Well, after a week spent rehashing Funky’s failed fitness program, today’s strip is a change of pace indeed!
Six months after we learned of it, Funky finally gets around to telling Holly that his father has started smoking. As he’s telling her this, a nurse passes by pushing a wheelchair in which sits the crumpled, soulless husk of Ed Crankshaft! But that, that’s not the big news! Today we learn that Funky’s dad has a name!
No doubt his friends knew him as “Mort.” His daughter-in-law, however, in the first time we’ve seen her come to visit, stiffly addresses him: “Hello, Morton” (I imagine her intoning this the same way Seinfeld would say “Hello, Newman“). Without imparting a hug or a kiss, she proceeds to lace into him about his recently acquired habit. Mort gives no fucks: he proceeds to smoothly light two cigs with his Zippo, proffering the second one to his lady friend.
Six months ago a doctor took Funky aside and raised the prospect of moving his father into “full-time nursing care.” But Mort seems happier and more engaged then we’ve ever seen him.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Wow, this might be one of the best strips in recent memory. And it features an Alzheimer’s patient in a nursing home, too! Only in the Funkyverse. Morton refuses to be sucked into Funky’s (read: Batiuk’s) bottomless pit of misery and despair, instead choosing to get all YOLO with it. Good for him. Like the old saying goes, you only die once so smoke ’em if ya got ’em. You go, Mort. My new favorite resident of the Funkyverse.
Yeah, give Mort (how apropos!) credit for going out on his own terms rather than submitting to the whims of the Dark God of the Funkyverse. Add to that the reminder that yes, one day karma will catch up to Ed Crankshaft and he’ll end his days alone and forgotten, and this is one of the most positive Funky Winkerbean strips in a good long while.
Lighting two cigarettes and offering one to a woman was considered very suave when an actor did it in a Bette Davis movie.
It’s so refreshing and rare when Author Guy finally takes his foot OFF a character’s throat for a change. Not too long ago Pa Bean was pretty much totally unresponsive so it’s kind of cool to see him, you know, doing stuff, even if it’s just goofy comic relief. Now watch, he’ll end up having him burn down Bedside Manor or get cancer or something, just to balance it out.
Mort is so grotesque. It’s as if he’s some Middle Earth troll-like character drawn by Rankin-Bass.
Funky in the title panel is the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time.
Well, it ain’t as if he’s going to have to worry about getting hooked or anything. Also, I do like how Crankshaft gets a HAPPY ending. Jeff is off with his collection, he doesn’t have his evil mother cramping his style and his father-in-law is also out of the picture.
Such loving detail lavished upon deformed physical decrepitude- THAT’S how things are done in the Funkyverse!
@fudgeripple82: Well, he DOES have to depict contemporary issues affecting young adults in their late fifties in a sensitive and thought-provoking manner.
Does this make Funky le petit Mort?