Such opinions are highly subjective – I’ve told my story in detail – but I think there’s a new way to identify roughly when this happened in Funky Winkerbean.
Here is the cover blurb for The Complete Funky Winkerbean, Volume 14, 2011-2013, released in January 2025:
[this book] sees the sons and daughters of the original Funky gang starting to make their mark on the world by playing in basketball championships, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, and being deployed to war zones. Along the way there are graduations, weddings, and anniversaries––including the 40th anniversary of Funky Winkerbean.
Now here’s the same blurb for the brand new Volume 15, 2014-2016, released just three weeks ago:
the Funky gang are now in their late forties and raising teenagers of their own. Batiuk continues the Starbuck Jones storyline from the previous volume, as Holly searches for the final five issues of the comic book to send to Cory in Afghanistan. Elsewhere, there is a memorable class reunion, the character of Mason Jarr is introduced, and the cast decamps to Hollywood as Lisa’s Story is about to be adapted into a movie.
Notice the difference? Volume 14 at least sounds like a comic strip someone might want to read. Volume 15 has nothing to sell. Starbuck Jones! Mason Jarr! The Lisa Movie (which wouldn’t even be completed until 2022)! That stupid time travel class reunion, which was basically another Lisa story! Oh, and someone’s in Afghanistan, but don’t worry – his mom is collecting comic books for him!
I submit that 2013-2014 is the time when Act II’s overambitious sloppiness finished transforming into Act III’s lazy self-indulgence. Because Batiuk can’t even polish this turd anymore.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Batiuk turned it into self indulgent twaddle because if he actually did focus on the younger generation, he’d have to admit that the original cast had become unsympathetic clods defeated by making defeatism humanity’s nation.
You can argue for many points, especially in Act III. Is it Wally’s second return which destroyed one of the things people at least semi-enjoyed in Wally and Becky and needlessly added to Wally’s suffering? Is it Les’s re-marriage, which cruelly dumped on another miserable character in Susan by casting her as the antagonist for some reason? The graduation of Summer’s class, where the promise of what Act III was going to be about disappears and whose run up includes the gay prom which is probably the most insultingly insipid story in the entire run?
I agree that 2013-2014 finishes the transformation but I don’t know if that’s the shark jumping moment where it was all downhill. If I had to pin it on any one moment it’s Wally’s homecoming in 2003. The story is needlessly dramatic in a stupid way, sets up the revolting John/Becky/Wally love triangle, its stupid recounting of Wally’s ordeal is just Batty engaging in his desire to write a pulpy adventure story which presages the constant fascination with his childhood interests… in this case adventure comics. So it’s the tuning point where whatever charm may have still been lingering goes away and the art too becomes duller. Where stories increasingly become more self-indulgent in either chasing praise or glorifying childhood nostalgia.
It’s the culmination of issues that go all way back to probably the post office bombing but really congeal in that mess of slop.
I think comic strips rarely have true Jump The Shark moments, because they’re too long-running, and stories unfold very slowly. When do they happen, it’s trigged by an overall change in focus rather than a single moment. Like when Peanuts became too Snoopy-centered in the 1970s. And the awful conclusion to For Better Or For Worse. Rarely is any single comic strip so bad that it kills an entire series by itself.
And Funky Winkerbean has had a ton of those moments, like the ones you mention. I would also add “I made my son a toy out of his grandfather’s murder weapon” and “where’s father?” as two more egregious ones. No television series would have survived any of these incidents.
If I had to pick a single comic strip where Funky Winkerbean jumped the shark, my answer is “the day in 1999 when Lisa got cancer.” (I gave a different answer in the post I linked, but that was more of a personal reaction.) Almost everything that sucked about FW after that moment grew directly from that moment. I was going to list them here, but I might make a whole blog post of it.
Rather than handle it competently, our little man did the only thing he can. Even Lynn Johnston could have written a cancer arc that wasn’t skull collapsingly stupid. That would mean that Lisa would end up being a bird or some stupid thing but at least it wouldn’t be painful in the way what we got is.
What he ought to have done is binge watch Coronation Street and base it off that.
