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.


MisutaaAsriel
@MisutaaAsriel

You mean to tell me this shitpost of a chost is genuine? That there's an actual comic named "Funky Winkerbean"? That, despite never having seen it in the Sunday Edition the 27 years I've been on this earth, I'm to believe it was syndicated in newspapers?

That this creation, which feels like something not of this reality, as if plucked from an alternate reality next door and placed within our own for laughs, is a genuine product of this world?

That a reoccurring background character with the name of a famous motorbike company is a Janitor? And kicks off some batshit insane final arc?

Surely you jest.

Surely you jest… right?

Please tell me this is a joke.

grace
@grace

Oh, Funky Winkerbean is not only all too real, but it ran in over 400 newspapers, especially in its home state of Ohio, where it's set (and we get frequent references to Ohio landmarks like Luigi's Montoni's Pizza).

There's even a flashback during the final arc where Timemop, as the fans call him, arrives in the past, sees a motorcycle, and goes "Yeah, you know what, that's a good name. I'm gonna go by Harley Davidson while I'm here." I would never lie about Funky Winkerbean. The truth is so much funnier.


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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: