The entire 50 year run of Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean was recently storytimed by a very committed Anon. itt we grab a slice of Montoni's pizza to discuss sex symbol Harry Dinkle, cancer, Drunky Drinkerbean, band camp, time travelling jannies, think about Afghanistan and stand in line to strangle Les.Final Storytime Thread >>151975514
Donna was the Eliminator
funky cancerbean
>>151993651An article from March 1974
I went into act II expecting it to be pure misery from that point on, but I was surprised by the fact there’s only a few arcs that are actually like that. I was pleasantly surprised(?) by how lighthearted the majority of the strip actually was. Not sure why I went in with that expectation, maybe those few arcs have just permanently shaped the reputation Funky has
Anyway for just a little bit more closure and to look back at the good old days, I'm gonna post the remaining strips of 1974 that didn't make it into the storytime. As it is, the storytime had a small gap from November 19, 1974 to March 21, 1975 and part of that gap has now been posted on the go comics website covering up until January 5, 1975. Anyone who's interested can probably go back in about 3 months and read the rest.
May be a tad slow in posting as I'm still putting some of these together but I wanted to go ahead and get started
OVER HERE FUNKY!
>>151994077>AfghanDeepest lore.
Also some of these feel familiar but it could just be that so many jokes are repeated/flashbacked to. I saw in the archive, storytime anon said that the end of 1974 featured Wally's introduction and here it is, so it might just be imagining things.
>>151994077Wow I forgot Dinkle showed up only two or so years into the strip, I mostly associate him with the 80’s and onward
This is what I'm talking about. I would almost say I remember this strip but I also know Les used this line about a million times on that hiking trip so I really don't know
>>151994116It’s funny reading this in hindsight and knowing who Wally becomes
This might be the last appearance of Roland (in act 1).
>>151994155Roland!Batiuk may have done you dirty, but at least you're still my boi here
Poor cousin Alice...
This mini dump has been brought to you by the Livinia Lovers of America Association
And here's the last one. Not sure why they have up to the 5th of Jan when it's only just barely the 4th, but we'll take it. Nice to look back and remember Burch got out unscathed.
>>151994100I legitimately think this is the only time in Act I that Funky and Holly ever interacted.
>>151994219should have been a story where he fingerblasted her pussy and then made Les smell his pinky
>>151994196Thanks for the mini dump, and again, thank you for everything OP, I know Funky isn’t the greatest work of art ever produced but I had a lot of fun reading it
>>151994077>storytime is over>more Funky is unearthedWill it ever end?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Cr2HmlG3c
>>151994188>Livinia Lovers of America AssociationBetter to call it the Livinia Appreciators & Lovers of America so you can give it a catchy name like LALA.
>>151993916Take away the mustache and he even looks like funky.>>151994244I was trying to come up with something quickly but that is way better
>>151993932The comic that >>151993845 posted was originally published in April 2007, and I remember 2006/2007 was around the time when I saw more people taking jabs at Funky being miserable and it got moreso during the rest of that decade to maybe mid-2010s, like you have Josh at Comics Curmudgeon talking about it, you have Chris Sims doing Funkywatch, you have the Son of Stuck Funky guys, you have Willis' other Shortpacked comics, and so on, which just spread the reputation it got.
>>151994153I agree. Back around like 2014 or 2015 I wanted to do a collage of all the major Wally moments put together but I never could do it because I couldn't locate good copies of the Act 1 and Act 2 daily comics at the time
Batiuk posted these some years back, they were for the 1992 timejump
>>151994334
>>151994262Comics Curmudgeon started in 2004 and seemed to kickstart a boom in comic snarking. The mid-2000s into the early 2010s was a very snarky time for the internet as a whole and Comics Curmudgeon was very popular and since full archives of all of these strips genuinely weren't available back then, you'd only have the context of what was coming out to inform your opinion of it. So at the time most peoples' perception of Funky would have been during stories like the Wally/Afghanistan stuff and Lisa's cancer which is then amplified by the fact you're only able to read one strip at a time and have to wait 24 hours or the next one.So stories that might have zipped through in a handful of images in this storytime would have taken weeks or months to play out. For most of 2007 you're reading, one day at a time, a story about a woman slowly dying of cancer and your context for the strip is really only this cancer story. Maybe you were aware it started out humorous but those earlier strips aren't readily available so your only experience is the more depressing stuff. Then you're hanging around in communities that are based around snarking (CC, Something Awul, wherever) which amplifies the whole thing. And I'm not saying that's terrible or anything, snarking on stuff is pretty fun. But all of that does come together to form a rather skewed and limited perception of what the comic in question is. Then you couple it with the reactions of the creators themselves. Batiuk, for example, always had a problem with those criticizing his stuff (using the strip to take shots at critics is prevelant all over late era Funky) and there was him siccing his lawers on Wordpress to get SoSF shut down for a day or two using spurious copyright infringement reasoning because they were posting the strips (they got around it by linking to the strips instead) which, of course, is going to sour their perception even further.
>>151994340
>>151994340Funky’s mullet actually looks good in these drawings
>>151994347SamefaggingI think when you take it all in at once you see that maybe it wasn't as morose and depressing as people at the time painted it as but I think it still is a grim comic at times and its not like its perception was solely limited to snark communities. Other strips running contemporaneously with it would skewer the cancer and alcoholism plots. Here's a thread from, of all places, Straight Dope that dates back to fucking 2001 and it's a lot of the same complaints.https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-melodramatic-funky-winkerbean-annoys-me-yet-i-must-read/49395So its reputation wasn't created solely by places like SoSF or Comics Curmudgeon, it had that reputation in one form or another long before then. But those places coming along and getting popular as the internet became more widespread certainly amplified and shaped that perception to a far greater deal.
>>151994334I can't remember if I mentioned it when I was doing the jump from Act I to Act II but the actual mechanic of how it happened with the literal page turning was given to Batiuk by Roger Stern. Stern apparently wrote an introduction to one of the Complete books (I assume the one that has the Act I to Act II) but since it's not uploaded on an RCO or whatever and I'm reasonably lazy I have no idea what Stern actually wrote.