The thing with this question is… you can say “Lisa’s pregnancy” and be correct… but you can also say “Les’ valedictorian speech” and be correct… or “the first Act II class reunion”… or “Susan Smith”… or “the post office bombing”… or “Lefty getting her nickname”… or “Lisa’s first bout with cancer”… or “Wally comes marching home again (the first time)”… or “John Byrne’s guest stint permanently alters the artwork”… or “Wally dies in the minesweeping simulator”… or “Lisa’s death”… or “Wally comes marching home again (the second time)”… or “Lisa’s Story becomes a thing”… or “the emergence of Cayla Tyler-Moore”… or “Funky’s car wreck and time-traveling coma”… heck you could probably even argue for “timepool” and “the death of Bull” and be correct.
I’m hard pressed to think of a piece of media that has had as many shark-jumping moments as Funky Winkerbean. These aren’t just lowlight story arcs, they are all points where TB changed the way he did things for the worse.
If we are just looking for the point where the strip turned into a Starbuck Jones-fueled fantasy land of endlessly diminishing returns, then it is probably Funky’s car wreck and subsequent time-traveling coma in 2010. The story arc itself wasn’t as uniquely terrible as much of what followed (a statement that I would not have believed back when the strips were first printed), but it was such a clear point in the strip’s history where so many tables that TB set up prior were upended or ignored. Starbuck Jones as a thing basically debuted in that story arc, the effects of which are still being felt in Crankshaft… but beyond that, you had all sorts of big pointless changes that occurred shortly after, stuff like: Morton’s remarkable recovery, Wally getting together with Rachel and turning his life back around, Cayla’s appearance changes, Dinkle sliding back out of retirement, Lisa calling in a bomb threat at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport from beyond the grave, the return of Durwood (and eventually Pete), and more.
You can add in Les walking back forgiving Bull.
I wasn’t around for most of FW, so I don’t have the insight of some of the other posters here. But I’d say looking in retrospect at some of the strips that have been posted by the FW historians here, that the shark had long since been jumped by 2013. However, 2013 may represent the point at which the shark was no longer even visible in the rear-view mirror — that the shark had now been jumped so definitively that there was absolutely no chance the strip was EVER going to be even faintly worthwhile ever again.
Though I’d have to go back and really dig through early Act II to confirm, my gut instinct is that the apex shark was jumped in Susan Smith’s suicide attempt arc. Before that Act II was mostly Act I gags with a few ‘after school special’ moments; after that it turned into a ripped from the headlines melodrama with the syndicate egging Batiuk on by putting out press packages about which hot button topic the Funky bunch were going to tackle next.
Susan’s suicide is probably the moment that changed everything but I don’t know if I’d quite put it as a shark jumping moment for the simple reason that it’s a fairly decent story. I wouldn’t even say decent by FW standards but decent on its own merits. It’s the culmination of a bunch of interwoven plotlines that go back to 1993 when Susan was first introduced and Lisa came back. The actions of the charactrs generally make a reasonable amount of sense (aside from Les’s insistence he could get Susan to a hospital faster than an ambulance), it’s allowed to build up into a real climax that then dovetails into the other main plot (Les trying to propse to Lisa) that it’s connected to. It even gets an actual ending when Susan returns to school and is able to put everything behind her.
Its biggest sin was that it’s what really gave Batty the bug to do more “prestige” stories trying to capture it but he never had the patience or seeming ability to recapture what made that story work. It’s why I’d say the post office bombing is more egregious as an indicator to where things would go. Part of the Susan story is putting a hurdle in Les and Lisa’s path but, again, it’s a hurdle that at least makes sense give what had been written and established and Susan’s crush is the understandable (for dramatic purposes) culmination of being happy that someone was actually giving her positive attention for once. The post office bombing, though, also exists to throw a hurdle in the way but it’s done in the way that would become the TB standard: an event happens, wow it’s shocking, oh okay it’s over I guess and nothing is actually resolved.
There’s no build up, there’s no resolution. The consant writing of a second act without ever writing the first or third because Batty generally lacks the patience to allow things to build more organically and seems to have a disinterest in writing the fallout of events. Reading his attempts at prestige stories is like trying to watch only the back half of Empire Strikes Back without having seen either the first half of the film or the other two movies sandwiching it. Who cares about all the boring stuff? Let’s just get to Han being frozen in carbonite and Darth Vader telling Luke that he’s his father already!
Tangenting addendum, I do like that it was Sadie who welcomed Susan back and defused the tension that had existed. Reading through all of that, Sadie’s character—at least with Susan—is fairly consistent. She’s a little vapid and flippant but I can’t think of a time where she’s ever actually mean or nasty to Susan. She’s always, by her standards, reasonably nice to her, sticks around to help her do menial work with the magazine when she doesn’t have to and later on the makeover at the end of their senior year doesn’t seem to be motivated by anything other than just wanting to boost Susan’s confidence. She even pays for the shopping trip herself.
Another example of Batty’s literary shortcomings. Despite his dislike of the character and her origins, he’d managed to create a relatively decent character in Sadie who actually was distinct enough from the sister he was so convinced she was a mere clone of. Her and Susan had good chemistry and “vapid popular girl and shy unpopular girl” is a no brainer character pairing to do stories with whether it’s comedic stories or serious ones. But TomBa had already made up his mind and was just way too myopic about his work to ever consider that he might have been wrong. Sadie was the worst thing ever and a shallow, one note character and anything that showed otherwise, intentionally or not, didn’t count. He liked creating characters but if they didn’t catch his interest immediately then he was quick to label them failures and either deemphasize them or write them out which got worse as he got older and his interests became increasingly narrow.
Wonderful review of the Susan Smith initially story arc. The wheels fall off at the end, largely due to the meme that is “I can get her there faster myself”, but let’s not let that overshadow how the rest of the story arc and the notion of a student having a crush on a teacher in general (even, *shudder*, Les) is handled well on the whole.
Which is why TB bringing Susan back for an Act III love triangle with Les and Cayla was both terribly sad and icky beyond belief…
The Act III Susan/Cayla/Les love triangle was one of Act III’s (many) low points. That panel where Susan shuffled away in shame after being smugly dismissed (by Les, of course) was one of Act III’s more unnecessarily cruel twists. Not as cold-blooded as Bull’s untimely end, but pretty cold nonetheless. The idea that Susan would throw herself at Les over the success of his (sigh) cancer book strained credulity, but Susan getting fired and being banished from Westview was kind of mean-spirited, for no good reason.
If I’m remembering it right, this series of events eventually led to Cayla (sigh) throwing herself at Les, culminating with Cayla literally (ugh) forcing herself on him, resulting in one of Act III’s more disturbing mental images. Cayla completely reinvented herself TWICE (the dreads, then Cayla Tyler Moore) to finally reel Les in, and even then she really had to press it. Blech.
It shouldn’t have taken much of a brain to realize that “distinguish herself from her ridiculously popular older sister” should have been Sadie’s entire character. I was the oldest of two siblings, and I sensed my younger brother’s efforts to do this when he reached high school. He just wanted to make his own mark and not be known primarily as some guy’s little brother. I shared my father’s name, and I all my life I bristled at being called “Junior”, as if I was an identical clone that liked and wanted all the same things. (By the way, I got along great with both of them, so it wasn’t an “I don’t want to be that asshole” thing.) So I’ve experienced this from both sides. And it’s an underexplored story idea. But as always, Batiuk takes the easy way out by blaming the character for his inability to write stories for her.
Yeah, you can argue about individual stories but I think that Sadie really exemplifies all of his shortcomings as a writer. He thought he had a lemon and instead of deciding to make lemonade he just yelled “I hate lemons!” and chucked it in the trash. A better and more competent writer would have seen the supposed negatives and worked that into an actual story with the character as an opportunity to grow them and maybe it does or it doesn’t work but they at least tried. BatYuk couldn’t even get that far though. He decided he hated her because she was too similar to Cindy and that was that.
There’s a thought I’ve had that makes me wonder if it’s less that she was, in his mind, ill-conceived and more that he just flat out liked Cindy too much and didn’t like a character that seemed to be stepping too far into her lane. By that I mean I almost feel like Cindy was Batty’s favorite character after Les. She dominates the last few years of Act I over almost every other character and is probably the second most prominently used of the Act I characters afterwards. She’s also one of the few characters that doesn’t really have much of anything bad happen to her.
So I wonder if his dislike of Sadie is less because she was created for poor reasons and more because he saw her as stepping on his waifu’s toes which was a huge no-no. It’s not as if Batty won’t spin BS narratives about things after all. Whatever the actual reason, she’s a giant missed opportunity and really stands out to me among his biggest failings as a creator.
