So Tom Batiuk’s version of Calvin’s raccoon ran in the last full week of 2025. And it went like so many other stories do in the Funkyverse:
- Poor, innocent, helpless creature gets injured.
- One of the Funkyverse’s designated heroes notices.
- The designated hero makes a big show out of helping the poor, innocent creature.
- The designated hero provides little actual help to the poor, innocent creature, and may even subject it to further injury.
- The poor, innocent creature gets worse, for reasons that will not be blamed on the designated hero, even when they probably should be. (Optional: the poor, innocent creature may appear to get better for awhile first.)
- Poor, innocent creature dies, having suffered more than they probably needed to.
- Designated hero congratulates themselves while smirking. Never once do they ponder their own role in the death of the poor, innocent creature.
- Tom Batiuk starts checking his mail for Pulitzer nominations.
This isn’t just the cardinal story we just saw. It’s also Lisa’s story. In some ways, it’s Bull Bushka’s story, Becky’s story, and other pointless tragedies in the Funkyverse. And some of you picked up on this in the comments:
- “The actual miracle will be surviving with a broken spine.” – pj202718nbca
This is closer to the truth than you’d think. Most bird-window collisions result in the death of the bird, eventually if not immediately. Pam and Jeff made no attempt to ascertain the bird’s injuries, or take it to someone who could treat it. Though to be fair, most people wouldn’t know what to do when presented with injured wildlife. Which was part of the point of the Calvin and Hobbes raccoon story.
Calvin’s mom admits to Calvin that the raccoon looks badly injured. She also admits to Hobbes that she doesn’t really know how to help.. This concept was explored more in the story where Hobbes went missing after a break-in at the family’s home. But it’s nice to see it acknowledged here… because it’s something you’ll never, ever see in Funky Winkerbean. Characters like Jeff Murdoch and Les Moore are not allowed to acknowledge their own mistakes, must less admit them. Even when their mistakes are blatantly obvious to readers.
- “I had predicted a ‘Christmas miracle’ with the bird getting miraculously better on Thursday. But it actually got better on Friday, albeit with the ‘Christmas miracle’ as the actual punchline.” – Green Luthor
This speaks to a huge problem in Tom Batiuk’s writing, and that is: his attempts at humor, and even ordinary banter, undermine the seriousness of the situation. Pam and Jeff stored the injured cardinal in an oven warmer when any box would have worked, which made it look like they were planning to cook it. The partial first week of 2026 has been a celebration of football helmets, after a football helmet was the symbol of Bull Bushka’s stupid death and his even more stupid life. And we saw “costs an arm and a leg” jokes in CBH’s reposted Christmas story, thankfully out of earshot of Becky. Has Tom Batiuk never encountered the concept of “too soon“?
The raccoon story has jokes in it, but they’re not at the expense of the injured raccoon. Nor are they at the expense of Calvin’s emotional investment. But this happens quite a bit in the Funkyverse.
Bull Bushka’s CTE death arc started with Linda and Buck Bedlow cracking wise about Bull’s need to do laundry – a common symptom of his condition. Similarly, Mort Winkerbean’s dementia (before it was magically cured off-panel) was played for laughs in a Sunday strip where Funky observed him repeating himself.
Though this doesn’t happen in Lisa’s Story, nosireebob. Lisa’s death is the greatest tragedy in human history, and must be treated with complete seriousness at all times. Everyone in the Funkyverse must adhere to Les Moore’s inscrutable standards of “protecting Lisa.”
- “I can’t shake the dread that something bad is gonna happen to the cardinal even if yesterday’s strip turned out to be a cop-out.” – csroberto2854
He was right – the cardinal immediately bashed into the window again. Which was played for laughs. Which reinforces all of the above criticisms, and then some:
- Relying on ambiguous art to make a joke work. The artwork in the above strip suggests that the cardinal flew through the open window, and then immediately doubled back, as if wanting to return to the house. However, if we assume Rule of Funny is in effect, it’s arguable that the cardinal was just being drawn from the more comedic angle.
- Making the joke at the victim’s expense, again. Crankshaft hilariously says “Birds just don’t get glass!” Well, that’s exactly the problem, Ed; birds don’t perceive glass as an obstacle. If they see natural habitat on the other side, they will try to fly straight to it. This feels like mocking blind people for bumping into objects.
Contrast: Richard Pryor. Richard’s Pryor comedy material was about poverty, racism, broken families, prostitution, gang violence, substance addiction, and other awful things. But he never once trivializes those things, or mocks anyone for being affected by them. That’s how you combine tragedy and comedy effectively: by not letting the comedy undermine the tragedy. - The pervasive gloom of the Funkyverse. We initially see the cardinal recover, which threw off Green Luthor’s mental timeline for how the story would play out. But pj202718nbca turned out to be right: the recovery was a temporary respite, so Batiuk could prop up yet another tragic ending. Even though the tragic ending was going for a laugh this time.
- The pervasive indifference and incompetence of the Funkyverse. Which are hard to tell apart, really. Tom Batiuk wants to sell his world of noble, caring, small-town Ohio people. But their actions bely this at every turn. Pam and Jeff ultimately did nothing to help the bird. Ed laughed when it got injured again. Les had little interest in keeping Lisa alive, and great interest in leveraging her death into the writing career he thought was his birthright. Becky didn’t even care about losing her own arm.
Maybe that’s why Tom Batiuk cured Mort Winkerbean and Harry Dinkle: nobody in Westview was capable of doing it. Or cared enough to try.
Son of Stuck Funky 
A nitpick: The user who said “I can’t shake the dread that something bad is gonna happen to the cardinal even if yesterday’s strip turned out to be a cop-out” was me, not pj202718nbca
I just agreed.
Then again, I was thinking Pickles would wait until it died of its injuries instead of the three of them being too stupid to take it far away to release it.
I corrected it. Sorry about that.
Having finished the readalong I was doing, it’s kind of interesting to see the thoughts of outside (but not necessarily normie) people. Generally, the thoughts were more positive as a whole for Funky Winkerbean than might exist here. Even acknowleding that Act III had a lot of issues, most of the people who read it seemed to have genuinely liked Acts I and II, even the more dramatic bits later in Act II.
A lot of them, for example, found Lisa’s death, even with caveats, to be appropriately moving and dramatic. The criticisms, especially for Act III, are probably not all that different than the types of things you would find here but expressed less caustically.
Dinkle was definitely the character most of those who read it seemed to like. Even Act II and Act III Dinkle, who’s definitely not popular here (and who I don’t like either). The general sentiment was that they appreciated him not getting dragged into all of the drama and just remaining more or less the same and providing some stability compared to everything else. Wally was probably the other character that people seemed to really like and found his story to be the most effective overall.
Other ones that people seemed to enjoy were Chien, Bull, Holly and surprisingly Funky himself. I remember someone saying that they liked Act III Funky and Holly’s relationship and that it felt more realistic to them and less sappy (presumably in contrast to something like Les and Lisa). PBM was pretty well-liked too.
Act III Les, of course, was widely hated especially as he became more whiny about having been bullied; and yeah, there was a lot of complaining about his behavior during Bull’s funeral. The reaction to TimeMop was also about as expected: general disbelief, confusion and that it just happens with no actual build.
Someone did bring up an entertaining (and not unreasonable) guess for PBM’s identity: Jinx. Their logic was as follows.
Anyway, all that said I’ll leave you all with a piece of art that an anon from the threads drew to celebrate making it all the way through. I’ll dub it The End of Funkvangelion.
I stand in line for that.
I rather like the Jinx is PBM theory. Of course, I am genuinely convinced that TB does not remember that Jinx was ever a character, or what her traits ever were if he does indeed remember.
TB’s idea with Jinx was solid, if rote… a mirror dyad to the Les-Summer dynamic, the nerdy daughter of a jock father rather than the jock daughter of a nerdy father. TB got bored with exploring that dynamic between Les and Summer in 25 strips, I’m not sure there are 5 strips where he touched on the subject with Jinx and Bull.
There’s actually an interesting wrinkle I didn’t know which is that Sean McKeever wrote a little bit of Funky. There’s a podcast interview with him from 2020 where the subject comes up for a few minutes and while he can’t remember all the details of what he did at the time (since it would have been 15ish years prior) he does say that after being given a two week tryout by Batiuk (which he says was related to the war in Afghanistan) and doing a few other stories (the ones he mentions are the senior skip day story with Darin and Pete and the story where Darin finds out Lisa is his birth mother), Batiuk actually wanted to bring him on full time as a co-writer.
He said that he had to decline because his workload at Marvel was picking up so he wouldn’t have had time to do it but said if he had he would have likely been in charge of doing the high school stuff after the timeskip. Which makes sense given that he was sort of the teen/young people writer in comics at the time. It also makes the quick abandoment of the Funky Kids make a lot more sense. Someone else with a reputation or writing those types of characters was intended to do it, they couldn’t, and Batty likely didn’t have interest in doing it himself (if he did, he wouldn’t have tried to pawn it off on another person).
I have a question, Narshe
where’s the link to the interview with Sean McKeever?
Here’s the link, skip to around 55 minutes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200408003157/https://scpod.net/sean-kelley-mckeever-talks-spider-man-comics-shops-video-games-and-a-lot-more/
And speaking of not knowing what too soon is, today’s strip makes a joke of the bird feeder that attracted the poor bird in the first place.
Also, there is the insecurity that caused Les to expose himself legally by saying he can get Susan to the hospital faster than people with training. This leads to a fifth point: the pervasive need to confuse expertise with bullying.
Happy 2026 everyone. I’ll start the year off on a positive note. Today’s strip 1/4/26, was genuinely funny for me. No, I’m not printing it out and taping it to the fridge, but I got a good chuckle. I’m an avid bird watcher/feeder and the cost of seed has gone up a lot. But, like Batty, I actually enjoy winter, it’s beautiful in its own way. I enjoy sitting in my chair, reading, drinking a cappuccino, and watching all of the birds that come to my feeders.
So I enjoyed today’s Crankshaft, but Mary Worth, ugh don’t get me started on that strip. I’m actually hoping for another Wilbur story.
