragedy happens, and then gets better breaks in his later years. It feels like there's a missing payoff to counter him getting more arrogant in the way that you see Funky's arrogance in Act 3 eventually has its priceOn a similar note i felt like Les saying that he never got over being bullied by Bull never really rang true to me considering 1. He punched Bull during the 5th anniversary reunion, 2. a flashback showed Bull helping him out in a way back in high school, and 3. in general they were still on good terms during adulthood in Act 2 and 3, and I think Bull testified for him in one Act 2 arc. There's an argument to be made about Les not getting over it but if he hadn't he would've gotten into way more conflicts with Bull since he had to deal with him day-to-day in his job.
>>151346124The way Les acts regarding Bull, largely in Act III, is a huge example of why he's hated so much.
>>151322103Thanks OP
Bumping
Hey there Funky!
>>151322536I'm assuming Les EVENTUALLY does the jump, but fucks it up?
>>151337490Sounds fine.
>>151336796Kek
>>151323350Lol
>>151336796Nice
>>151350823It does get a proper ending at least which is maybe one of the only times I've ever seen that for a long running gag.
Today is 1977
Woody Hayes, if anyone is unaware, was a legendary football coach for Ohio State.
>>151353691>frankly I think I'd love it!me too les me too
The gag with Dinkle at his typewriter (and later computer) writing books will eventually evolve into his writing a biography on the fictional composer Claude Barlow which will carry all the way until the end of the strip. Literally; the last series of strips prior to the final week time jump is about Dinkle putting on a performance of Claude Barlow music.
Spoiler: the computer did not stop playing Star Trek.
First appearance of Nate Green. He's just going to be a kind of generic teacher for a while but eventually becomes the vice principal and in Act III the principal. So he's sticking around for the long haul.
The last strip is the last time Wicked Wanda will show up in any capacity for a very long time. I believe this is also the first time we see the school (and thus the city) referred to as Westview, the team name as the Fighting Scapegoats, and the Westview logo. So overall, fairly important.
>fourth stripThis is, as far as I can tell, the only reference at all to Les having any siblings. Considering how much Batiuk eventually calls back to Act I, I'm surprised he never brought it up again.
First appearance of Ron. An ultimately minor character who stops appearing I believe by the end of the '70s.
These dracula puns will be another running gag although used more infrequently than a lot of the others.
>>151354316lol
This busing storyline will actually run for a few weeks worth of strips. Busing in the mid-'70s was a very big and contentious deal since it involved busing black students to schools in white districts (and vice versa) as a means of trying to force desegregation. It's a big factor in subsequent white flight to the suburbs and cities beginning to decay since a good chunk of the tax paying population just up and left.That famous photo of a white guy attacking a black guy with the American flag was from a busing protest in Boston.
I don't know if "football fields are for band practice" quite qualifies as a catchphrase since I don't think Dinkle actually says it all that much. But it's about as close to an iconic line as Funky ever produced.
Ah, here is. Harley Davidson aka TimeMop aka Time Janny. He will show up a handful of times over the next few years, disappear for a long time, and then very infamously come back at the end in one of the most baffling writing decisions for anything that I've ever seen to close out the strip.
boomer garbage
I have no idea if the Winter of '77 refers to the previous January where there was a massive winter cold front that produced the New York blizzard and had snow in Miami or the at the time current winter which would produce a giant blizzard in Ohio in January of 1978.Anyway, that's it for today. Next year is 1978. A few more characters are introduced, Crazy Harry moves out of his locker, and Les gets his driver's license.
>>151355207Yes, that's what makes it interesting.
>>151353756Wouldn't we all.
Funky Winkerbeanmore like Faggot Wankerbean.I'm kidding. Thanks for dumping OP it's reasonably entertaining. Sometimes.
>>151357311More like Drunky Drinkerbean.
>>151355408>jokes about dismemberment, execution and lonelinessYou can really feel that depressed 1970s milieu.
>>151355084>Fifth stripActually good one>SixthFrank and Ernest tier punchline
>>151355019When you said "time janny" I did not expect a literal school janitor
>>151359514I told you, it's absurd.
>>151335971>silage marnerOh, I hate this.
>>151353363wait so the computer was replaced with a newer model? WHAT ARE THE LORE IMPLICATIONS OP!?
>>151354110>the only photo with all teachers together is in the strike ok that got a laugh out of me.
