Banana Jr. 6000

Leaving Westview

My colleague Epicus Doomus and others have said: you had to like Funky Winkerbean before you could hate it. This was certainly true of me. I was once a genuine fan of the strip. Now I write venomous screeds about it for this blog. (And don’t worry, that book signing screed is on its way.)

I acquired my love of newspaper comics in the early 1980s, from my dad. I consumed them in a particular order, based on the order they appeared in my newspaper, and in descending order of how much I liked them. It was my little comics ritual.

Peanuts was always first, because good ol’ Charlie Brown holds a very dear place in my heart. Garfield, which was still pretty fresh at the time, was second. The true giants of the 1980s comics page hadn’t come along yet, so unremarkable stuff like Drabble, Shoe (hey, I wanted to be a journalist) and the Mort Walker strips were in the middle. Funky Winkerbean was last. It batted ninth in my lineup, but it made the team. I considered it the last strip worth reading, though I did enjoy it sometimes.

But I can pinpoint the exact day Funky Winkerbean lost me as a reader, and only regained me as a hate-reader 30 years later. That day was November 19, 1988.

Jumped The Comic Book

Harriet promised you an epic screed from me about this week’s shenanigans. This isn’t that screed, but it’s coming. In part because I want to be 100% sure there’s no second week of this arc. So right now, this is a quick TBTropes entry about the finale of the arc about the festival of Ohio-related books. I refuse to give them any more free advertising space than Tom Batiuk already has. Continue reading “Jumped The Comic Book”

Practice What You Preach

Saturday’s Crankshaft is a great example of a comic strip that is innocuous, but infuriating if you ever paid attention to the Funkyverse.

On the surface, it looks like a particularly mawkish installment of Pluggers. Oh, for the good old days, when store operators used mechanical 1970 Grocery Game-style cash registers and memorized where everything was. (Implied: instead of using computers, which Tom Batiuk is known to dislike.) Continue reading “Practice What You Preach”

Tom Batiuk Stole A Punchline. He Forgot To Steal The Premise.

Not long after I posted about last week’s arc about a real-world eclipse, regular poster J.J. O’Malley compared it to a Peanuts arc from June 15-20, 1963, which also coincided with a real-world eclipse. Several other posters also chimed in about the comparison:

Oh, if only I had faith that TB was funny enough to just rip this off completely…
billytheskink, https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2024/04/03/total-eclipse-of-the-old-fart/#comment-169174

Well, he did rip it off completely. The rest of it, not so much. Continue reading “Tom Batiuk Stole A Punchline. He Forgot To Steal The Premise.”

Total Eclipse Of The (Old) Fart

So this week’s Crankshaft plot has been about Ed renting out space at Pam and Jeff’s house to view the upcoming solar eclipse. Or, as a Comics Curmudgeon poster put it:

Tom Batiuk saw that the 2024 eclipse would pass right through Ohio, and immediately thought, “How can Crankshaft be a horrible person about this?”
https://joshreads.com/2024/04/the-only-fools-here-are-all-of-us/#comment-2783092

Credit where it’s due, though: this is a timely, Ohio-relevant story, which we rarely get in the Funkyverse. The total eclipse will happen next Monday, April 8, and the path of totality will pass over the Cleveland metropolitan area. Since we don’t know exactly where Centerville is – and it’s implied to be a far-out Cleveland suburb anyway – the story is highly relevant. Continue reading “Total Eclipse Of The (Old) Fart”