As always, this site continues to give me something to think about as I read TB’s daily submission of “woe is me.” The recognition of the “Calvin raccoon” story was something I didn’t catch until I read this post and you are right on target with it. I know writing a daily strip/trying to be funny every day for 50 years is extremely difficult. It’s not something I could or would want to do. However, as I’ve said on this site and my own, TB isn’t interested in protecting or caring for his characters – he is only interested in punishing them and hoping we enjoy it. And honestly, I don’t, but God help me, I can’t stop watching the train wreck.
No, Batty is not hoping to please his readers, he’s trying to impress the people who hand out awards. Watterson, on the other hand, wanted to write an interesting strip, and he succeeded.
I don’t necessarily believe that he hates his characters (well, except Sadie), I think BatYam’s problems are that he overestimates his ability and doesn’t actually think of his characters as, well, characters. Characters suffering hardship and having to overcome it, having to deal with tragedy, these are all common things in lots of stories but with Batty he seems to believe that’s sort of the point and doesn’t think beyond, as has been said, the initial shock readers will feel. He doesn’t want to focus on how the characters deal with what happens or the aftermath and doesn’t really want to get into the characters’ heads and lives. They’re just pieces to be moved around as needed; action figures to be played with.
I think that’s a result of the fact that his creative influences are old Silver Age comic books where the continuity and consistency didn’t matter (if X adventure needs to happen and Flash needs to be here because whatever, then that’s what it is who cares about the hows and whys) and having spent 20 years writing a gag strip where all that mattered is what role a character occupied. He fancied himself a good dramatic writer but his skillset was just wholly unsuited for it because it was refined with something else entirely and even with is influences being comic books, they weren’t comic books suited for longform dramatic stories or even just exploring characters and themes; just simplistic childish adventures that were practically self-contained.
So when Holly shows up and she’s more bitter and no longer a grinning bimbo because events in her life between high school and then have taken a toll on her and chagned her. And that’s a big change but Batty doesn’t see or feel the need to actually show this gradual change because Holly isn’t an actual character, she’s just a piece to be moved where it needs to be to do the story. He wants Holly the embittered ex-majorette to be Funky’s rebound so that’s what she is he can just hadwave an explanation like a bad comic book retcon.
That’s what’s frustrating about Funky. I don’t think most of the stories and ideas, at least in their core concepts, are inherently bad. There’s seeds of good stories all over the place in the strip and while a good farmer would be able to cultivate those, Batty is the kid who just sprinkles some whater on a tomato plant and then wonders why it isn’t growing.
That is exactly right. Nobody gave much thought to what happened after Flash used Super Crazy No Way Speed to defeat Mirror Master because continuity wasn’t a thing. Thus, the beloef that shocking people was all that mattered.
Like I always say, BatYam is great at creating new premises. He has premises to burn, just mountains and mountains of premises. But turning those premises into actual stories is kind of his biggest bugaboo. And by that, I mean the guy can’t freaking do it. He thinks he can, but he confuses dreaming up a new premise with actual writing, so as far as I can tell, once he establishes a new premise (which can take weeks of mindless repetition, BTW), he thinks he’s finished. And it’s on to the next premise.
Absolutely! I’ve said it elsewhere on here: Batiuk cannot comprehend — cannot even recognize — the difference between premise and story. At a fundamental level, he thoroughly and wholeheartedly processes a “story” as its premise … and a premise as a “story” that is totally and utterly complete within itself. It is a storyblindness so all-encompassing, Batiuk is about as able to relate an actual story as a Golden retriever would be able to write an essay in Morse code about the colour red.
And Batiuk’s seven or so premises often resolve each other, or use each other as punchlines. Ed has to take off his football helmet award…so he can eat his Montoni’s Pizza! We just saw that on January 2.
That would certainly explain how Holly wound up in Cleveland on the Starbuck Jones set, because nothing sure else does.
That’s a good example of it. Why is she there? Was she just in the area for one reason or another? Was she there because Montoni’s was catering the shoot? And is she jumping in because she just couldn’t help herself and relive a bit of her majorette Gloria Daze? It doesn’t matter, Batty had a joke he wanted to do so he did it.
The same deal with one of the OMEA strips in 2022 where Holly has a memoir. When did she write this memoir? Doesn’t matter. Batty wanted a joke about her writing a memoir so she wrote one offscreen even though that should have been a long running story arc and given how light on any actual story 2021 was (seriously, the highlight of that year is Phil Holt cheating death which says a lot), it was probably a desperately needed one.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(Meanwhile in Westview, Les is still walking on the streets holding a sign that says “WILL POINTLESSLY GLAZE MY DEAD WIFE FOR $10”, completely forgetting the brutal beating that Kunio and Riki gave to him a while back)
Les: ARRRGHH! Some children WERE left behind!
(Suddenly an mob of pissed-off graduates from Westview High, which includes, Owen, Cody, Bernie, Wedgeman, Chien, Mooch/Sir Nuts-A-Lot, Matt, Mickey, Malcom and Alex the Goth Girl approach Les and beat him into a pulp)