>>151994347>Comics Curmudgeon started in 2004 and seemed to kickstart a boom in comic snarking. The mid-2000s into the early 2010s was a very snarky time for the internet as a whole and Comics Curmudgeon was very popular and since full archives of all of these strips genuinely weren't available back then, you'd only have the context of what was coming out to inform your opinion of it. So at the time most peoples' perception of Funky would have been during stories like the Wally/Afghanistan stuff and Lisa's cancer which is then amplified by the fact you're only able to read one strip at a time and have to wait 24 hours or the next one.This was what I noticed too; like take >>151994262This brought forth the constant meme of Funky Cancercancer that even Mara Wilson used in a tweet. But the punchline of the Shortpacked comic doesn't work if you had read the Funky comic closely for a long time and knew about those characters; if you knew about John Darling and about Lisa's pregnancy then you knew that Darin and Jessica weren't related. This came about because a lot of people who were snarking at the time knew didn't know much about the characters, because there was no archive as you said; the only reprint book that had anything from Act 2 around 2007 was Could Be A Book Deal Here (from the 90s) and the Funky alcoholic book, and Lisa's Story, and I don't think any of them read the former two (Chris Sims and Josh Fruhlinger definitely had no idea Funky was previously married when Cindy returned in 2014; they didn't know who Cindy was even though she had a few appearances in Act 3 in the 00s). But again, the way to read the old strips was to pay to get access to Comics Kingdom at the time, and I don't remember when that was up; I remembered it was definitely around by 2014. The Son of Stuck Funky guys I think actually read through the comics though, even though I don't know to what extent in the 2000s.
>>151994400I admittedly know nothing about these groups, but I can’t believe there were entire communities dedicated to shitting on newspaper comics. Like Funky is far from a masterpiece but I can’t imagine dedicating time and going out of my way to hate it
>>151994466It just happens, that's how the internet was at the time. Comics Curmudgeon would pull from all these different strips so it got popular and among that subset there was readers who would develop an interest in a particular strip for whatever reasons unique to them someone gets interested in something so those people maybe want to talk about it further but not so much B.C. or Mary Worth so they create their own blog dedicated to that and a community grows around it. Then after a point you're coming as much for the community that's gathered as the subject itself.Not really any different than general threads on here; like the Questionable Content one to use a relevant example. You want to make fun of a work, analyze it, laugh at edits and maybe just chat with the other users more generally. I don't really see anything weird or wrong with that. Even with a comic like this that's finished, it's enjoyable to do all of that I think.
Did you know that in addition to Funky Winkerbean's Homecoming, there may be a John Darling musical!? > John Darling : A musical in two acts based on the comic strip by Tom Armstrong & Tom Batiuk / book by Shubert Fendrich ; lyrics by Shubert Fendrich & Bill Francoeur; music by Bill Francoeur. -- Denver, Col. : Pioneer Drama Service, 1984. -- 43 p. ; 22 cm. -- Call no.: PN6728.J6F4 1984Apparently the guy who wrote the lyrics passed away in 1989, before John Darling ended the following year. There's a listing for this in the Michigan State University library pages but it looks like you have to be a student to get access.
>>151994400I guess I shouldn't be surprised about those posts especially since that was right in the middle of Funky's alcoholism arc. But I think it's just because I never really saw Funky get brought up in the places I went to at the time. In my experience whenever a comic strip thread happens on some forum I went to, pre-Comics Curmudgeon, it's>complain about current state of the funnies>complain about Cathy>complain about Garfield>complain about legacy comics>complain about the drama comics (as in Mary Worth, Rex Morgan MD) and make some crack around the lines of "why this not funny">Praise Calvin and Hobbes, Far SideI only knew about Funky because it used to run in my paper for some years (but they stopped carrying it around like early or mid 90s) and only knew it took a serious turn because Comic Buyer's Guide had an article about it. For me it was surprising to see a lot of people start talking about it in the 2000s even if it was mostly to dunk on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL0_46qrwEEWish I could find a recording of the musical. Found a playbill and a commercial, but there's not a lot out there.
>>151994559My paper didn't carry Funky so I only knew about it because of the places that snarked on it. I'd read some Comics Curmudgeon and Sims's column and I think it would pop up on SA when I was an active member there. Even prior to doing this storytime, my only real experience outside of those was the times it would pop up on here, usually in relation to Dumbing of Age. That's a major reason why my desire to storytime it came from DoA since my initial knowledge and perception of Funky was mostly from DoA threads and the fact that both were often compared with one another.Like I said, it was the stupidity of the Joyce/Dorothy story arc in DoA and Funky being posted about in one of the threads about it that made me more seriously decide to try storytiming it. Once I saw it was on GoComics (and found a way around the paywall, thanks UBO), I decided that was it and started on collecting it. Naturally, collecting everything one at a time meant I'd have to read the strip as I did so which then allowed me to have a more complete picture of everything beyond the snippets and plot bits I knew. Looking at the date the initial folder for 1972 was created, I started on 7/16/25 so collecting everything was basically a continuous process for like 4 months. Then when storytiming I'd go through and read ahead so if there was something I felt I wanted to comment on or point out, I'd be able to.So basically over the course of around 5 months I've read this damn strip twice over which is way too much Funky Winkerbean in way too short a time. But that means I have a better understanding of the strip and, like Summer, I can analyze patterns and clues to better see where I think it works and doesn't work and the idiosyncracies of Batiuk's personality that are enmeshed within the entire strip which is what makes the strip so interesting to me.
>>151994347>And I'm not saying that's terrible or anything, snarking on stuff is pretty fun. But all of that does come together to form a rather skewed and limited perception of what the comic in question isThis was part of the reason why I did the threads back in 2014. I came across the Funky Alcoholism book and wondered why no one had talked about it because there was a whole lot of stuff I didn't know about with the backstory. Maybe Son of Stuck Funky did but it probably didn't show up on the immediate Google results. Then I came across the Funky comic archives that only went up to late 1998 and realized there was a whole lot of backstory people didn't know about; it was flawed but there was something there. I was actually amazed at how a lot of people on /co/ got compelled by it that year.
As a general overview of the series, I think Funy Winkerbean was mostly solid. Act I could be rough at times, especially when it came to introducing and dropping characters, but improved as time went by and the cast stabilized. Act II had a major transition in tone but mostly handled it well though there were a few elements that felt off. Retconning the Eliminator for one thing; Donna could have easily been Donald's slightly younger sister that had the same interests. Ultimately though, we saw the characters from Act I grow and develop from their first act versions in a fairly natural manner. The downside of Act II for me was missed opportunities; there were a lot of things that happened offscreen that could have easily supported stories. Like there were hints that Westview had some really solid girl sports programs and that could have made for interesting contrasts with the disastrous football teams. I still say having Mary Ellen as a cuthroat women's coach that was Stropp's foil could have been a lot of fun. Act III was where the series really went off the rails and a huge chunk of that was the direct result of the result of the series abandoning the more natural character arcs in favor of focusing on other, largely new characters as Batuik decided certain characters didn't work and dropped them..Summer, Maddie, Jynx, and Corey should have been the obvious focus for Act III. Have Susan and Mickey follow the same path as Les and become more important characters along with Darin growing closer to Summer and Les. Have Sadie around for contrast with Cindy and to be there for Wally. Most of those were pretty much dropped as characters though and the one that didn't just became a glorified sidekick. If I had to sum up the problems with Act III in one character, it's not even really Les, easy as it would be to say that, but Pete that was the core problem since he was the entry point for so many of the characters and stories that really drag in Act III.
