Son of Stuck Funky

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.

Continue reading →

Happy May The Fourth to all of you!

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.

Continue reading →

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.

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.

Continue reading →

Allow me to take a tenative step atop the rickety defender soapbox for a moment. Because in my humble opinion, if anyone has earned it, it’s me.

Today I wish to lay out some thoughts about Batiuk and his editors and if/how he takes others constructively criticizing his work.

Tom Batiuk has said, in many interviews and in his book forwards, that getting editorial control was precious to him. He goes on and on and on about how he wanted to be free to pursue his vision of his strip. All of this is undoubtedly true.

“There were times when I would imagine that I lived in a world where cartoonists were free to write about whatever interested them, that their creations would belong to them and no one else, and that the concerns of commerce were not their concerns. In essence, that they were happily free to pursue their art. Then a butterfly would flap its wings and I would find myself back in 1984 (not that 1984, but close) and the vexing realities of the real world would set in. ” Introduction to TCFW Volume 5.

Continue reading →