Logan, woman to fictional girl, I think this better be your last potentially romantic date with your good pal Malcolm.
I mean, I guess he’s tall. And next to cowlick Connor and certified Michelin Manlet Bernie, he’s okay looking. Yeah, he’s got a receding hairline, but what fresh-faced Westview teen doesn’t have one? I mean just look the crowd at that graduation party you went to!
That’s a lotta kids in baseball caps for a pool party…
But girl. I’m seeing some SERIOUS red flags. You better put him right back in the friendzone.
I know from my work at the gas station, that a lot of the young high schoolers these days have debit cards. All well and good. But a credit card?
I remember the day my mom handed me a credit card with my own name on it. She said it was linked to her account. She said she would be able to see everything I bought. She said it was only for emergencies. Like if I was stranded in a blizzard and needed a hotel. (Many of my mom’s worst case scenarios involve blizzards. It’s also why she refuses to get rid of the compressed bale of old blankets wedged in her linen closet.) She gave me one of those serious mom stares. I felt like I was walking around with the nuclear football tucked into my nylon wallet.
But Malcolm tells us that this is HIS credit card. I guess that means Malcolm is 18, and has an independent source of income. Which would seem like points his in favor. But then he says he must have maxed it out and didn’t realize it? And so Logan has to pay for the latest rehashed Marvel product?
I don’t have a smart phone. My phone has a calculator, and always knows what time it is, so it’s already smarter than me. I had a smart phone for about six month, before I ruined it jumping into a pond to fish out a newborn calf. Now I’m playing a game of chicken with a 10 year old diet-blackberry Samsung to see which quits first, the phone or the entire 3G Network. (Looks like the phone will win.)
But I have seen the wizardry available with the internet in the palm of your hand. I’ve seen people at the checkout have a card decline, pull out their phone and pay it off, or transfer money from one account to another, in minutes. I’ve seen people glancing at their phones and checking their balance before telling me exactly how much in sticky quarters they’re going to give me to pay for their pack of Camels so they can run the rest on their cards.
Meaning, any tech literate young zoomer is going to be able to pay down the balance on their credit card with their phone on the spot.
Meaning, Malcolm not only has maxed out his credit card, he lacks the funds in his bank account to pay it down. And he didn’t think to check on this before his very special date with Logan? A date where he only brought his credit card? He’s already in debt, but was going to tack interest charges onto a date?
And I know most starting out credit cards have pretty low credit lines, but still $1000, $500?
Then he looks Logan in the eye, face both tired and pained, and tells her that this is nothing…barely peanuts…to the crippling debt he’s planning to inflict on himself. Malcolm already has a solid figure in his mind, so much so that he already counts that debt as HIS before he’s sat through a single lecture. Tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands, more money than most people make in a decade, are already hanging over his head, future promise bucks handed from lender to unnamed college in his name. For what?
Why is he going to a college expensive enough to drain the light from his eyes? What are his plans? Does he have a career path that requires a degree? Because he isn’t being bankrolled by scripture sales from the Cult of Dead St. Lisa. He doesn’t have an Endless Summer to spend puttering around a university changing his major from one useless certificate to another.
College can be a rewarding place to learn, to find yourself, to make new friends, to fall in love, and have exciting experiences. So can summer camp. You do not go 40 grand in debt for summer camp. You go 40 grand in debt because you have a clear goal that necessitates that sacrifice.
Come on, Logan! Surely with your ABC News boosted business blog, you should be able to talk him out of the biggest and most expensive mistake an aimless young graduate can make:
He appeared in 68 strips, not counting this week. He spoke 31 lines of dialogue.
And.
At last.
A (first) name.
How do I know all those specific numbers? Uhhhh.
You know how yesterday’s post was kind of short? Today is going to make up for that. You’re all in luck, or out of luck, depending on your views. Because we had a couple rain days last week that kept me out of the fields.
And so, below, in chronological order, is every appearance of the class of 2022.
August 26, 2015. 1st appearance of Bernie Silver. Westview seniors Owen and Cody attempt to bully him. He is nonplussed. The next strip they stop when they realize Bernie has a copy of ‘The Amazing Mr. Sponge’ in his backpack.
August 30, 2015. 1st appearance of Maris Rogers, unnamed. She is presented as the newest in a long line of popular blonds. Les creeps on her as only Les can.
For the most part Owen, Cody, and Alex dominate Westview High School storylines for the next months. Freshmen don’t show up again until…
February 23, 2016. Bernie Silver is reintroduced, Maris Rogers gets her name, and Logan Church’s has her first appearance. Logan was colored white for her first week, before becoming black when next seen in September. She has since been recolored in the Comics Kingdom archives.
February 29, 2016. The aged up Crankshaft Twins, Emily and Amelia, are introduced. And spend a week establishing that Emily is the pink and sunny one, and Amelia is the dark and sassy one. For the first couple weeks, their hair is colored typical-Westview-blonde, but has since been recolored in the Comics Kingdom archives as a strawberry blonde.
This will, of course, remain wildly inconsistent.
The following week, we get another set of Emily and Amelia shenanigans. Including Batuik pulling out an ancient running gag from the 70’s, and the last appearance of quarterback, chain-smoker, and 35-year-old high school student Jarod Posey. Emily and Amelia join ‘The Bleat‘. Amelia eats lunch with SENIORS. Les tries teaching them poetry.
July 10, 2016. A Sunday Strip where Emily and Amelia play their previously established instruments door to door as a band fundraiser.
August 10, 2016. Malcolm and Connor, and later Emily and Amelia, appear as silent students in a week-long band camp arc where Becky and Dinkle are the only characters to speak.
September 18, 2016. A Sunday Strip where Bernie asks if he can opt out of a quiz. Logan, Maris, and maybe Amelia are in the class.
October 23, 2016. A Sunday Strip where Bernie on ‘The Bleat’ announces Bull Bushka’s retirement. Some students that look like Maris and Malcolm are pictured in class.
January 8, 2017. A Sunday Strip where Bernie hasn’t practiced the Trombone.
March 5, 2017. A Sunday Strip where Bernie leaves chess club to go play games at Komix Korner with Malcolm and Connor.
March 19, 2017. A Sunday Strip where Malcolm and Connor are playing games in Komix Korner.
March 29, 2017. In the middle of a week of Becky/Dinkle gags, a single strip where Dinkle addresses the band. Malcom gets the only name he will be known by for the rest of his high school tenure. Bernie, Emily, Amelia, and Connor are also seen.
April 17-22, 2017. A week of high school gags. First two strips of Les ranting at silent students. Emily, Amelia, Malcolm, Connor, Logan, and Bernie are crudely scribbled in. Then a strip at Komix Korner where Malcolm and Logan tease Bernie about Facebook friends. Then three strips where Bernie and Malcolm talk about how dangerous ‘the vendo’ snacks are.
May 28, 2017. A Sunday Strip where Logan takes a test. A call back to Batiuk’s numerous test gags of the past.
A week of school shenanigans. On May 31, 2017 we get Bernie doing another Batiuk ™ wacky test answer. And June 1, has a poorly drawn Connor talking to a poorly drawn Linda (Burchett had just taken over art duties.) Everything else that week is about the teachers.
June 11, 2017. A Sunday Strip where Bernie, Malcolm, and Logan are playing games at Komix Korner.
August 28, 2017. The final appearance of Owen, Cody, and Alex, at the Starbuck Jones premiere.
January 17th and 18th, 2018. In a week of Les Moore complaining about copier paper, Maris, Malcolm, and Logan run in filming a hit piece for ‘The Bleat’. The artwork is particularly awful.
January 21, 2018. A Sunday Strip. Emily and Amelia talk to people who don’t resemble their parents all all about getting rid of the landline.
January 22 and 23, 2018. Bernie, Malcolm, and Logan discuss school food.
JUNE 10th, 2018. A Sunday Strip. Bernie talks on ‘The Bleat’ about teachers running out of material to teach. Emily and Amelia film him. A student who may be Connor beans a kid with the sun in Kablichnik’s classroom.
DECEMBER 16, 2018. A Sunday Strip. Becky and Dinkle yell at the band. I you squint and cross your eyes Bernie, Connor, and Emily might be there…or they’re just generics.
December 23, 2018. A Sunday Strip of the Christmas Concert. Is that Connor’s hair fweep in the second panel? Is that a tiny Amelia in the last? Does it matter? No. Because the strip is about Becky (for once.)
March 17, 2019. A week later, A Sunday Strip, Batiuk pats himself on the back again for the gun violence walkout by having Fred Fairgood watch the entire class walkout again on the news. If you squint you can tell it’s Bernie, Logan, Emily and Amelia leading the class out, and Malcolm, Bernie, and one of the twins on the TV.
April 2019. During THREE WEEKS of Free Comic Book Day at Komix Korner. Malcolm gets commissioned Darin art. Bernie meets Flash Freeman. Bernie and Malcolm ask about the first appearance of Batton Thomas. Logan, Bernie, and Malcolm get their pictures taken with Masone Jarre and Holtron. Logan gets an autograph to sell. And Malcolm asks about future crossover events at Atomik Komix.
The next week, May 8-11, Cindy has agreed to talk to ‘The Bleat’ crew. (For whatever reason, Batiuk has forgotten that Maris was supposed be a part of ‘The Bleat’.)
November 3, 2019. A Sunday Strip. Malcolm delivers a bad pun on ‘The Bleat’. Amelia and Logan are camera operator and director.
December 16, 2019. A single weekday strip of Dinkle criticizing Becky. Is that Malcolm in the crowd? Idk.
March 8, 2020. A Sunday Strip of Bernie getting a candy bar delivered. Malcolm and Emily are flabbergasted.
March 29, 2020. A Sunday Strip. Bernie relates New Horizon’s historic flyby with a Marvel character. Connor, Emily, Amelia, Logan, and Malcolm are in class.
April 15, 16 and 17, 2020. Batton Thomas visits Westview High. The kids don’t get it. Bernie, Malcolm, Emily, Amelia, and Logan are in attendance. Emily, as the polite one (or just because) asks the only question.
November 30- December 5, 2020. A week of disconnected school gags. The PA system screams for Logan, which startles Connor and Les. Bernie, Malcolm, Logan, Maris and Emily(?) return from an unseen field trip. Maris does a typical Cindy-lite school picture gag. Emily and Amelia talk to Les about Cross Country on set of The Bleat? Logan answers a question ‘correctly’ and Kablichnik cries. Bernie and Amelia are in class with her.
December 21, 2020. Malcolm walks out of band class in the background while Dinkle and Becky talk. THRILLING.
January 3, 2021. A Sunday Strip. Malcolm, Bernie, Emily, and Amelia show up as smirking side faces during the Winter Band Banquet.
January 10, 2021. A Sunday Strip. Connor, Emily and Amelia, and Logan are all called on by name during attendance. Malcolm looks devastated that another chance to establish his real name has come and gone. Bernie keeps Altoids in his pocket. This is treated like something we all should know by now.
January 24, 2021. A Sunday Strip. Becky explains the behavior guidelines before the band goes to OMEA. Bernie asks a question. Emily, Amelia, Malcolm, Logan, and what might be a tiny Connor and Maris are all in the background. The next day, only Malcolm is identifiable. The band is left behind in Columbus, Ohio, and not seen again as they make their long trek back in the middle of winter.
In February 2021 there is a week of Dinkle substitute teaching, but all the kids look completely generic except for maybe on February 17th. This might be Connor without freckles?
March 7, 2021. A Sunday Strip. Emily, Amelia, Bernie, and what might be the back of Malcolm’s head, listen to Kablichnik blather about black holes.
September 1, 2021. Les Moore crucifies the concept of humor on the set of ‘The Bleat’ while Emily, Amelia, Malcolm, Logan, and Bernie watch in horror. The next day Bernie runs out for protection.
September 5, 2021. A Sunday Strip. The Class of 2022 flashes back to a zoom lesson. Maris has black hair for some reason.
March 20, 2022. A Sunday Strip. Bernie, Malcolm, Logan, and Connor are playing Magic at Komix Korner. Bernie angrily forbids Batton Thomas from sorting Magic cards.
First of all, I’d like to thank our very own Billy the Skink for his expert analysis over the last couple weeks. Especially for pulling vintage strips from a period of time not currently covered by the penny-pinching misers over at Comics Kingdom. Billy, you are, by far, my favorite guest-host-with-a-name-that-reminds me-of-famous-K-Pop-artists. So here’s to BTS!
A Skink for All Tastes…
While my feelings for my fellow guest-hosts are always positive and enthusiastic. My feelings about today’s strip are…complex.
I mean… it’s almost good. It’s almost funny. It feels human. Like, for a moment we’re getting a window into the Multiverse of Madness to an alternate world where Funky Winkerbean isn’t about sad, self-centered old men complaining about the passage of time.
Maybe you disagree, but it feels believable to me that Thatsnot Hewmore has kinda liked Logan, but was hesitant to make their friendship awkward. It feels believable that Logan would respond in this way. Given the almost nothing we know about these characters, this feels relatable.
But…is it too relatable?
Am I only relating to it, and finding it funny, because of the meta-narrative?
If you really break down what Crazy is saying here, it seems to imply that when he was sixteen he was attracted to an eleven year-old-child he assumed was a boy.
No Boku No Pac-Man, please…
Unfortunate implications aside, all we have here is a restatement of the week’s plot. The only thing of note is that the Sunday colorist managed to depict a redhead character correctly for once.
March of last year Tom let us know this arc was incoming, when he posted the book cover that inspired his Eliminator helmet, and said this:
I saw this book on a spinner rack at the Captain EZ Confectionery a few blocks from our first apartment. Couldn’t resist the cover. Picked it up and later “borrowed” the Hunter helmet for a character I’d just created in Funky called the Eliminator. Said helmet, coinkadinkily enough, will show-up in a Funky story arc next year.
Cover Me 143 posted on MARCH 20, 2021
“Hunter” – Art by Paul Neary and written by Rich Margopoulos, Budd Lewis and Bill DuBay. Six parts in total, appearing in issues #52-57. Set in a near-future world devastated by nuclear war, it features Damien Hunter, a half man/half demon who seeks to destroy all the demons on Earth, including his father Oephal. As a half-breed consumed by self-loathing, Hunter frequently moralized on racial issues in contemporary America.
I want to thank Banana Jr. 6000, none, Charles, Mela, as well as others for providing some background on the arcade game Defender. I didn’t grow up with video games, only picking up the habit during college, so the context was great. I hunted up a few short YouTube vids that cover the development and just how unique and challenging the game is.
Today is the last day of my shift. It has been a real treat celebrating 50 years of Funky Winkerbean by going back in time to see what a 25-year-old Tom Batiuk was capable of. Thanks everyone who enjoyed it with me!
But what did I really think of the first four years of Funky Winkerbean?
It was alright.
Not usually laugh out loud funny, certainly capable of being bad, but amusing enough. Certainly not out of place squeezed between Hagar the Horrible and Wizard of Id.
But I easily found strips where the seeds of what would grow into Batiuk’s thorniest issues were germinating.
Preachy Nihilism.
Recycled Jokes
Observational Non-Humor
Vaguely offensive portrayals of women
I mean women WANT to be sexy and hate not being sexy and hate other women for being sexy amirite?
Dinkle writing AWFUL puns.
Worshiping Les. (Okay, this one is actually funny.)
And, as I’ve said before, I think we’re sometimes too hard on modern Batiuk during those occasions when he dips his toes back into gag-a-day humor. It might not be as good as his best was back then. But his best now is as good as his average was.
So sue me, I liked this one.
There were a couple strips I stumbled across that made me cringe or shudder, knowing where the strip would eventually go.
Baby Wally was born fearing death.
Alcoholism runs in Funky’s family.
Les hopes his future wife will make him money…
Uhh…
Uhhh…..
But despite all that, there were strips that had me genuinely laughing out loud. So here they are, my favorite strips from the first few years of Funky Winkerbean.
Act I Crazy Harry is my spirit animal.
I have literally done this.
So that’s it for me this round! The esteemed SpacemanSpiff85 will be taking over the ship tomorrow, asking the hard hitting questions.
Like, when is the strip ending? Will Wally Jr. ever return? Will Mindy and Mopey ever marry? Will Summer ever graduate Kent State? We’ve reached 50 years and we’re still chugging along. Maybe someday, we’ll know, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be this year.
Link to another dumb question from Maddie that I can’t believe she’s never asked her mom before. And how has Maddie not seen the picture at Montoni’s? She worked there.
Who doesn’t at least know the very basics of how their parents met? Heck, I referenced my own parents’ story of sneaking out to the county fair behind my grandma’s back in the very first post of my shift. I will admit, sometimes I pretend like I haven’t heard a story, just so I can hear it again; but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
And, as many of you have commented, this story has more holes than Swiss Cheese. The real backstory here is that in 2001 or 2002 Batiuk realized that he had married off Les to Lisa and Funky to Cindy and wondered who he should set Crazy Harry up with. He then had the idea to reveal that The Eliminator kid was a girl all along, and have her and Crazy fall in love. Not the worst idea, really. Done right it could have been a cute reference to ‘Samus is a girl!’. The problem was in the execution.
No. It wasn’t.
In Metroid, Samus isn’t ‘hiding’ her gender because the Mother Brain is sexist and won’t fight a woman. She’s just in an androgynous space suit for most of the game. Players might assume she’s male, but it’s not confirmed either way until the end.
Hai Guize
I haven’t read all the old The Eliminator strips; I don’t know how often she self-refers as male. So I don’t know how feasible it would be to present Donna’s past actions as allowing the people around her to think she was a boy because she didn’t care to clarify, or because she thought it was funny. (“I was named for your Grandpa Donald. My mom always called me that when she was angry.”)
But the only other way to salvage this would be writing a more serious story about Donna as an insecure little girl who thought she needed to disguise herself coming to the realization as an adult that she was wrong. Because she didn’t need to. Period. Mary Ellen, and Livinia, and Junebug, and even Wanda have proved that handily almost a decade before The Eliminator is introduced.
Batiuk is repeatedly guilty of recontextualizing his own past to suit the narrative of the now. I found some old puff piece newspaper articles that just plain don’t make sense after reading the first few years of Funky Winkerbean.
To Batiuk, delving back into the high school years with the gay prom issue underscores the generational changes and contemporary challenges his characters faced once he decided to let them begin aging along with Batiuk and the rest of us.
“I had crossed the threshold and I had grown up and the characters wanted to grow up too, it seemed like,” Batiuk said in an interview in his cozy and bright studio jammed with books and mementos.
“Funky Winkerbean” might have a lower profile in mainstream culture than, say, “Doonesbury,” possibly because “Funky” was a gag cartoon in the early years when society was highly politicized in the Vietnam era and has become more issue-oriented since the 1990s…
When he began “Funky Winkerbean” on March 27, 1972, Batiuk was a 25-year-old cartoonist who seemed to be purposely unaware of the furor then affecting American society. The Vietnam War was still a focus of the nation’s rage, Watergate was just beginning to heat up and all the rest of the post-‘60s-era concerns – sexism, racism, the Cold War, social-welfare programs – hogged the daily headlines.
In the midst of this, Batiuk’s strip existed as if in another dimension. His characters were mostly students whose main interests involved air-guitar contests, flaming-baton routines, bullies roaming the hallways, student popularity polls and how to survive the daily humiliations of gym class.
In the 90’s and beyond, Batiuk wanted to pretend he hadn’t been talking about ‘serious issues’ in Act I, because he wanted attention for talking about them now.
The first years of Funky Winkerbean didn’t exist in a ‘different dimension.’ They were more contemporary than the modern strip has been in years.
VIETNAM
Let’s talk about the draft on the fourth strip ever.
Some of these events were very much ‘of their time.’ For someone like me, born after this era, reading through is a fun little history lesson. Like when I was a kid, learning about the 80’s by reading Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits and watching old VHS of Saturday Night Live.
Son of Stuck Funky 