There’s another thing to be considered: making her a clone was a painful reminder of his waifu’s glaring defects as a character.
That would require him to ask a question he can’t: “What does this person want?”
“What do you mean Sadie wouldn’t want to read Silver Age Green Lantern comics? I would want to read those! How am I supposed to relate to her!? Argh, fine then! Into the Westview Mystery Spot she goes!”
More like “What do you mean by her not wanting to be lumped in with her older sister? Why would a girl want to be seen as an individual?”
This dislike for something that isn’t an attention getting stunt is the cause of another recurring annoyance: a group of people will talk about an upcoming event…..and then smirk as they talk about how cool something we don’t see was.
I started college in 1990. The early 90s were a lot like the late 80s until “Smells Like Teen Spirit” landed. I certainly didn’t percieve the change until then. And to this day, I can still tell you where I was when I first heard that song. I had heard about it, and hearing the actual song made me realize that the hype was right. This was something totally different, that was going to help define the decade.
The Funkyverse is like that. There aren’t sharp breaks between eras, even though the time skips should have created sharp breaks. But the storytlling changed only slowly.
The Act I >Act II transition is sharper. That’s when Batiuk realized that ham-handed, overwrought drama was far more likely to win him awards than anything else he was doing. The Act II > Act III change was a lot more hazy. Remember those pencil drawings of older versions of all the characters around 2007/2008? It looked like the intention was to keep Act II going, and Batiuk kind of did that for a while. But by 2014 Act III had congealed into what it truly was. Many of the characters in those drawings are now long-forgotten.
Well, IMO the teen pregnancy arc was the point of no return. But as far as Act III was concerned, as awful as it was before, it fell off a cliff when Les married Cayla. You could see BatYam just totally lose all interest after that. He paired up Les and Cayla early in Act III, as a Pulitzer-bait prestige arc, and that relationship just sort of hovered in limbo for a while as Lisa remained front and center. But he couldn’t just break them up and/or abandon Cayla, as he’d have been accused of using the interracial dating angle as a cheap “shock value” tactic. He wrote himself into a corner, and really had no other option but to get them hitched. And surely we all remember how half-assed it was, and how Cayla was relegated to a background character afterward. The whole thing was really unseemly.
I’ve been organizing and doing a sort of daily readalong on another (some might say notorious) site going through a year per day and someone there made an observation. I think it was related to the story in Act I where Les and Cindy spend New Year’s together but they wondered if maybe Batty’s original intention for Act III was to pair up Les and Cindy citing that the first few times we see Cindy after the timeskip is when Les is in NYC for Montoni’s stuff and is basically spending all of his time there with her.
I don’t think it’s an absurd possibility either. Batty obviously seemed to adore Cindy as a character, has a thing for pretty blondes and especially schlubby nerds hooking up with them. What would be more self-indulgent than having his self-insert schlubby nerd hook up with the strip’s shining example of a pretty blonde? If it was something he considered then he obviously had second thoughts for some reason (maybe he thought it would look bad to have Les hook up with his best friend’s ex or something) and pretty quickly shelved it. So he had to get his schlub nerd + pretty blonde fix via Dopey/Jessica and Mopey/Mindy.
Of course whatever the reality, as said the entire Cayla story is completely pointless. She existed to go “oh ho, Les is marrying an African-American woman, isn’t that daringly progressive?” and once he got it out of his system and didn’t get any plaudits, she basically devolved into being a bit character because Batty had more important things to do like lament the lost adaptations his work should have gotten if only those morons in Big Hollywood weren’t so stupid while poor Cayla waits for a trip to Hong Kong that will never come.
Cayla was supposed to represent Les “getting over it”, so to speak. However, he (Batiuk) wasn’t over anything at that point, and still had Lisa front and center. And the interracial angle was most definitely another stab at a Big Prestige Arc, designed with attention-seeking and plaudits in mind. The thing was, though, that he couldn’t just have Les go out with Cayla a few times and just let her fade away, lest he face criticism for using an African-American character for a cheap gimmick. So he had to keep Cayla around. But his problem was, he had absolutely no idea what to do with her, or how to keep her around while Lisa was still all over the place. I mean, Les and Cayla “dated” for YEARS, and there was always much speculation re: why that woman was willing to tolerate playing second fiddle to Les’ book (not “Fallen Star”, the other one). She was just always kind of there, in the background, and never really doing or saying much.
