Banana Jr. 6000

A Very Funky Week

Welcome to the second installment of This Week In Act IV. This Crankshaft arc had no characters or overt ideas from act IV. But it was still a cavalcade of everything that sucked about latter-day Funky Winkerbean, and how that suckitude has infected Crankshaft.

Let’s start with Monday’s strip. The previous week was about Ed Crankshaft soliciting Montoni’s to sponsor his softball team. Ed told lame jokes for a week, then it ended with Mindy and Pete at the softball game, meeting the detestable one-armed news reporter Skip. I ended last week’s post by calling this “undue attention from the local media.”

I undersold it. Because now there’s a frickin’ TV reporter at the game! Are they broadcasting live? Is it viewable on my ESPN app, between kabaddi and the New Zealand pro basketball league? Can I bet on Summer Silver Senior Slowpitch Softball Society games on DraftKings? Did they really need two media outlets to report on a 93-year-old softball player turning 94? It’s like something out of The Onion. “Local Old Man Is Now Slightly Older.” How much media coverage does this small town need? Especially when 60% of residents are content creators themselves?

This Week In Act IV: More Montoni’s

Guess what?

After an internal discussion, Son of Stuck Funky has decided that we will do regular updates again.

Because Crankshaft has officially become Act IV of Funky Winkerbean. We’ve been tracking it that way for awhile, and this week seemed like the right time to make it official. For me, this week was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And I was the first to advance the idea of doing regular updates again, so maybe I’m the most sensitive of our team members. But they’re all on board with it!

Continue reading “This Week In Act IV: More Montoni’s”

The Two Scariest Words In The Funkyverse

It’s been over a month since Harriet promised you an epic screed from me, about the three weeks Crankshaft spent on three different book signings (two for Dinkle and one for Batton Thomas). I haven’t delivered it yet, because I said I wanted to make sure the arc was over.

It wasn’t over. It’s still not over yet. It may not be over for months. Continue reading “The Two Scariest Words In The Funkyverse”

The Story About May 4 Was The Best Funkyverse Arc in 25 Years. Here’s Why It’s Awful Anyway.

Last week, Tom Batiuk’s blog re-ran his five-week story on the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings. This is probably his strongest story after Act I, and is well-regarded even by readers of this blog. It has a few problems that are too big to ignore, though.

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.