>Maddie inquires about Summer's love life out of nowhere>Those unsubmitted strips abruptly have them hanging out>Summer starts looking more and more tired and haggard looking from then on.So Maddie was basically fucking her to death I take it.
>>151994719What makes Funky interesting to me is how much of Tom Batiuk is tied up in it. Something like Garfield or Questionable Content is wholly uninteresting to me because they just kind of exist as things to make money (QC not originally but definitely since the hand stabbing). They're not that funny, there's no real interesting stories so there's nothing to make me want to read or to keep reading.But Funky is different because Batiuk's quirks, his personality and such are completely inescapable. If you read the strip, especially in the later years, you can get a picture of a guy who's sort of settled into where his life is as a successful cartoonist but not quite as successful as he wanted to be, who desired to be taken more seriously and so would chase awards and praise. Not in a desperate way per se but even if he wasn't actively thinking about it, the themes are so pervasive that they obviously reflect the man making it. It's flawed, it tries to be more ambitious than it can really handle because it's just kind of ill-equipped to do that stuff because the writer himself is locked into a certain mindset of how storytelling in a comic should be influenced by doing a gag strip for 20 years, his love of silver age comics and things like that.I don't mean that to be an insult like I think he's a preening prima donna and if you met him at a con or book signing he'd be obviously mugging everyone for praise. But he pulls so much from his own life when making the comic that even subconscious elements are going to seep in.That's a big part of why I find it, or Dumbing of Age, so interesting to follow even if in the case of DoA I actively dislike 99% of what he does with it. It adds a extra layer of fun that makes it more interesting then just "read comic, call it good/bad and move on" IMO.
>>151994728>Have Sadie around for contrast with Cindy and to be there for Wally.Yeah, I like Rachel well enough in that she's inoffensive but that's because she just didn't have a character prior to hooking up with Wally beyond "she's hot and she likes teasing the guys about it". Sadie was given that connection with Wally right before he shipped out to Afghanistan and the natural story was her being the one to connect with and help him through his problems in Act III. Pulling Rachel for that was a really random thing and it's probably entirely because Batiuk didn't want to introduce a new character but because he hated Sadie and decided against using her in Act III there wasn't any unattached women who were left so it just winds up being Rachel by default.And yeah, I really hate Pete for similar reasons. He just sort of exists prior and is lame but whatever. But after 2013 he and Darin increasingly take over the comic and which coincides with a lot of the old characters getting sidelined in favor of Mason Jarres and Phil Holts and Chester Hagglemores. Even if I don't necessarily hate Mason or Marianne... were they neeeded? Who wanted to read about them over Summer in college? Who wanted to read about Phil Holt over seeing what Maddie is up to? Or maybe showing Rana in college and what leads to her reembracing her peoples' religion.Les may be a smug, whiny unlikable douchebag in Act III but at least he makes you feel something even if it's the feeling of wanting to see Bull or Funky or anyone punch him out. I kind of enjoy hating him and calling him a prick. But Pete and Darin? They don't have that. They're worse than hateable, they're boring. I only put Darin over Pete in my list of least favorite characters because at least the strip pretends you're supposed to think of Pete as a schlubby loser. Darin is not only annoyingly bland, he's talked up as being amazing because he's Lisa's son which means if he's not amazing, neither is Lisa.
>>151994077The first reunion in act III implies Liviana does get married since her surname got the addition of a "Jessup".
>>151994755I agree and I want to know what influenced his characters; like for instance if you read the article in >>151993916 it said he got the visual for Funky and Crazy Harry from his students and that a lot of the characters by 1974 were people he met, or people he was teaching at school.It also says that Les is patterned after a close friend of his, which made me wonder how much of Les was that guy and how much of him became more like Batiuk (like for instance the book signings and stuff, that I presume is from Batiuk's experiences). We also know that some stuff like Funky's car accident or the Kilimanjaro climb or Crazy reminiscing about Action Comics #242 or Tarzan books was from Batiuk's experiences.
>>151994791>Darin is not only annoyingly bland, he's talked up as being amazing because he's Lisa's son which means if he's not amazing, neither is Lisa.Again, I have to blame at least some of that on Pete since Darin basically just winds up as his sidekick instead of the more obvious path of him trying to discover who his mom was via growing closer to Les and Summer.
>>151994116>Second stripSo did Wally have a death wish all along?
Is Harry L. Dinkle a Sociopath?Harold L. Dinkle is many things. a Doctor, a band director, the leader of the St. Spires choir, a salesman, husband of Harriet Dinkle, my LEAST FAVORITE character from the Batiukverse (alongside Cindy Summers), and an absolute piece of shit who should be thrown into an active volcanoBut is he a sociopath?>lack of empathyForced his students to stand in the freezing weather during winter through brainwashing, made the St. Spires choir practice until 2 AM, letting Holly get severe third-degree burns from her highly dangerous flaming baton trick, refused to ever let students take the day off (even for deaths in the family or a wedding they have to attend)>extreme anger issues and no self controlDinkle thinks that the football field is for band practice (Which is not the case). He cannot stand it when the football team actually practices on the football field and is a MASSIVE sore loser>extreme arroganceHis narcissism is evident by his self-proclaimed nickname “The World’s Greatest Band Director”, but that wasn’t enough and went the extra 4 miles and legally changed his name to Harry L. Dinkle The World’s Greatest Band Director>drug useIt’s not shown that Dinkle has a drug addiction, but in my opinion, he would most likely get drunk and beat his wife after a rough day where his students try to rebel against him and his horrible treatment of them>trouble with holding down a jobHe only lost his band director job when Fred Fairgood had enough of Dinkle’s horrible treatment towards his students and had him dragged out of the school kicking and screaming (I think that the “forced to resign due to hearing loss” story Dinkle told Becky was complete bullshit)>never learning from their mistakesHe will always do all the horrible shit he has done in his life until the day he diesVerdict: Yes, he is a sociopath and he also has Narcissistic Personality Disorder
>>151994441Yes it does help to have actually read the whole thing, in some ways it makes it better or at least make sense but in other ways it makes it worse because you see the same thing happen again and again (like Les moping about Bull) or things that should have an impact not doing so (like Bull being kind to Les).
>>151994755Aye, Funky is an interesting read simply because you can tell a lot of it is observational and possibly anecdotal, yet even in its preachy moments it (to me) never feels as obnoxious as when other comic book writers do it, maybe it’s because Tom takes the more cynical/stoic view that bad things will happen and very often there is little you can do about it but endure (whilst other writers clearly think their work is a call to action). I don’t know, when Tom gives a Very Important Lesson, or comments about hot topics like Global Warming feels more like a disappointed teacher rather than an angry student… which given his background fits perfectly.
>>151994838Dinkle doesn’t do drugs he IS drugs, he’s high on his own esteem.
Anyway, thanks again OP for being such a bro and storytiming this for us, honestly the best storytime I’ve been on in /co/, great discussion and commentary and even the comic itself had some good moments. Like most people Act 1 is my favourite but Act 2 at least had some interning drama if a lot of tonal whiplash, Act 3’s worst sin was being boring with all the comic book guys.
>>151994845Yeah that was the major disadvantage from reading the entire thing because you catch on when he repeats something over and over, or you catch that he missed some story threads that he could've used. He clearly plans some things out but somehow either unintentionally or intentionally ignores other things.To me though I think it was better off reading a lot of it to get the contexts of the various characters even if Batiuk tended to contradict himself a lot of times, because you can sort of see some of what he was trying to do.
>>151994559There's one correction I need to make to this that I forgot to add in the previous post, I do remember one Funky news during the early 00s and it was Newsarama or some comics site announcing that John Byrne would be guest-penciling Funky for a while. I honestly don't remember the reactions to that back then and I don't know if any of the reactions on Newsarama would even be still up since they changed the site so damn much. At the time I had no idea who Wally or Becky were. I vaguely remember seeing John Howard before, possibly in Crankshaft, but he didn't leave me much of an impression other than making me wonder if he was just like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.>>151994791>>151994811There was something I started wondering about when I was thinking about Sean McKeever guest-writing Funky and it occurred to me we don't know much about itSo I came across this link brought up in Son of Stuck Funkyhttps://web.archive.org/web/20200408003157/https://scpod.net/sean-kelley-mckeever-talks-spider-man-comics-shops-video-games-and-a-lot-more/Sean McKeever talked about his time on Funky (starts around 55:30) and that he was doing it around the time he was starting on Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, was still on Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, Marvel Mega Morphs, and so on.He doesn't remember all of it but he remembers part of it was Afghanistan War (which means he probably at least wrote some of the Wally in Afghanistan stuff in 2007), and the storyarc about Darin finding out Lisa is his mom (because at the time McKeever also found out who his birth mother was).Because McKeever had so much on his plate (the Marvel titles mentioned above) he had to decline Batiuk's offer to co-write the strip. Had McKeever accepted he likely would've been the one to shape the direction of the next generation of characters, Summer, Rana, Maddie, Cory, etc.
>>151995198I kind of wondered if Batiuk's intention was to get a younger voice on the comic for a fresher perspective. To give you an idea of how much younger Sean McKeever is, he was born the year Funky Winkerbean launched. My guess is because that and maybe other things fell through Batiuk continued the comic as is. Maybe the original intention with Pete was that he would be the character that McKeever would put his experiences in the modern comics industry into.
>>151995086Yes I think it’s better to have read the whole thing in one go, if only because you can skip ahead if it’s another ‘Talking trees week’ or ‘old farts talking about comics’.
>>151995209I wonder if Batiuk ever intended to have the Funkyverse continued after he left the strip. I guess Crankshaft does that to an extent but maybe Funky could have died and the strip renamed Winkerbean and focused on the next generation with a new writer and perspective.
>>151994077>>151994094also>drinking
>>151994100I love how dumb act 1 holly looks
>>151994188yeah get fucked les
>>151994400>that linknothing ever truly changes huh
>>151994641whether you like it or not, you're now the preeminent funky scholar in this part of the internet.
>>151994838
>>151994728> Pete that was the core problem since he was the entry point for so many of the characters and stories that really drag in Act III.In hindsight, all of the comic-shit bringing down the comic probably should have made Pete the main suspect.I found him inoffensive in act 2 (though even then I didn't care for the comics he and Darin did even back then), but yeah he becomes bad in Act 3. Though, isn't he the Les-equivalent of his generation?
>>151996221Forgot to mention, but considering the nightmare stories about comic editorial at both of the big two, I feel that it was kind of a missed opportunity.
so what's the most iconic funky strip?
>>151995760Yes she’s the perfect bimbo
>>151995862>Doctorate in Funk
>>151994753Summer can't be gay we know she has descendants
>>151996286>What are you thinking of>Afghanistan
>>151994400> My newspaper only runs the Sunday strips. (WTF?) So people in our area can read a small snippet of a plot that makes no sense whatsoever. Occasionally, I just see someone staggering around, taking a swig of a bottle and fall over.LOL
>>151993916>"It's cheap art."thought it was called writing
>>151993916Good for him.
you can't have an after party thread and not post the OCs
>>151998089Cute Holly
One of my favourite gags
>>151994400>That guy resurrecting the thread 21 years later.I do love old forums
>>151996286This definitely has to be one of them
I've still got 9 years to go, but (short of a major shift in the remaining years) I'm pretty cemented in the fact that Batiuk was right about people hating it just for being different from what they expected in the funny pages. Both of the cancer storylines are actually really sweet, holistic treatments. He goes out of his way to show both Les and Lisa having their own moments of relative weakness as they help each other to cope, and there's always at least a dry wit to the dialogue. The only times the strip really gets maudlin are when Drunky is in the snow and when Lisa gets the false negative.
>>151994552Them's always the breaks with those special library collections, and many don't allow those accessing them to scan or reproduce the content. Hence why for theatre kids the original Chicago version of Grease will always be locked away in the Warren Casey Papers collection.
>>151998089No from this thread, it's from the /co/llection but I find it funny enough to post
>>151994728They could've also made the teenage Eliminator the sibling of the kid one, to go into some crazy lore.
>>151995370My guess is maybe, if he was intending on bringing on a younger writer to handle part of it, back in the mid-00s. If you look at the stories McKeever said he was involved in>Wally in AfghanistanWally's generation>Darin finding out Lisa is his momDarin's generation>The 2006 Crankshaft/Funky crossoverDarin's generationThese were all dealing with the younger characters. Remember that McKeever was also writing Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane at the same time which got highly praised on this board decades ago, so he might've handled the Act 3 new generation pretty well especially since Didio-era people aren't involved with this.Also given that the plan for Act 3 was to jump ahead ten years yet still be set in the "present" that would've retconned Wally's generation to be closer in age to Sean McKeever's generation. My guess is Batiuk would've still had some say in the dialogue and editing stages but might've focused more on Funky's generation and older till eventually McKeever might've gotten more of a handle on it. I don't know if they would've killed Funky, though.
>>151995209I think he could have thought of scaling things back. Essentially he oversees things, gives a plot outline and inks but lets the writer and artist otherwise handle things.
>>151999700Yeah, McKeever in the 2000s was basically the youth guy in comics. He had done Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, Sentinel, his indie work, Gravity was also a young character and tha would have been around the time he moved over to DC to take over Teen Titans (and DC subsequently ruined his career). McKeever handing the Darin and probably Summer generations while Batiuk handles the old farts would have meant that at least some of the stories (the non-old fart ones) would have been better.
>>151996221>>151996237This is also a guess but I think Batiuk was either far removed from the modern comics industry or checked out of most of the mainstream stuff during the 2010sOn McKeever's wiki it states >In 2011, with Marvel cancelling several titles and placing a moratorium on new series, and DC launching The New 52, McKeever found himself suddenly out of comic book work.He went into game writing after that, writing for Star Wars: The Old Republic and other stuff, so that's a link Batiuk had to the modern comics industry that was gone. Other possible ties he had to the comics industry were no longer in any position of power; John Byrne was now over at IDW, Roger Stern I think hadn't done much Marvel or DC work in the 2010s. Also if you remember, Batiuk had Pete tell John that "Metropolis Comics" was going to relaunch everything, in a comic that ran a year after the New 52 announcement. And Chris Sims remarked that Batiuk's jab at JMS' Grounded came about a few years late. There's also the possible problem that DC and Marvel could retaliate (not just against him but anyone who told him) if he told stories of bad editorial decisions that weren't supposed to be public. I think he had built up a lot of goodwill with some people to be able to use Marvel and DC characters in the comic strip from time to time; that could be in jeopardy. And of course he's a Silver Age guy, he probably already had issues with 90s stuff it wouldn't surprise me if he wasn't liking a lot of 2010s directions.So based on all those I could see why he took the route of creating a fictional comic company and indulged in that.
>>151996286Wally thinking about Afghanistan, Funky laying in the gutter drunk, Wally crashing is car, football fields are for band practice and maybe the strip where Les finds Susan wih the pills would probably be the top five I think.>>151996478Adoption or IVF
>>151999294It’s this or the drunk driving.
>>152000269>and tha would have been around the time he moved over to DC to take over Teen Titans (and DC subsequently ruined his career)I thought back to this 2015 story and wondered if this was about the closest Batiuk got to commenting on what happened to McKeever at DC. Now obviously he didn't do the Clone Saga. I think Batiuk chose the Clone Saga for plausible deniability and it was an easy target. But>editorial comes up with a really bad idea and tells the writer to do it>writer does it>writer gets shit on because of it>editorial removes the writer from the book, takes no blameThis is basically what happened to McKeever, isn't it?
>>151996286
>>151996286For me personally it was one of the band parents hijacking the goodyear blimp. But it was probably >Afghanistan.
>>151999605that's cool. I really like the "instruments as weapons" motif.
>>152001025Dinkle stuff is gold, especially the ‘Sex Symbol Harry Dinkle’ page. Thanks for reminding me of the blimp strip I must go and look that one up again.
>>152000515>This is basically what happened to McKeever, isn't it?Yeah, that was more or less the story of his DC run. The Wonder Dog issue of Teen Titans was especially bad because he didn't even come up with the story, he was handed it and told to write it, he did, then the editor completely rewrote but kept his name in the credits.
>>152001150he really is the most successful character. maybe that's why batiuk still keeps him around.
>>151993651Crankshaft next?
>>152001189Lol
>>152000435
>>152001110
>>152001189For one, it'd be hard because the GoComics archive only goes back to 2003 and for a lot of that archive there's no Sundays for some reason. For another, I just plain don't care about Crankshaft and one of the big reasons I dislike the last few years of Funky so much is because of all the Crankshaft encroachment. The fact that the final real week of Funky Winkerbean is dedicated to everyone going to Centerville and a buch of newer Act III characters and Crankshaft characters being the center of those strips, basically telling you to go read Crankshaft, honestly irritated me. It feels like a giant slap to people who might have actually cared about Funky to see it end as a platform for shilling the creator's other comic instead.
>>152001173He seemed to stand by the violent shock end though and mocked fans for being upset, from what I recall in his interviews. But then he wanted Wendy to be a supervillain wanting vengeance for Marvin and got mad that Bryan Q Miller got the dibs on her.
>>152001397This is the crossover I needed to see.
>>152001598I would imagine at the time he's not going to go "yeah this is ass and it's my editor's fault" because he didn't want to burn bridges. He also said, though, that he had to be talked out of quitting the book by Wolfman.
>>151995198Shit, I just realized, I forgot that Wally was in Iraq in 2006/2007 and and it looks like McKeever did, too.
>>152001645Maddie floof
>>152001488you're really gonna diss my boi Crankshaft like that
>>152001815>The alternate universe where Les got fired for what Chien wrote
>>152001815if I could I'd draw Chien and all the other forgotten characters in band gulag.
>>152001815Garfield has some serious BDE in this image
>>152001645It just hit me what Act 3 Les looks like sometimesHe looks kind of like an older Paul Rabin from Spider-Man
>>151996221>Though, isn't he the Les-equivalent of his generation?Yes.
Crankshaft cameo in Byrne's Next Men #10
>>152003573>Winkerbean something on bus headerAnd a mention to Funky too.
>>152003591what, you mean the "you trying to get killed??" part?
>>152003573This cameo is kind of interesting because if you take in the timeline of Next Men into account, everything might probably be the same for Funky and Crankshaft up until Aldus Hilltop is elected instead of Bush and Clinton, which means Clinton doesn't visit Harry Dinkle in this timelineAnd also some people will start having mutations around late 90s because some kind of STD kept getting transferred that mutates people, because someone fucked one of the Next Men. Eventually mutates create their own kingdoms, and destroyed the UN in 2009, leading to a war that lasts from 2009 to 2025. So anything Funky or Crankshaft from those years may not really happen or might happen differently in the Next Men universe
>>152004129That's okay, I'm sure time janny can sort it out.
Are there any other finished newspaper strips that may be worth checking out? Ideally those that did not run for 50 years (although that's probably a minority for the good ones). I have heard that Pogo is good and it's apparently less than 30
>>152004311Calvin and Hobbes.The Far Side.Fox Trot as a daily strip.Kudzu is more or less a Southern Funky Winkerbean and had similar issues with side characters taking over the strip while the primary cast got sidelined. Not sure how easy it is to find collections of that one though.
>>151999605I find it funny that prior to the 2025/2026 storytimes the ones who got requests/fan art done of them were:>Becky>Rachel>the twins from Funky and Crankshaft
>>152004830iirc in a previous storytime a lot of anons got attached to Becky during act II for being such a good waifu to Wally, people got quite invested in their relationship as one of the high points. Obviously Act III kinda ruins that. And twins are always good.
