For posterity, I transcribe the Funky Winkerbean overlay that intrudes on today’s Starbuck Jones Cover, in which SJ himself seems to have awoken one day (perhaps after uneasy dreams) to find himself transformed into a drooling chimp:
Holly: This happens to be a key issue that kicks off the Xaxian-Krull war saga!
Funky: Sorry… I must have missed that while I was living in the real world.
Seth MacFarlane & I came up with an improvement for the chimp:
Funky is just being an arse—— to his wife, here. No bones about it. This is the guy who went back in time to admonish his teenage self to hang onto Starbuck Jones #1 for the world-shattering ambition of saving a suburban-Ohio pizza parlor. Not to mention that he was a kid, not in the real world, when this issue was putatively published. He should talk! No! He should shut the f—— up!
Also, a tip of the poison pen to Batominc for crapping all over the guest artist’s work with FW’s inexplicably bitter comment.
Christ! What a Funky Winkerbean!
Update: I couldn’t read the credit in the scan, but TFH has identified the guest artist as Terry Austin.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Well, Starbuck, since you seem to have a functioning brain and functioning hands, you could write Judy a note. If you think she’ll freak out over that, you could write the note and omit the monkey part and just hand it to her.
This is the first SJ cover that’s disappointed me. Look at Judy’s arm–it seems to be behind the Yellow Green-Dress Alien…but she’s standing about three feet in front of him. Unless she has stretching powers and is copping a feel…
Now that Holly (a GIRL!) likes comic books, they’re no longer allowed to be cool.
Ahh, geeezzz, this reminds me of the old DC “Adventure Comics” featuring the teenage Legion of Superheroes with Superboy and the gang. Similar dialogue as in “Oh my gosh! Braniac5 has been turned into a slime devil. When the Princess sees him she’ll lose her stellar powers and the planet’s sun will implode!!!” WTF? Thanks for stirring up memories of bad comics, Bats.
I thought that the minute I looked at Batiuk, I’d know what to do, but it didn’t happen. I was free, but he knew I wasn’t going anywhere. If the generals back at King Features Syndicate could see what I saw, would they still want me to kill him? More than ever, probably. And what would his comics people back home want if they ever learned just how far from them he’d really gone? He broke from comics, and then he broke from himself. I’d never seen a man so broken up.
“Living in the real world”, eh? And what does TheAuthor know about that, exactly? He insists on ruining his guest SJ covers with his own obtrusive blathering and there’s never any point to it, it’s either some flaccid gag or just a bunch of nonsensical jabbering that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. And does he like comic book collecting or does he hate it? It’s impossible to tell anymore and I seriously doubt that he even knows.
Yes I live in the real world. Where any expression of passion or joy or even delight in anything is brutally smashed down by depressed pizza addicts who are simply waiting to die and are terrified that there is more to life than just worship of the dead Lisa and wondering what topping to have.
It’s like Downton Abbey in tights!
Yeah. The ‘real world’……wherein her function is to service a fat, morbid, greedy mope longing for sweet, sweet death.
I know, I know….Batiuk has never followed any sort of 1/2 way realistic time line (it’s called writing)…. But SJ # 216 would be something like 18 years after issue #1. Funky Old/young bought that issue when in high school (age 15… around 1980), so this issue (216) came out around 1998….and yet still only 10 cents.
…..oh never mind
Good point about the timing of issue 216, Pookster. Funky was too busy coping with the real world by passing out in the snow.
Considering that Starbuck Jones is the sole reason Flunky’s ptomaine-ridden greasy spoonery is still in business, you might think he’d react with something other than stoop-shouldered, heavy-lidded ennui, loathing, and contempt.
Of course, ennui, loathing, and contempt is what this strip is all about- even when dealing with allegedly favorite topics like comical books.
Funky: “Wait a minute….why am I being so dismissive of this?!? Didn’t Tom retcon his earlier retcon into me inexplicably being a FAN of the book Time Travel Me had to convince my younger self to buy?”
Holly: “I have no idea. He’s been picking up this story so rarely.”
Funky: “Ah, wait. I forgot. Mister “Quarter Inch Removed From Reality” doesn’t like Silver and Bronze Age comics because they imaginative or exciting! They’re Evil, Filthy GENRE fiction after all! No, he just likes them because they’re OLD.”
Holly: “Hmmm. Just like how Act III is allegedly a reality-based comic strip depicting the issues affecting contemporary issues affecting depicting affecting contemporary issues reality reality reality-”
Funky: “Holly, brake, brake, BRAKE! Pull back now. That way lies madness. Our comic strip now is solely about how much the Dark Lord of Westview despises comics and those who collect them, even as they’re now the only thing he EVER writes about.”
Holly: “Clear as mud!”
Is that chimp touching his junk in a SUNDAY strip?!