Tag: Funky Winkerbean

Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a parkbench quietly…


After a whirlwind week in the Big City, the old friends sit on their park bench like bookends…and bitch and moan about life. Please explain, if you can: who are the “greedy, amoral morons” who have ruined Funky’s life? It was barely two years ago that he was the cover boy for Pizza World magazine. Now his empire is down to just one store. And the reader is expected to believe that this is the fault of anyone besides the inept, ill-tempered, unlikeable jerk whose cost-cutting, penny-pinching management style ran the business into the ground?

Or maybe said “morons” are really those who hate on TB’s Pulitzer-worthy “writing”? It isn’t the first time that the author has used his strip to take us Philistines to task…

If I Can't Make It There, Can't Make It Anywhere…

The sign on the door says it all: Out of Business. Funky and Les bid arrivederci to the New York store. But in a final “F you” to the landlord and to all New Yorkers, before locking up, the boys have left every  faucet in the place wide open…note the water just beginning to seep out at the bottom of the window in panel 2. Take that, City of Broken Dreams!

The Declaration of Indifference

Well, look who came back to “help”. Where the @#$% have you been?

I’m on Funky’s side this time: I was gonna get on him for responding to Les’ “big news” with the usual dreary negativity. But he brought Les along on this trip for help and probably moral support, and off goes the Delicate Genius to take a meeting with his wacko “agent” while Funky is left, alone, to schlep more boxes. Les’ schmuckiness star continues to ascend.

Welcome to (My) Jungle

AAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEE (Click to view larger)

Nothing caps off a depressing week of “un-funnies” like the ol’ sideways-formatted comic-book cover “tribute”. And this week’s honoree is even more obscure than usual. “Jungle Comics”? Must have been before my time. The comic books I spent my allowance on were 15¢, not 10¢…and I Google-image-searched“Jungle Comics covers” and I get the feeling that “Jungle” comics were kept behind the counter instead of on the rotating wire rack next to Superman…lookit all that leg! This stuff might’ve been pre-Comics Code.

Check out grimacing, shirtless (fortunately that’s cropped out) Funky, tangling ass with an exquisitely coiffed mandrill. Careful with that knife, Funk-zan, you might cut your other hand…if that is your other hand; in my paper it’s colored differently than your knife-wielding hand. Maybe the mandrill’s throwing a right?

Anyway, what’s the gag here? “…turning over a new leaf goes pretty much unnoticed when you live in a jungle.” As Livia Soprano would’ve said: “Ohh, poor you!” I’m thinking that TB was just so intent on shoehorning in a tribute to his fetish comics that he crafted yet another stilted, un-lifelike “punchline” to justify it. What “jungle” does Funky live in? Westview, Ohio? He’s the richest, albeit most miserable man in town. The hell with this jungle, ask your nephew cousin Wally about being stuck in a Godforsaken desert hellhole for five or ten years.