>>152001815>>152001848>Les gets fired>goes into a extremely depressed state>Lisa dies years earlier due to some reason or other>domino effect of everyone else fucking up and becoming their Act 3 selves too early>Chien feels guilty and tries to get Les out of there and drives him to Indiana>Starts regretting it after having to hear Les during the drive>For some reason they're forced to stay at the Arbuckle houseI have no idea where else to go with this
>>152004749Kudzu actually sounds pretty interesting being a southerner myself. I remember reading Fox Trot in the sunday papers growing up, but the only thing that really stuck with me was the artstyle (then again, I was more taken with garfield and wizard of id at the time so who am I to judge?)
>>152005306How does Wally fit into all this?
>>152005369Uh...Ok so Les' firing had the domino effect that everyone became their Act 3 selves or worse, earlierFor example Funky ends up looking like Act 3 Funky because of alcoholism bloat and being in prison for a a year or so because of accidentally hitting someone while drunk, which dissolved his marriage sooner and Cindy feels justified in taking away his stuff (even though she kind of caused some of the problems indirectly). This version of Cindy cuts off all ties to Westview but is now even more isolated and aloneSo in John Howard's case it was worse because Wally was found the first time much earlier so John didn't fully have the change he did in the original story (full makeover, planned proposal, etc)Wally and Becky's story plays out like Act 2 but in the background a much darker John is emerging so that when Wally goes missing in Iraq it goes like what that pic saysWally marries Rachel and also gets a support dog and they decide to leave to Indiana since there's not much they can do in Westview
>>152001645Dat early digital rendering>>152003355Was this peak smug in Funky? I don’t even think Les achieved this level.
I went on vacation and didn't have it in me to keep up, so I dropped out somewhere in Act 3, but I enjoyed Acts 1 & 2 and I want to thank OP for dumping. I only had a vauge idea about Funky Winkerbean from Comics Curmudeon back then and it was really interesting to get more context. >>151994077Act 1 art and jokes are so refreshing now.
>>151993651ngl it's kinda crazy how this comic went from what it was to what it ishow'd the creator even go to that point
>>152005630he watched Pepper Annhow would a crossover work?
>>152005630He more or less stated getting bored of doing gags, did the story where Lisa gets pregnant and got praise and attention for it and eventually made the choice to pivot away from gags and more towards drama since that interested him more and also he kept chasing the high he got from the pregnancy story.
>>152001187I think what makes him work is that usually cocky characters get their comeuppance as the wages for their pride, whereas Harry just gets away with it. However it’s all so low-stakes and silly that it ends up being charming.
Bumping for interest (also catching up with the years I missed)
>Ranadan>Tomboy Summer>Gothtober
This was like carrying a baby for 18 months and then delivering a giant turd instead. Not OP's fault but as everyone else already said Batiuk did not have enough skill as a writer to move past gag strips and forced things to happen so they'd go the way he wanted, genuinely believing if shitty superhero comics for kids could do that so could he.Congrats on the longest SoP ever, OP.
>>151994441>then you knew that Darin and Jessica weren't relatedThe strip wasn't about Autobots so Willis didn't care. He did a much crueler hatchet job on For Better or For Worse.
>>151994466>but I can’t believe there were entire communities dedicated to shitting on newspaper comicsTelevision Without Pity was a remarkable online community that influenced the creation of many others.
>>152006549Is that a good thing or a bad thing
>>152005654depends what era they’re going for
>>152006568it was seminal snark where the last generation of boomer writers and bad actors were excoriated. the place that rechristened Drew Barrymore "Lispy Potatoface."
>>152006541Foob is another case where people greatly exaggerated its faults. The last few years ARE bad, Elly is definitely an unlikable boomer by that point and Elizabeth/Anthonny did indeed suck. But the degree to which that was the case vs. how the critics portrayed definitely don't align. Like the whole "the family hates April" thing is and was way overblown. Especially not when the actual target of Johnston's dislike for Girls These Days was Becky.Definitely no defending THIS though beyond it being amusing in the same way vendos, climate damage, what brings, and I stand in line are.
>>152006571Yeah, the internet of the 2000s was just a very snarky place as the late Gen Xers were the main ones using it and bringing that same sensibility. TWoP, Comics Curmudgeon and Something Awful all come from the same sort of place and ethos. I think even TV Tropes was originally snarkier too. Then there's how those types of places influenced broader culture. Something like The Soup, for example, was 100% just that same style of caustic humorous criticism of pop culture transplanted to TV.
>>152005539
>>152006541Why does Elly look like a muppet?
>>152006652>as the late Gen Xers were the main ones using it and bringing that same sensibilityYou're welcome, by the way.
>>152006652Pretty much. TVTropes had vandals from SomethingAwful pretty often, but then Fast Eddie liked to snipe any articles and tropes he felt were too negative.
>>152006652Good
I will say one aspect that was 'interesting' (in good ways and bad) was how despite the comic growing more grounded and some of the more whimsical elements being retconned, Batiuk never went the whole nine yards.Dinkle is obviously the most blatant example, but then you have stuff like Harry's testimony in act 2 where he references the stuff in act 1, the references to Les' (fake) machine gun, Holtron's sentience not being fully disproven, etc.
>>152006652I think this snark has been slowly losing ground to less cynical views with time. I'd even say you can see this happening with the way anons focused on the better characters like Dinkle or lamented the lost potential funky had.
There's Funky Winkerbean! Over here, Funky!
>>152007565there's so much more to this joke now.
>>152007113>The three ages of Funk
>>152007457Constant snark is just exhausting. It's fun in small doses, as a contrast, but when it's everything it loses all value.
>>152001189This comic is what I'll think of whenever I think of Funky Cancerbean.
>>152001633
>>152008517I don’t know, I feel that too many people just want to be validated for doing the bare minimum and snarking was a good way to bring them back to earth. The other thing is that ultimately snarking didn’t stop people like Batiuk from doing what they were doing, for better or worse you need creators who are mentally tough enough and prepared to do what they want rather than folding like a deck of cards at the first criticism… until they start making comics about guys making comics.
So, who are we casting for the Funky Winkerbean movie coming never?
>>152008517The opposite, like poptimism in music, has been even worse because it allows slop to exist uncritically and worse than that be treated as if it has an true merit.
>>152008698It was always kind of weird seeing Sims get so big (relatively) because I remember first reading his stuff 20+ years ago and that was entirely because a guy I was AIM friends with from GameFAQs turned me onto the ISB because he was a regular that comic shop that Sims worked at.
>>152010367Is he really that big? I just kinda file him away with Seanbaby in the early 2000s make fun of nerd shit category. Haven't thought about either of them in years.
