grace
@grace

An Extremely Abridged Funky Winkerbean Retrospective

Today, December 31st, 2022, is the end of 50 years of newspaper comic Funky Winkerbean. Here it is.

The last Funky Winkerbean. It's set in this weird 60s retrofuture. An older woman tells her daughter, Lisa, to stop reading and go to bed. The last panel is a close-up on the book Lisa's Story: The Other Shoe.

This is a real wet fart of an ending, but to see why, we have to take a very bumpy and buck-wild trip back in time. Please, join me.

content warnings: This is gonna touch on a lot of stuff that's been hot-button issues for the last 30 years. I don't think I go into enough detail to be triggering, but there are gonna be mentions of domestic abuse, cancer, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and so on.



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in reply to @grace's post:

Yeah! It truly is the end of an era. I believe that, before this, Funky Winkerbean was the longest-running comic strip of its kind (or at least longest-running American strip) that still had its original author. Everyone else has passed the torch at least once.

Batiuk is still gonna keep doing Crankshaft and occasional Funky stories on his blog, but it's wild to see the dailies end regardless.

in reply to @grace's post: