I didn’t mean for that last post to be a poll, but it’s revealing how many individual Jump The Shark moments posters were able to identify in Funky Winkerbean. Here’s a compiled list, in roughly chronological order (because, as you know, Timemop).
Act I (1972-1992, ends with the original class’ graduation)
- Lisa’s pregnancy (1986)
- A high school girl has a genuine mutual, unreciprocated crush on Les (1988)
- Les’ valedictorian speech (1992)
Act II (1992-2007, ends with Lisa’s death)
- Lisa’s first detection of cancer (1998)
- Wally dies in the minesweeping simulator
- Becky loses her arm
- The first class reunion
- Susan Smith’s suicide attempt
- Wally’s first homecoming (2003)
- John Byrne’s guest stint permanently alters the artwork (2003)
- Sadie Summers – not because she was a bad character as Tom Batiuk thinks, but because she was under- and mis-utilized
- The post office bombing (USA!)
- Lisa’s cancer returns in 2006, because of a hospital error
- Lisa’s death (October 4, 2007)
Act III (2007-2022, ends when Funky Winkerbean ends and its characters move to Crankshaft)
- Tom Batiuk skips ten years after Lisa’s death, throwing away a gold mine of story ideas. Which also prevents Les Moore (and Batiuk) from ever moving past Lisa’s death, when that was the stated reason for the time jump
- Les screaming at Summer over a dress for the winter dance he was pushing her to attend
- Les saying “yes you did” and getting pissy with Funky over a mild joke about Les attracting two women at once
- Wally’s second homecoming, which destroyed the likeable Wally-Becky relationship, and needlessly added to Wally’s suffering
- Lisa’s Story becomes a thing
- Starbuck Jones become a thing
- The emergence of Cayla as a character
- Funky’s car crash and time-altering coma (2010)
- casting Susan Smith as the antagonist in the Les-Cayla-Susan love triangle
- the gay prom story where the gay teens never seen or talked about again
- Morton Winkerbean’s remarkable but never-addressed recovery from dementia
- Wally hooking up with Rachel and turning his life around
- Cayla’s appearance changes
- Lisa calls in a bomb threat from beyond the grave
- Darin and Pete become major characters
- The rise of Atomik Komix as a central location
- “Where’s father?” – the resolution of the Zanzibar The Talking Murder Chimp story
- The death of Bull Bushka, which was ultimately insurance fraud
- Les walking back his earlier forgiveness of Bull
- Darin makes a toy for his son, out of a handgun that was used to murder his grandfather
- The entire finale, featuring a long -forgotten janitor who is revealed to be a time-traveling agent, tasked with ensuring Summer’s book gets written
- “behavior-patterned algorithms that will let us define humanity as our nation” or whatever that drivel was
Act IV (Crankshaft, 2023-)
- The Funky Winkerbean characters invade Crankshaft
- The alleged Burnings
- The Batton Thomas interview arc
And must be a lot more candidates than that… because that list doesn’t mention Dinkle even once.
Son of Stuck Funky 
Oh, by gosh, by golly, we’re just spoiled for choice, aren’t we? Thanks for your yeoman work compiling this, BJr6K. This list could be twice as long, three times as long, and still never encompass all the glistening gems of dreck. For example: Schrödinger’s Phil Holt, somehow simultaneously dead and alive.
But my vote has to go to Lisa’s Story.
In any other strip, this could have been an interestingly surreal/recursive/”meta” storyline. Or a way for the strip’s author to distance himself from his avatar and look at his own work with some critical distance. Or a fulcrum for character growth. Or a way to allow Les to work through his grief/bring Summer’s mother alive for her.
Or, really, anything but the one thing it became: an absurd and neverending faux-humble orgy of oblivious self-congratulation.
As for Zanzibar, I can’t bash him. Still the best, and funniest, thing to ever come out of FW.
“The Harley the Time-Traveling Fuck-Up” has to be the strip’s worst moment in my opinion
a few nitpicks
A couple of entries need correction:
“Les saying “yes you did” to Funky when her was” — I’m not sure what this was supposed to say
“The Crankshaft characters invade Crankshaft” — should be “The FW characters invade Crankshaft”
Considering the last few weeks have been about Mopey, Mindy and PBM “Crankshaft characters invade Crankshaft” might actually be accurate. It’s not their strip anymore, they’re merely guests. Might as well retitle the strip to Montoni’s or Two Dolts, a Girl and a Pizza Place.
He wanted to call the parent strip Winkerbean And Company after the first time skip to highlight the lame genre shift so he might as well go for Montoni’s.
He wanted to call the parent strip Winkerbean And Company after the first time skip
Really? Where’d you hear this?
Wikipedia.
I know he grew to dislike the name because he felt it didn’t fit the tone by then but that would have been an equally bad name. Maybe worse since at least Funky Winkerbean is an immediately eyecatching and memorable name. The actual thing to rename it to if he had decided to go through with it would have been simply Westview. But if he wanted a title that would have accurately refleced the new direction then the only actual choice would have been Les is Moore.
Westview would be a smarter title….which is why he didn’t use it.
So he hated Funky Winkerbean but he wanted to change it to Winkerbean And Company? This reminds me of a joke in Robin Hood: Men In Tights.
Given the imbalance, that doesn’t need correcting.
As I see it, a “Shark Jump” needs to be some event that completely changes the character of the strip, sending it in a direction that is out of character with the content of the story up to that time. A lot of the events that are listed do not by themselves make a drastic change to the strip, but collectively they send the strip in directions that do not at all support the original theme of the strip.
Maybe it was the “Lisa’s Pregnancy” arc that was the first significant shark jump. It could also be argued that the mere elevation of Lisa to something other than a minor character drastically changed the tone of the strip, transforming it from a gag-a-day strip about high school hijinks to an attempt to be more serious and topical. That said, the Lisa’s pregnancy still fits into the basic theme of FW – following the lives of the characters as they move on with their lives. Even most of the events in Act II listed here, however ridiculous they were, still fit into the basic theme of the strip, even though the tone was becoming less “Welcome Back Kotter” and more “General Hospital”.
I think the real shark jumping began when he started veering off into the supernatural – Funky’s car crash/time travel, Lisa phoning in a bomb threat from beyond the grave – neither of these things fit into the overall feel of the strip. And the Les Moore takeover of Act III, paired with the <a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Myers_(Halloween)#Characterization“>Michael Myers</a>-like persistence of all things Lisa, completely destroyed any remaining resemblance to the spirit of the original strip. Add to this the introduction of comic books (and all the inanity surrounding Atomik Comix, Starbuck Jones, Mason, and anything that happened in Hollywood) and the entirety of Act III is nothing but a shark tank. It seemed like every week brought a new face palm.
As I see it, a “Shark Jump” needs to be some event that completely changes the character of the strip, sending it in a direction that is out of character with the content of the story up to that time. A lot of the events that are listed do not by themselves make a drastic change to the strip, but collectively they send the strip in directions that do not at all support the original theme of the strip.
Maybe it was the “Lisa’s Pregnancy” arc that was the first significant shark jump. It could also be argued that the mere elevation of Lisa to something other than a minor character drastically changed the tone of the strip, transforming it from a gag-a-day strip about high school hijinks to an attempt to be more serious and topical. That said, the Lisa’s pregnancy still fits into the basic theme of FW – following the lives of the characters as they move on with their lives. Even most of the events in Act II listed here, however ridiculous they were, still fit into the basic theme of the strip, even though the tone was becoming less “Welcome Back Kotter” and more “General Hospital”.
I think the real shark jumping began when he started veering off into the supernatural – Funky’s car crash/time travel, Lisa phoning in a bomb threat from beyond the grave – neither of these things fit into the overall feel of the strip. And the Les Moore takeover of Act III, paired with the Michael Myers-like persistence of all things Lisa, completely destroyed any remaining resemblance to the spirit of the original strip. Add to this the introduction of comic books (and all the inanity surrounding Atomik Comix, Starbuck Jones, Mason, and anything that happened in Hollywood) and the entirety of Act III is nothing but a shark tank. It seemed like every week brought a new face palm.
A shark jumping moment is basically the point of no return where everything has changed significantly for the worse and there’s no recovery. In that respect, I don’t think you really can count anything in Act III as a shark jump because by that point he strip was already completely far gone. Act III is one of those zombie sitcoms that tries chugging along despite the fact that 3/4 of the actors have left and the focus has shifted so radically it’s no longer the same show.
Lisa’s pregnancy is one of those moments that definitely changed the strip but not necessarily for the worse… at first, anyway. Because in spite of the mythologizing and the whole “I couldn’t do jokes about Les climbing the gym rope after that” he spent another six years doing just that. Hell, that mid/late ’80s period was probably where Funky was peaking in popularity. It wasn’t even the first or last attempt at a serious story in Act I either.
I’ve said the post office bombing could be viewed as one because it’s where you see a lot of Batiuk’s bad tendencies manifest. There’s a lot of little things that build up over the years. The Jade Dragon story which is Batiuk’s eyerolling attempt at doing a socially relevant story in the most cowardly banal way possible. Everything around the 1998 graduation between Wally and Becky’s accident and the fall out from it and the Susan domestic violence story that leads to the retconning/mythologizing of Lisa’s pregnacy by making Darin be the product of rape (and thus starts the push to canonize Lisa for being so strong to overcome it). Lisa’s first cancer story which is trying so hard to be a tearjerker. Funky’s alcoholism and his crumbling marriage is a mess because a lot of the problems in that story fall squarely on Cindy’s actions but Batty seems unwilling to actually let her be blamed for anything and throws most of the blame onto Funky.
2003 is really the year where all of the various faults in his writing come together to form the Funky Winkerbean we all know and not-so-love. The Wally story, the attempts at making John sympathetic despite him acting like a creepy weirdo tool (who buys an engagement ring after one date?) and up to that point just existed to be a punchline, the forced attempts at solemn poignancy with the death row story where Lisa has to watch a guy get executed on Christmas. Aside from the writing, it’s also where the art style changes and fun fact about that, Byrne’s version of his fill-in run (from the Modern Masters book about him) is completely different from Batty’s often told version of events.
I’ve said before a few times that I think Wally’s return is the actual shark jumping moment and if I had to pick any one specific story then that’s where I’ll always go. But just more broadly, 2003 is the real watershed period. There’s not really much of anything good that comes from it, it’s all largely bad and it’s where Batty seemed to really go all in on making the tone of the strip as miserable as possible because he thought that would make it seem important and thus get him all the praise and awards he so desperately wanted. Once he got a few years into Act III and realized it wasn’t coming that’s when he settled into just being as lazizly cashing his check and reminiscing.
It’s probably not a surprise that Byrne doesn’t see what Batiuk did.
Here’s the exact quote about it from Byrne (the book itself is from 2006).
Now, Byrne is misremembering a bit there. It wasn’t Web of Spider-Man but Spectacular Spider-Man, specifically issue 58 from 1981 (Web didn’t launch until 1985). And the only Funky character was Crazy Harry, along with Mike and Zonker from Doonesbury who were all drawn among the crowd of passers by on the title page. But I’ll forgive him for some minor misremembering on a one-off comic he drew 25 years prior.
But nowhere in Byrne’s telling, of something that would have been only a few years prior, does the subject of Batiuk being injured come up. It’s a lot more utilitarian: Batty wanted to change the up the look of the strip, he wanted a more dramatic style for the soap opera Wally/Becky/John story and thought that Byrne, his longtime friend, would be a good fit to introduce that new direction. I don’t have any reason to doubt that Batty was injured and had surgery on his foot at the time but the story as he tells it doesn’t work when he mentions he was inking Byrne, which he’d been doing since 1994 with Ayers anyway.
So Byrne’s version of events sounds a lot more believable which makes me wonder, why concoct the BS story about the injury necessitating a fill-in? The only thing that makes sense to me is that being a fan of old comics and the way they were presented, Batty likes to romanticize the creative process a bit like how the old Marvel comics made the bullpen seem to be a lot more exciting and brotherly than it actually was. So saying he wanted it to look different and he got in touch with his friend and worked something out is boring, but saying it was all serendipity where the stars aligned to allow this to happen makes it seem more whimsical. You know, this stuff just kind of happens where you’re struck by inspiration from a bolt out of the blue. I don’t think he’s lying maliciously, but it’s definitely spinning tales to create and maintain a level of kayfabe.
I think it’s a matter of Byrne and Batiuk separately deciding which details were and weren’t important. Maybe Byrne didn’t think Batiuk’s injury was relevant to the story, so he left it out. Tom Batiuk’s injury was, of course, extremely relevant to Batiuk, so he brings it up at every possible opportunity.
My problem with this whole thing was that there was never a coherent explanation as to why Byrne got involved. Supposedly Batiuk wanted a more soap opera style, but that was applied inconsistently. And Batiuk never stopped writing stories that needed the more cartoony style. It’s all a very poor charade for the real reason: Byrne was a comic book creator. Batiuk wanted him for that reason, and nothing further. He couldn’t go to comic books like he wanted, so he made comic books come to him.
This seems to be the best-fitting explanation. I think you’ve hit it bang on!
It’s called gilding the lily for a reason. The prosaic reason would be accepted by pretty much everyone but he cannot or will not see that.
Tom Batiuk feels a constant need to prove himself. “No, see, I really do get inspiration!” Because that’s how he thinks writing works. He thinks he needs to prove that he is constant contact with the muses, or somebody might see him for the low-talent fraud he is. Batiuk can never simply tell you where a story came from, because that wouldn’t be writer-y enough in his mind. Because Batiuk can never admit that there’s no grand creation story behind works like “Crankshaft loses at bowling to a man dressed in pizza boxes.” So you get these stories that are somehow incredibly banal and ridiculously overblown at the same time.
Y. Knott’s “a bird landed on my window and I made a week-long arc out of it” example below is exactly something Batiuk would write along these lines.
Contrast him with Charles Schulz and his constant need to say that it’s just a kid getting Halloween and Christmas mixed up when faced with people who want deep meaning about sincere pumpkin patches.
In regards to Byrne saying he drew Funky and Crazy, but only Crazy appearing in the issue: the issue in question was inked by Vince Colletta. Colletta had a… reputation amongst comics artists. He could always meet a deadline, but often that involved cutting corners. He might choose to not ink the backgrounds in some panels, or remove other details. Most infamously, he once inked in a character’s body, but not their head! (Several prominent comics artists, including no less than Jack Kirby himself, would insist that their work NOT be inked by Colletta.)
So it’s entirely possible that Byrne did, in fact, draw both Funky and Crazy, but Colletta wound up erasing Funky in the final inking. I would guess that most people familiar with Colletta’s reputation would find that scenario very plausible.
Oh, yeah. Commander Rushrush did it again.
I’d agree with the post office bombing as the big shark-jumping moment, not in the sense of “and now the comic will never be good again” — there were a bunch of good or at least interesting things happening after that — but in the sense of the strip took a step that changed it and would be a harbinger for the things that would break it. It has the ripped-from-the-headlines news event But In Our Town And Without Motivation, the Lisa Torture, Les Moore being all like that, even the mawkish aftermath. My recollection is that most of these elements worked, at least at the moment, but if you get the balance of any elements wrong you get, like, the Golf Course Fire.
(It even foreshadowed a bit where a joke within the drama got misunderstood and snarked on. When it becomes clear that Lisa was Injured, the whole football team turned out to donate blood, and one of the nurses quipped that Coach Bushka was a big guy, take two units from him. There were some people on Usenet group rec.arts.comics.strips who were _very_ cross with the idea that _any_ blood drive would take two units from a person, and could not be convinced that yes, making a joke about taking more blood from the big guy is a normal thing normal people will do.)
Today’s Crankfuckery
Davis got the clipart for today’s strip from Crankshaft’s early years (which hasn’t been put on GoComics yet)
If we were doing daily Crankshaft updates on this site, “The Crankshaft characters invade Crankshaft” would be an absolutely killer post tag.
Only starting to pay attention to Funky back in the day when the fatal cancer story was near its end (glimpses of old Les therapy flashfowards and seeing the bald and weakened Lisa looking like a guy are my first memories of the strip) I was too late to see what likely was the shark jump. I’d agree that Act 3 was too late to pin one but two things stuck out to me following in its early years.
1: Funky’s car accident and quasi-time travel trip was so bizarre and nonsequiter that it signaled to me that this strip was going to be weird in a confusing kind of way. That it’s flagged a third of the way through as a dream and amounts to him stumbling through town, meeting his kid self and only just remembering to recommend he buy the Starbuck comic felt as much as a wet far as the time Watterson bailed on the arc where Calvin’s gravity reverted and then he grew big. If not a shark jump, that’s pretty much a tone-setting Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
2. Closest to my own personal shark jump was one moment in Summer’s high school basketball career where she broke a limb (don’t think it was the broken leg Les came home to in complete surprise because nobody called to warn him) or some other injury just before a big game, and the way Keisha and the rest of team responded was to announce to the referee the night of the game that they were willingly forfeiting the whole thing and leaving the gym to stay by Summer’s side in the hospital. There was so much eye-rolling soap opera-tier Glurge in such a move that I immediately cut the comic out of the paper as a memento of how ridiculous it felt, and it pretty much cemented my snarking following of the strip going forward. That the story then continued with the teammates blatantly defying/ignoring the nurse telling them they were exceeding visitor number limits and then Walnut Tech or whoever it was getting back to them saying they were oh so moved by the action that they didn’t accept the forfeit and just rescheduled the game was all the more reason to be rolling my eyes so hard that they would fall out.
Also Crankshaft’s getting “artistic” this week? All black and white save for the red robin sticking around? Or is this a new stealth-promoting tactic for Lisa’s Story content?
I was about to post about Crankshaft and his over the top battle with squirrels when I reread Leaving Westview: it jumped the shark when he got the Little Red Haired Girl wrong.
If anything, Batiuk got Les Moore wrong. He thinks Les is his own Charlie Brown, but he isn’t. Charlie Brown had a lot of admirable qualities once you got past his crippling shyness and the-universe-hates-me nature. Les doesn’t. Les Moore’s ugliness isn’t just skin deep; he’s a thoroughly vile person all the way to his core. And he spent most of Act II and Act III showing this side to everyone.
Les is not just someone who thinks the universe owes him or someone filled with hate, jealousy, envy and the need to sneer at people who displease him. He’s a shnook who thinks he’s the hero.
I don’t think Les’ “Yes you did” to Funky was a shark-jumping moment. As others have pointed out, a shark-jump is a moment when something changes dramatically into a different, worse thing. By the time “Yes you did” rolled around, everyone knew Les was a self-absorbed A-hole of the first order, so it was not much of a stunner. All it did was put the jewel in the crown.
What is the context for “Yes you did”? The list above says “when her was” which appears to be garbled.