So, not knowing what else to do, he just kind of shoehorned Cayla in there, then proved beyond any doubt that he did indeed have absolutely no idea what to do with her. From their wedding on, even characters like Cliff Anger and Phil Holt had more screen time than Cayla got.
Maybe Cayla should have been a comic book nerd, then things would have been different. Of course Batty would have made her say that her favorite character is Black Lightning.
As I have often both enjoyed and hated pointing out, Cayla’s silhouette is on the cover of a real-life, printed on actual paper book subtitled “Lisa’s Story Concludes”.
Yeah, how would Cayla, Lisa’s former husband’s new wife, be any part of Lisa’s Story? Unless the whole thing was really Les’ Story all along.
But we all know it’s not THAT. < / end sarcasm tag>
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of the PBM Santa Storyline
(ZZZZZZZZ)
Related to the Batiukverse: fanart o’mine
I’d say that FW Jumped the Shark when Batiuk tried shift FW from a comedy into a dramedy during Act II
as for the characters:
10/12; This is the other reason Act III turned out the way it did: Batiuk’s sneering contempt for today’s kids because they’re being children wrong. This is the issue I have with this obsolete medium that isn’t it being a flypaper for right wing nitwits: their overweening desire to force today’s kids to enjoy an old man’s childhood.
I’m curious as to whether this is another character named Maris or if Act III’s final Cindy Summers expy, Maris Rogers, has contracted the same fluctuating age disease that befell the Doublemint Twins, RobbieBilly, Wally Jr., and poor Skyler Fairgood…
I’d assume it’s another character entirely because I wouldn’t put it past Batty to just re-use a name he likes but hasn’t been popular in like 60 years.
This is, after all, the same guy who thinks “Rocky Rhodes” is such a great name that he gave it to two different characters in a shared continuity. The idea that there’s more than one “Maris” running around isn’t a stretch of the imagination at all.
It turns out that her name is also Maris Rogers and Funky Marisbean is an older sister. Maris’s mother, also Maris, gave all her daughters her name like George Foreman did with his sons.
Batiuk just likes the name.
When did Funky Winkerbean beome an alcoholic? Because that when Batiuk’s work went from being just another gag strip to something that made people gag. He’s just no good at drama.
Funky’s alcoholism was first brought up near the end of the Chien Gets Suspended storyline, where he showed up at Les’s trial COMPLETELY shitfaced (which was in 2000)
the storyline where he went into rehab was in early 2001
“Otherwise Marked” might be a good new name for The Valentine…
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 5 of PBM Santa Storyline
(The PBM sulks out of the room, only for a figure which resembles Sonic the Hedgehog except his arms and fur are a dark navy blue and his skin is a chalky white to enter the room and is wearing a christmas hat)
Maris: That’s not Sonic-
Kid With Buzz Cut: Maris, I think it’s better that you play along with it, because that thing, whatever type of alien that he is, genuinely believes he’s the real Sonic The Hedgehog and will lose his shit if told otherwise.
12/13: Piiza on Earth and ggood riddance to this arc.
“And so, as the Yuletide snow quietly settles on the legendary staircase that was the drama-filled setting for The Burnings, we close the book on the Adventure of the Cardboard Kris Kringle. What wacky escapdes will PBM get into next? Find out Monday as a new story opens in 2025’s hottest new comic strip, Crankshaft and the Pizza Box Monster.”
And of course, the stupid problem returns: we have no idea who the man is or why he’s in the suit.
If it’s anything like other Funkyverse mysteries then I doubt that Batty himself actually knows who it is and won’t until he decides to actually write the story of PBM revealing their identity. A which point he’ll radomly pull a name out of his ass.
It’s all about the moronic shock, not about any sort of resolution. A better author would have had a suspect and motive in mind first. This means that there’s one franchise that would baffle him: Columbo.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 6 of PBM Santa Storyline
I’m hoping that next week isn’t The Interview from HFIL (Batton Thomas and Skip Rawlings) or Dinkle Being A Egomaniacal Fuck-Up
He’ll find a way to combine the two.
12/14: It might seem banal that it took them this long to avoid the inconvenience of a real tree but there’s a big question mark in a Mudhen’s cap to deal with: how will Ed react? Will he accept it? Will he try to water it? Will he try to take it to the recycling?