Oh yay, we finally get to meet Rocky’s mom, Carla! I’m sure she’ll quickly become a beloved recurring character, and surely doesn’t exist entirely for this “sin-in-law” joke. Holly’s face is looking especially rough in the second panel. I don’t know if it’s because she’s weary at the prospect of at least another week of bad sitcom level wedding tropes, like I am.
Tag: the raptor claw in Holly's hair
Homeward Bound
Link to the exciting conclusion to Batiuk tackling racism in 2022!
Yup. Batiuk doesn’t even have the decency to end this on a Sunday Strip. And has instead given us six panels of pointless nonsense. It’s like ending a contentious divorce arbitration with a pie in the face.
So let’s ignore it, and move on down memory lane.
Just a reminder, as we continue the saga of Jefferson Jacks.
I already have a retraction to print!
Cuban League professional baseball was definitely a thing. Up through the abolition of professional sports in Cuba in 1961. Since it was played in the winter, American players, black and white, often participated. It was one of the first baseball leagues to be completely integrated. There were usually four or five teams, including, Almendares Alacranes ‘Scorpions’, