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’ll be completely honest, I actually do find amusement in some of Batty’s slightly off phrases. It’s somewhere between sincere like and ironic enjoyment but I always do smile at a good use of “I stand in line” or “climate damage” or “vendos”.
You can at least imagine someone saying that they stand in line for something. You could never imagine anyone calling somebody a foob.
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/
the idea that an under-30 Mopey would have the biggest writer at Marvel or DC is completely absurd
There was a real humdinger of a post on the old funkywinkerbean.com blog, before it moved to tombatiuk.com and some of the blog posts got lost. It was about Tom Batiuk’s oft-mentioned job interviews with Marvel and/or DC. He said something to the effect of “I was certain they’d make me the lead of Spiderman once they saw how good a writer I was.”
So, yes, that is absolutely how TB thinks the world works.
Fascinating find! And I would say the proof that TB wasn’t interested in writing much for the high school kids was evident in how often they showed up as Act III went on. Which is interesting to me, because TB wrote no characters in Act III as naturally/effortlessly as he did Owen and Cody.
This discovery explains why those pre-Act III drawings we saw of new high school students never materialized. Batiuk was never planning to write stories for any of these characters; it was McKeever’s job to write stories for them. Which makes these drawings a phantom artifact of a future that never arrived. Tom Batiuk never had any intention of taking the strip back to Westview High School and its Act I roots. That was filler material, to be farmed out to an underling, who would come from the only place Tom Batiuk thinks produces talented writers: the silver age comic book industry,
McKeever at the time would have been in his early 30s and was basically an up and coming writer (which drives home the idea that an under-30 Mopey would have the biggest writer at Marvel or DC is completely absurd) and using him to write the Act III high school stuff would have made sense as at the time that was basically the niche he’d carved out for himself in comics.
Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane is a pretty good teen romance comic about high school versions of the Spider-Man cast (with the twist that MJ is the lead character so as such the reader is never actually told that Spider-Man, who she has a crush on, is her friend Peter Parker since it’s her POV we’re following). If given a relatively free hand by Batty and some time to adjust to the comic strip format I could have seen that going well.
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.
Followed by a whole week of bird feeder stories! Tom Batiuk really supported my point on that one.
The “Here’s the shock/’story’ over/reset” might work when Flash is talking science gibberish when he punches Rainbow Raider but not here. Pmmm and Jfffff are too upset by the ringtone to think big picture.
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.
Don’t forget that he used “the time travel was all just a dream… or was it!?” at least four separate times, three of which have the same general storybeats (time travel happens, characters mill around and meet their past/future selves), two of which have the same twist (Funky and Crazy’s time travel was possibly real because of events that happen with a comic book). I suppose Summer in the closet (har har) talking to TimeMop isn’t technically a time travel story but you may as well group it in with the others since it’s got the same style of ending and involves a time traveler.
Although nothing that happened afterwards in Funky or Crankshaft requires TimeMop’s story to be real. Hell, his “fixing the time bubble” didn’t even happen because the timeline is still screwed up and the twins can apparently change their age much like Phil can move between the realms of the living and the dead. So I can just think that she visited TimeMop, quickly realized that he was a deluded old schizo who thought he was a time travler and left, then had a dream about him babbling nonsense because seriously what a weirdo.
Which is why he’s a great gag a day writer.
@Narshe The stories were so vacuous that “the time travel was all just a dream… or was it!?” wasn’t even a question worth answering.
It certainly explains the output we’ve seen of Atomik Komix. Just covers, with no hint as to what the story inside would be like. It’s like Silver Age DC comics, where they’d come up with a cover concept and then write a story around it, except that Batiuk never bothers with the second part. (And he fails to make the first part interesting enough for anyone to want to find out what the story would be anyway.)
My fan theory is that Atomix Komix is the comics equivalent of Asylum Video, and others who make cheap ripoffs of big-budget Hollywood movies. The hollowness of AK’s output, and the fact that they got sued into a ball of dirt over “Arachnid Man”, fits perfectly with this interpretation.
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.
That Holly memoir was especially galling, because almost every other person in this town is a published author. Really, Tom, the Funkyverse needed ANOTHER author to do ANOTHER book signing? For ANOTHER book no one on earth would actually read?
IIRC, the first and last we heard of Holly’s memoir was a throwaway gag of her promoting it at OMEA. Contrast this with the not-funny, but perfectly cromulent running gag of Dinkle’s Claude Barlow biography, or the turgid and navel-gazing saga of Les and Le Chat Bleu and all the handwringing around his writing “Lisa’s Story.”
Narshe mentioned Puff Batty’s tendency to move his characters around like props, disregarding what little personality or backstory he’s given them, to serve his lame plot contrivances, and speculated that it’s the result of stuffing his brain with Silver Age plotlines.
I can buy that, but he also frequently extols sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov. Yet he shows not the slightest hint of having learned from any of them. And when he dips his toe into sci-fi concepts like time travel, it’s as surface-level as the powers of a throwaway Marvel villain. “The Pieman! He can telekinetically throw pies into the face of any superhero! And he has Nuclear Pie Powers to turn his pies into A-bombs! And you’ll never hear of him again after this issue, when the Flash’s super-speed rearranges the atoms of the Pie Bombs to render them harmless!”
That kind of thing impressed grade-school TB, which is unsurprising. What’s surprising is that it *still* impresses him.
@Drake It shouldn’t be surprising at this point, though. If Tom Batiuk has a defining trait, it’s his complete lack of curiosity about anything.
The worst part about Holly materializing in that strip is that the week of strips prior to it absolutely BEGS for one to question why Holly is there.
Starbuck Jones is filming in downtown Cleveland at the same time the second generation of Act III high school kids are on a field trip to the Great Lakes Science Center in downtown Cleveland. Andy Clark, on loan from Crankshaft to drive the bus, tries to avoid a traffic jam (caused by blocked roads for the Starbuck Jones filming) by taking a shortcut and winds up barreling on to the set of the movie. The strip is still with Clark, and the bus, and the Starbuck Jones cast and crew on-location in Cleveland on Saturday, and then Holly does her Xanaxian flaming baton routine in the Sunday strip… presumably still in downtown Cleveland .
So if we are still in Cleveland, Holly can’t be a curious onlooker wandering out of Montoni’s during one of its many many slow times to see what the Hollywood types are up to.
Holly was not previously depicted as being a part of the WHS field trip to the science center and has no reason to be there in any capacity.
She has not had a kid at WHS in 4 years
She doesn’t work for WHS
No one in her family works for WHS
Her strongest connection to Starbuck Jones is that she once completed a collection of the SJ comic books for Cory
Her strongest connection to Hollywood is, ugh, this…
None of the people Holly is acquainted with who are involved in Starbuck Jones are present at this filming. No Pete. No Durwood. No Masone.
It’s a remarkable strip and a great encapsulation of Act III. I adore it and hate it with equal intensity.
I literally dated the majorette who did fire baton when I was in high school. There is not a single move she did that was meant to look intimidating. ALSO BOTH SIDES OF THE BATON ARE ON FIRE.
The idea that an actor in a big-budget Hollywood space movie needed a friggin’ high school baton twirler to instruct them how to wield a weapon is mind-bogglingly stupid. But that’s the world the Funkyverse lives in: where highly-compensated people in the competitve world of acting constantly need rural Ohio mediocrities to teach them how to do their jobs. Give me a break.
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)
1/5: We get premise-as-story when it works today as we usher in a week of “Ed’s obsessive focus on a bird feeder irritates Pam and Jeff.”
It really shows how shallow the cardinal story was. Calvin cried when his raccoon died, and then had a lot of insightful things to say about the nature of life and death. The cardinal bashed into the window, was taken inside, not helped at all, bashed into the window again, and laughed at. And this week, the family continues the activities that probably caused this incident. Which is rich coming from a creator who wants us to care about “climate damage.”
They don’t connect the bird feeder to the dead bird for a reason: they’d have to admit to being stupid and indifferent.
I just wish they’d show any human emotion whatsoever. That was what made Calvin’ raccoon story work. You could see how invested he was, and even his own parents got invested because their child was.
On a side note: Calvin’s parents don’t get enough credit. Yes, they’re snarky and don’t really know how to deal with their child. But when shit gets heavy enough – the raccoon, the break-in, the car rolling out of the driveway – they’re pretty solid.
Showing human emotions leads somewhere dangerous: asking if they did anything right. This is why Les is King Message Control Murder: by insisting Lisa’s Story be told his way, he’s protecting himself from asking if he shat the bed and if so, how badly.
This is also probably why Watterson is on Team Dad.
That’s always been my fan theory: that Les’ entire motivation for “protecting Lisa” and writing an avalanche of books about her was to put himself in control of her narrative. Evil husbands in Lifetime Original Movies aren’t this obvious about trying to cover up their own misdeeds. And nobody calls him on it. Ever. Not even Lisa’s alleged friends, who might have a bone or two to pick about how it all went down.
Today’s Crankfuckery
(suddenly, a snippet of 99 Bottles of Beer on The Wall plays, and Ed picks up the phone)
Dinkle: WHY THE FUCK AREN’T YOU HERE RIGHT NOW!?
Ed: I’M TAKING A BREAK FROM YOUR CRUMMY WAYS!
Dinkle: FUCK YOU, I’M NOT LETTING ANYONE TAKE ANY BREAKS-(gets punched in the balls) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!
1/6: It’s still all about the app and never about connecting the feeder to the bird strike.