>>152010833At one point he was one of the bigger names among comic book journalists, had writing gigs for Marvel. That went away, including ending Funky Watch, for the crime of trolling Valerie D'Orazio like 15 years ago.
>>152008970On the flipside, snarking also felt like the bare minimum for getting validated for having something critical, or something that looks critical, to say. There were people who were good at it, funny at it; but after a while constant snark beget a lot of wannabe-comedians who mistook snarking for insight or some kind of 24/7 shield against the world (case in point: Lowtax from Something Awful). Which brings me to another point>>152009730>The opposite, like poptimism in music, has been even worse because it allows slop to exist uncritically and worse than that be treated as if it has an true merit.I don't think it's even worse, but it's equally as bad, because I was there to see Scans Daily go overboard on the snark while starting to word police people. It's also bringing me to mind of how 2010s entertainment went to shit when people tried too hard to checkbox list diversity instead of letting it happen naturally, while getting defensively hostile about it, and then it led to the response, a cottage industry of angry people fixated on finding as many nitpicks and problems as possible. It's just one extreme to another.
>>152007565he should be drunk, holding a bottle in his hand. what if he groped her titty?
>>152011305
In hindsight, Tracy returning to Westview and reconnecting with Funky as his rebound instead of Holly would have probably been better simply because she was a little more of a blank slate but had history compared to Holly who's practically an entirely different character sharing only the same name.
>>152011367Kek
>>152011367>filenamegosh it's perfect
>>152010833In comics? Kinda, because in the 2010s Comics Alliance was one of the bigger sites for comic books at the time. Funky Watch was probably how a lot of comic book people became aware of the comic.Looking back it was funny but a few he did felt like he was straining to find some way to interpret it as misery. I kind of wondered what his reaction to the Atomic Comix era would've been.
>>152011751
>>152011367Hahah
>>152011946Go Speed Bushka!
Sorry to ask OP, but do you have a MEGA of all these?
Bump of interest
>>152011456I'm divided on that because I think there is an interesting idea of a girl like Holly pushed to the brink to excel in the baton twirling and such during high school while appearing cheerful on the surface and then it wears down on her post-high school with all that also happened to her. You have things there that could lead to it, like how Act 1 showed her mom being way too involved in shaping what she needed to do. That's a lot of pressure.But yeah using only the Act 2 Holly stuff for Tracy, it's possible that it could've worked. I think Batiuk probably wanted Holly in the role because of the dramatic change
>>152014430The issue is that the change should have actually been shown. Not just her suddenly popping up like that. It's an issue throughout the entire strip.
>>151994219I think this is the other time they interacted in Act 1. I don't know if there were any others.
>>152014549Yeah, I sort of get the idea of it, where the idea would be finding out how drastically Holly changed would be like someone going to their reunion and finding out someone drastically changed; the happy-go-lucky bimbo got screwed up by life and has her health and marriage problems. But I agree, the issue is since it's a story there'd need to be a little more of the backstory shown because the reader isn't just someone who went to the reunion, they're seeing the lives of the characters on a regular basis. Since Holly got upgraded to series regular there'd need to be more on the backstoryAnd it's not like there aren't any angles to go with, like you can see in >>152014872 she got seriously hurt, you see in other Act 1 comics how controlling her mom was. We do see Act 3 Holly and her mom have a sometimes strained relationship but I think that could've played earlier in Act 2.
>Funky's trainer, of all characters, migrated over to CrankshaftCan't keep a good girl down.
>>152015052The problem is that Batiuk thinks of his characters only in relation to his immediate needs in any given story. He doesn't think of them as people with lives or motivations and write appropriately. This is pretty apparent with how quickly Summer disappeared when she graduated and likewise how her entire childhood was skipped over. Because Summer wasn't a character, she just existed as an accessory for Les so he could worry abou "wow being a dad sure is tough" and "oh my daughter is a jock".Once she was graduated she served her purpose and out of the story she goes. It's a very silver agey way to write. What's Captain Cold's motivations? What drives him to do what he does? What things happened to make him want to enact this plan? Who cares, he just needs to show up and rob this bank so Flash has a villain to fight in this issue. That's basically how Batiuk approaches and uses his characters despite what he might say about their rich lives.
bump
>>152011191I remember shortly before the Peter David blowout there were some s_d people mocking a young kid's shitty Teen Titans deviantart art of Flamebird and one named Lithera apparently tried to drag the wank over here. Their woke rebrand on Dreamwidth wouldn't dare dream of transvestigating minors.
There’s Funky Winkerbean, over here Funky!
>>152006441Excellent taste.
>>152015458She seems a lot more chipper here.
>>152017711She escaped from Funkytown, of course she is.
>>152017711She's not dealing with Funky's laziness and bad jokes.
>>152017711For now>>152017959Now she has to deal with Crankshaft's grouchiness and malapropisms
If we made a character tier list, do we separate eras or just judge people by their whole arc?
>>152018103I think you can do bothBecause some characters might work better taken as a whole and others might work best during one of the Acts
>>152018103I think separate eras would be good. I actually liked Act II Les, but Act I Les was mid and I can't fucking stand Act III Les.
>>152018111>>152018332That works, it will be a lot of work getting all the characters in but I can at least get one with the main cast put together.
>>152018332Yeah, it's to the poin where a lot of them may as well be entirely different characters like Crazy or Holly.
>>152017413The story time happening during thanks giving parade made this reference all the sweeter
>>152018332Well someone's already gone ahead and made a tierlist for all three eras. Some are missing but it's a start at least they included Masky Mcdeath and Dick Tracy. Also before you judge me too harshly on my choices I can't remember a lot of these characters from Act I.https://tiermaker.com/create/funky-winkerbean-act-i-character-tier-list-incomplete-1304679https://tiermaker.com/create/funky-winkerbean-act-ii-character-tierlist-1304679https://tiermaker.com/create/funky-winkerbean-act-ii-characters-1304679
>>151994100Love the way he draws Holly's mouth
>>152020071no one is brave or foolish enough to put Dinkle anywhere other than S tier
>>152022513I'd say Act 1 and 2 Dinkle is S-Tier, Act 3 Dinkle is S minus tier or A plus tier
>>152020071There's definitely a lot missing and then a lot of random one offs that I didn't bother even ranking.Except Chien and Sadie, I like them too much to not rank the Act III versions.
>>152016051Knowing that he wanted Sean McKeever to assist in writing makes me realize how much of a missed opportunity that was, especially since DC fucked McKeever over and Marvel had Justin from McKeever's Sentinel get killed off in Avengers Arena. I felt like the Darin/Jessica storyline in the final years of Act 2 was the strongest storyline in Funky for both characters, and if McKeever had a hand in that as the wiki and that interview indicated, I think I would've wanted to see his take on the younger characters of Act 3.
