This is totally babies — lisa’s death is always always always about les,...

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lisa’s death is always always always about les, isn’t it

lisa’s death is always always always about les, isn’t it

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FunkyWatch: August’s Most Depressing (and Confusing) ‘Funky Winkerbean’ Strips

By Chris Sims

Thanks to Josh Fruhlinger at the Comics Curmudgeon, I started reading Tom Batiuk’s long-running newspaper comic strip, Funky Winkerbean. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, what started as a strip full of wacky high-school hijinx has slowly transitioned into being an inescapable quagmire of despair. It is, without question, the single most depressing long-form work in comics history.

And I am completely obsessed with it.

Over the past month, Batiuk has reached new highs (or lows, as the case may be) in chronicling the wretched, godforsaken lives of his cast of characters, and if you’re a regular reader of this column, you’ll know that he had to pull out something special. Something even more alarming than Les Moore’s romantic entanglements. That’s right everybody — we’re talking about cross-time head trauma.

Before we get to that, though, there are still plenty of other misery-filled plot threads left over from last month that need to be resolved, specifically Les getting a movie option for the book he wrote about his wife dying of cancer. And don’t worry, just in case you forget that’s what the book was about, Batiuk offers plenty of reminders.

Anyway, you’d think this would be good news — if nothing else, Les could maybe bank a little bit of that option money for his daughter’s college fund, what with her dreams of a basketball scholarship maybe getting crushed with a painful knee injury back in February — but in Westview, there is no good news that cannot be twisted to result in still more suffering. As evidence, I give Les Moore’s glum face as he hears that having someone make a movie out of his book is an event not unlike watching someone feast on the flesh of his offspring. Welcome back to Funky Winkerbean, everybody!

Read more at ComicsAlliance.

Source: comicsalliance.com comics funky winkerbean

zzedar asked:

Why do you feel so strongly about Funky Winkerbean, anyway?

I remember when I was young, and Funky Winkerbean was in the newspaper, and it was starting to talk about more serious topics.  And it was cool!  I liked the idea of taking something silly and then finding something deeper in it, or putting characters who are generally humorous through something serious to see how they deepen.  I still like that idea, obviously, if you see the kinds of stuff I write and the kinds of stuff I like that’s made by other people (Scrubs, MTMTE, etc., stuff where the tone can shift dramatically from hilarious to depressing within the span of minutes)  

But, as y’all are probably well aware, I’ve come to not like Funky Winkerbean.  Stuff it does is grating and drives me up the wall.  And yet this is a bunch of ridiculous characters who have terrible things happen to them and became more serious, and that’s like my jam.  What’s going wrong?  AND HOW DO I AVOID THIS MYSELF IN MY OWN SHIT????  And so it just becomes a workshop session, you know?  Trying to examine what it’s doing badly that I can avoid like the plague.  Like, it’s become this example of What Not To Do.  And, honestly, it’s become pretty valuable to me in that respect!

The most important lesson it’s imparted on me is this:

Manage the bad things that happen to your characters as if it’s a bank account.  You first spend a while building capital on a character, and then when you’re ready, you make that withdrawal from the Bad Stuff Bank.  The problem you want to avoid is to not keep withdrawing and withdrawing and withdrawing from the Bad Stuff Bank that you stop remembering to put shit back in.  Eventually your nerve endings are all frayed and you don’t even remember why the fuck you liked this character to begin with.  They haven’t even been themselves for forever, and they’ve just become a person-shaped object to heap Bad Stuff on.  The story ceases being about the character and becomes about the overdrawing from the bank itself.  There’s no longer an arc, there’s just a freefall.  

And some people mistake that freefall for Important Deep Writing.  They point to their Bad Stuff as if it’s amazing on the face of it, not realizing nobody cares because for years now it’s been happening to a bunch of assholes.

Don’t overdraw from your Bad Stuff Bank.  

Don’t be Funky Winkerbean.  Or Electroma.  

god, electroma

funky winkerbean
Savvy newspaper comics readers know that Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft inhabit the same universe (and same Ohio town). Funky, however, likes to skip forward dramatically in time ever so often, aging its characters a decade or so. Crankshaft, not so...

Savvy newspaper comics readers know that Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft inhabit the same universe (and same Ohio town).  Funky, however, likes to skip forward dramatically in time ever so often, aging its characters a decade or so.  Crankshaft, not so much, which is a good idea if only because its titular character is really really old.  A ten year skip into the future likely means Crankshaft-the-guy wouldn’t be around anymore.  This leaves newspaper comic strip nerds like me wondering how the two strips still relate, chronologically.  

Well, today cartoonist Tom Batiuk took a short break from depressing everyone by giving us a pretty big clue.  In Crankshaft, Pam and Jeff (Crankshaft’s daughter and son-in-law) are in the audience of a Battle of the Bands.  In Funky Winkerbean, retired Harry Dinkle is writing his memoirs, and flashes back to when he was still the band director, specifically on a day where he attends that very same Battle of the Bands.  Same yellow foldup chairs, same stage, same band!  Oh, and of course, Pam and Jeff are sitting right there.

So Crankshaft is now set in the past of Funky Winkerbean.

Man, I bet this means Crankshaft is dead in “current” Funky time.  (There were some really odd non sequitur strips a while back showing a very aged Crankshaft on his deathbed…)

See?  Sometimes Batiuk gives us fun things to piece together, rather than teaching us about how we’re all going to die and everything is worthless and doomed.

Source: seattlepi.com crankshaft funky winkerbean
i was about to make a joke at darin’s expense at how thrilled he is for this but then i realized that, honestly, i would murder a man for a taste of my elementary/junior/high school’s sausage pizza – that stuff was probably terrible, but i feel it in...

i was about to make a joke at darin’s expense at how thrilled he is for this

but then i realized that, honestly, i would murder a man for a taste of my elementary/junior/high school’s sausage pizza – that stuff was probably terrible, but i feel it in my dna, i need it again

then i realize that darin and i… we are the same

and i become immensely depressed, which is the purpose of funky winkerbean

well played, batiuk, well played

funky winkerbean
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