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.