Category: Son of Stuck Funky

Monkey Winkerbean

Making their first appearance since January 2016 are Summer and Keisha. I’m sure the sounds of one-on-one basketball right outside his door do wonders for the terminally distractable Les’ writing process.

If “see you later, alligator” is good enough for Cliff and Vera, I don’t know why Les and Cayla feel the need to “update” it. Let’s not get started on Les calling his black wife a monkey. Instead let’s examine Batiuk’s tendency to take a feeble but acceptable joke and proceed to stretch it ’til it breaks. He could have left it at “they’re working on an update blah blah blah.” But, because it’s Sunday and he still has two panels to fill, he’s gotta drop in the stuff about going “viral” and “beta testing”.

It’s all well and good that Batiuk recruited a couple comic book pros to draw Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean. But the draughtsmanship, maddeningly inconsistent as it is, isn’t the problem with these strips, it’s the writing.

Losing Track

Programming note: SoSF’s 7th Anniversary draws nigh! In honor of the occasion, we’ve brought back the “randomized page headers” that were such a hit a year ago. Enjoy, and stay tuned for an anniversary giveaway! Stay Funky.


The series of inconvenient events continues as Dinkle and Dinklette must travel somewhere outside of Westview to a town that still has a post office. And what at what post office/bureau of motor vehicles/doctor’s office/retail store/fitness center/old folks home in the Funkiverse are you not greeted by a miserable, sarcastic, unattractive person who proceeds to insult you to your face?

A.K.A. El Dinko

In the Funkiverse, camera tripods were never invented. Harry sits for the obligatory passport photo, and Harriet finally gets to open that frog mouth of hers. If you asked me to imagine what a “drug overlord” looks like, I wouldn’t immediately picture a white-haired, unshaven, scowling septuagenarian, but the syndicate probably thought “another photo of you that looks a little less like a child molester” was a bit too edgy.

You Shall Not Passport

Seriously. I may be closer in age to Funky than to Dinkle, but no, Lefty: I’ve never had a passport. Never needed one. You know, not everyone goes jetting off to Iraquistan to adopt war orphans. Hey, what the hell ever happened to your daughter Rana anyway?

I may not have a passport, but you know what I do have? A driver’s license. And every four years I have to renew it; and unless there’s a long line, I manage to accomplish this in one visit, and usually without drawing sneering contempt from clerks and state troopers. I can’t imagine getting a passport is much more involved than that:  as long as one is able to produce a couple supporting documents and is prepared to fork over the fee, it certainly should not entail “a few months” worth of paperwork. But hey, readers love the “older people hate dealing with bureaucracy” trope, so let’s go back to that well one more time.