>>152023558I would bet that he did all of the Jessica/Darin stuff in 2006 and 2007. The Halloween party feels like it for sure, especially Jessica's "I'm actually really insecure" bit and throwing up on Darin which feels like it was pulled from SMLMJ.
>>152023514I respect the integrity of not putting Dinkle in S tier for Act 1 and 2.
I put them in D tier if I couldn't remember who they were or if I didn't give af.I'm pretty sure that chick in B tier is Livinia, who isn't a good character, but I ranked some of them based on the potential their characters had too; since, well, we are dealing with Batiuk here.
>>152023837It wouldn't surprise me. Batiuk still probably had some kind of hand in it (McKeever says in the interview there were times Batiuk came up with way better punchlines than him) but reading all of Funky together it did feel different, especially since up until the McKeever crossover, Darin either mostly played straight man to the other characters or was interacting with Lisa in a way that made the readers wonder if he'll learn his real mom was Lisa (ie trying to defend Lisa from Frankie, driving her to the hospital, getting taught French, etc). Prior to the McKeever stuff, I think Jessica seemed like mostly a background character with some airhead moments.
>>152018103I think something like this would be a better choice. at least I know where I'd put Les.
>>152025057Speaking of which, what would this depressionverse be like
>>152025185his what
>>152025057I was thinking that too, I guess we can at least decide who's going into which quadrant.
>>152025057I'm pretty sure there is a /co/ version of this, I remember because Clarissa's dad is bottom right. Also surely Les doesn't go there, I mean he turns into an insufferable smug, self pitying cunt but and he did have to watch Lisa die of cancer so he at least suffered a bit.
>>152025358It is kinda strange how Funky has flown under the radar for most of /co/, to be honest apart from the ‘Afghanistan’ strip there’s nothing I’ve seen before apart from a couple of strips in Act III that I saw on a Sunday Funnies thread.
>>152024496Gotta get tips somehow.
Does anyone have the Act 1 strip where Funky's reading a book and the writer upfront says that they hate it and they're only doing it to get paid?Feel like /co/ would get mileage out of that one.
>>152024663The leaves are more characters than some of these guys (straight to tier d)
>>152018332Act 1-3 Wally I think is best overall if taking all the Acts combined. Act 1 Wally is just "thinking baby" jokes but those comics hit differently after knowing what happens to him in Act 2 and 3. The circumstances around Wally got ridiculous but that's not a reflection on the character
>>152026183I agree, if I were to rank all three acts Wally is my favourite next to Dinkle.
>>152025805It was mainly cause it wasn't getting storytimed here much after 2014 or 2015. Most of the stuff storytimed back in 2014 was from part of Act 2 with part of Act 3 and even then it wasn't the entire run the way OP did recently. It was generally the bigger storylines like Drunk Funky, Lisa's Story, Funky's rise and fall and car crash in Act 3, the Who Killed John Darling story, Wally's insane life
>>152017058There are some people on there that probably unintentionally benefited from the PAD blowout since a lot of that stuff got memoryholed
>>152026981Yeah, That was sort of the peak of Funky Dramabean so I would assume it was mostly just to do the ones that were more interesting since at the time the current strip would have been Mason Jarre and Cliff Anger and shit like that.
>>152024663Livinia should have red hair but that was forgotten
>>152025933Sorry, I don't have it on me :-/
>>152027938I did the storytimes for Funky on /co/ back then; it was less to do with the Mason Jarre/Starbuck Jones/Cliff Anger stuff (it's way lower on the list for the reason I stopped) and more to do with outside things that came up that cut into time. Plus I was also trying to find as much Act 1 and 2 stuff as possible but I got a bit burnt out from getting too far into Funky.
>>152025239what
what are the canon dick sizes of the Funkyverse fellas?
>>152025185Everything is fun rainbow unicorns compared to punpun
>>152030805Les is the biggest dick
>>152030778Note how the Simpsons Thanksgiving Day balloon's haircut resembles none of these
>>152030835The closest is probably the third one
>>152030899The artists drew him from memory
>>152030922I really wanna see the storyboards for that, and did they ever talk about why they chose Funky for this? Like on Twitter or DVD commentary or something?
>>152031439I mean the joke is that Springfield only gets third rate character balloons and the name Funky Winkerbean stands out so it was probably not given much more thought than that. I mean even Hagar the Horrible or Cathy would have been steps up in relevancy as far as that joke works.
>>151999294Have you ever noticed how odd it is that right after he falls on the sidewalk in the snow, he's suddenly at home without any explanation in the next comic, and no one mentioned that they found him in the snow and brought him home?What if everything shown after he fell on the sidewalk, was all in his head as he's freezing and then in a coma at the hospital?
>>152032092My assumption is the fall was just a short thing and he quickly picked himself up and stumbled back home.
>>152014872>She got burned everywhere but her baton twirling armShe'll be back in week
>>152030767what's a depressionverse?
>>152025933Sounds like an I Chong strip. Also going back, it's a good thing Dinkle got a black uniform because the white makes him look like an ice-cream seller.
>>152033586As an aside, I’m now reminded of one of my favourite newspaper cartoon gags.
>>152032092It's actually not a bad representation of being black-out drunk. The last thing you remember being downing one drink too many and the next thing you know you're waking up at home with no idea how you managed to get there is definitely a thing, certainly one I've experienced a couple of times. I don't know if Batiuk had experience of alcoholism himself (or at least in someone he knew) but given the detail it's depicted in I have to presume he did, at least second-hand.
>>152030778Funky is cute
>>152034397Which is the cutest?
>>152026981I suppose the fact that it’s a 50-year old strip and not exactly being re-released didn’t help expose people to ‘classic’ Winkerbean.
>>152030778Mmm... Pizza...
>>152032092Drunky Winkerbean was one of the only things from Act II that I genuinely loved. If he had stayed a cool drunk bastard until the end of the act (and if the art had never changed) I probably would have liked II over act I. It would have been more believable in portraying his struggles with alcoholism too, showing that it took a long time to get over addiction (as opposed to just talking about how hard it is with that bitch Wade, which is what Batiuk does instead.) As it is Funky only falls off the wagon once, and his friends treat him like scum for loosening up and getting drunk one time. I was really on Funky's side during that whole story. He's not even a nasty drunk or anything, he just likes to party. He didn't deserve to have his entire surprise birthday party (these are always shitty anyway) turn against him like that. I mean, Wally only had two drinks, and then he ripped Becky's arm off and avoided her for years. Yeah, it was an accident, but I still think that's way shittier than anything Funky did in the whole strip.You know what, fuck this fucking comic. It pisses me off.
>>151993651What happened here? some globohomos activated their biblical alien technology and then everyone else was turned to tang?