Funky and Crazy (the two worst dwarfs) joked about Les having two women vying for him. Les stormed off in a huff. Funky went to apologize and said “I screwed up.” Les replied “Yes you did.” <s>Funky punched him in the face until it was a bloody mess.</s>
To paraphrase Dean Wormer, ‘arrogant, thin-skinned and stupid is no way to go through life.’ Les isn’t just a massive flapping anus, a vindictive dolt, a whining coward and an entitled fist magnet: he’s also dumber than a box of rocks.
Funky, Crazy, Cindy, Frankie, Cranky… if we can find two more, all we’ll need is Snow White.
Mopey! Jeez, how could I forget Mopey Pete?
And Buddy, that poor neglected dog.
Funky, Crazy, Cindy, Frankie, Cranky, Mopey, and Buddy.
I don’t know, but if you figure it out, let us know. I’m sure we’d all love to forget Mopey Pete.
I fixed it.
Come on, Pizza Box Monster, you should know better than that. No one in this town has ever gotten over anything.
Yes, cardinal, please go shit on Ian Cameron. This will free up Sunny to trash all the writing awards, Bean’s End catalogs, comic books, and Lisa mementos in this universe. It’s Wednesday morning, so Tobi’s probably already drunk, and could would better enjoy the weird surreal color thing you’re doing anyway.
Today’s Crankfuckery
I genuinely don’t know what this week o’Crankshaft is gonna be about
Well, that’s where I think it’s going.
Where I think it’s going is to a long blog post on the BattyBlog, in which Tom will tell us about the time his wife mentioned she saw a bird out the window, and then later the same bird outside another window.
“I mean, it was probably the same bird,” she added. “With birds, who knows?”
But Tom thought, “Wow! It’d be cool if it WAS the same bird. That’s a week of strips right there! Stuff THIS real must be shared with my readers!”
Out loud, he said, “Make me some cocoa — I’ve got some writing to do! What? No, I can SO do it while I read this copy of The Flash! Now, where’s that cocoa?”
The only time his blog posts are long are when he’s Dan Davising his intros from The Complete Funky Winkerbean, On Sale Now From Kent State Press.
Usually, we get brevity being the soul of witlessness.
Yeah this honestly does smell of the Funkyverse’s more random occasions of autobiographical writing, adapting either his bemusing stories or anecdotes of others.
Going to take a lot to beat the abandoned house detour, but I enjoy the “jogging with Issac” week at least for giving me avatar fodder.
12/16: And of course, a Hitchcock reference.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 2 of Pam and A Cardinal Storyline
Jeff: I’m serious, Pam. Some fat cat named Garfield Arbuckle might notice that the cardinal is inside this house and he’ll kill it and eat it.
Garfield: Way ahead of ya, pal
Umm, did I miss something? Since when did the Crankshaft/Murdoch household include a cat?
Ed had a cat ages ago, but we haven’t seen it in a very long time. But Batiuk needs a cat for whatever story he’s trying to tell here. Once again TB has dug up an ancient, long-forgotten character to make a filler arc work.
Okay, does anyone know what the cat’s name is/was?
Pickles, I think.
Leave it to Batiuk to reintroduce a character whose name will only remind readers of a funnier, better-done comic strip.
12/17: It’s been so long since we’ve seen Ed’s cat, I almost forgot he had one.
In response to today’s Crankshaft, I can only say this:
YES! YES! YES! GO CAT! EAT LISA’S GHOST! FREE US ALL!
CAT: “Sorry. Lisa ghosts give me diarrhea.”
We’re not that lucky.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 3 of Pam and A Cardinal Storyline
I wonder what happened to Ed’s cat between the late 2000’s (when the cat last appeared) and today’s strip
12/19: If Red could talk, I think he’d ask her to call 911 because there’s an old man about to fall off the gutters.
Today’s Crankfuckery
Day 4 of Pam and A Cardinal Storyline
(the cardinal then notices Dick Facey, and flees)
Dick Facey: STOP TRYIN’ TO FLY AWAY FROM ME, LISA!
Just tag in Chuck and Bomb….