Here’s the last Mother’s Day adjacent strip that ever appeared in Funky Winkerbean!
I spent time with my mom and siblings today, and it turned into an impassioned debate on what would make the greatest Mother’s Day movie. I argued that the James Cameron double feature of Aliens and Terminator 2 would make a great afternoon for an action movie loving mom.
Friday the 13th (the first one) was considered but my mother said, “That doesn’t sound like a very nice movie about a mom at all.”
Longer posts coming soon! Happy Mother’s Day everyone!
My colleague Epicus Doomus and others have said: you had to like Funky Winkerbean before you could hate it. This was certainly true of me. I was once a genuine fan of the strip. Now I write venomous screeds about it for this blog. (And don’t worry, that book signing screed is on its way.)
I acquired my love of newspaper comics in the early 1980s, from my dad. I consumed them in a particular order, based on the order they appeared in my newspaper, and in descending order of how much I liked them. It was my little comics ritual.
Peanuts was always first, because good ol’ Charlie Brown holds a very dear place in my heart. Garfield, which was still pretty fresh at the time, was second. The true giants of the 1980s comics page hadn’t come along yet, so unremarkable stuff like Drabble, Shoe (hey, I wanted to be a journalist) and the Mort Walker strips were in the middle. Funky Winkerbean was last. It batted ninth in my lineup, but it made the team. I considered it the last strip worth reading, though I did enjoy it sometimes.
But I can pinpoint the exact day Funky Winkerbean lost me as a reader, and only regained me as a hate-reader 30 years later. That day was November 19, 1988.
You know, in 2023, Dinkle showed up in only six Crankshaft strips. Just six out of the whole year. And this year we cannot escape him. Like Lillian in Monday’s strip, I’m almost feeling stalked. I’m guessing that when I pull up the tallies for 2024, Dinkle will have outpaced the appearances of everyone except Cranky, Lil, Pam and Jeff.
Since I’ve been on such an intensive Act I dive these past couple weeks, I thought I’d continue the trend and pull up some of Dinkle’s first appearances. Some of these have been posted before, but having them all to consume at once, like big ol’ wad of waxy sweet band candy, lets us truly absorb the full flavor of a fresh Dinkle.
As I posted back in March, the first strip with any band director at all was March 18, 1973.
In this strip, the band director is unseen and unnamed, though the personality is completely in line with what Dinkle would be.
What once was a cute inside joke among Star Wars fans has now turned into a legitimate and corporatized holiday that I’m guessing more people notice than Martin Luther King Jr. Day. To be fair, Disney can’t use MLK as an excuse to sell branded enamel pins, or goose viewership numbers on their streaming service. At least, not yet.
Still, allow me to mark the occasion. After all, I’m a child of the 90’s who loved Star Wars back when it was still charmingly commercial and not an omnipresent soulless mega brand selling tiny Benjamin Button frogman plushies to soccer moms who’ve never even heard of KOTOR. I have the action figures, the t-shirts, the comics, the beat up old paperbacks novels now punted by the UberMaus into the abyss of ‘LEGENDS’ canon. I have a VHS player so I can watch the series PROPERLY, without all the Special, Specialer, and Specialist edition bantha crap.
But, no matter what some of you in the comments section might think, I do not, NOR HAVE I EVER HAD, any sort of risque Slave Leia getup.
I do have a custom Boba Fett swimsuit. A tasteful one piece, as befits an elder maiden shaped like a handful of cookie dough.
ANYWAY! Here are some Star Wars/Funky Winkerbean crossover strips, from Act I. When both Star Wars and Funky Winkerbean were better.
I know there’s been a couple extra days gap between posts, sorry about that guys! It was a busy week of moving spring cows and their calves out to pasture.
The hills are alive, with the sound of mooing.
This weekend, however, the skies opened up and we got a near biblical amount of rain. So while I wait for the creeks to sink back into their banks, and the mud to dry up, I finally had a chance to curl up with my brand new (used) Volume 2 of The Complete Funky Winkerbean.
Son of Stuck Funky 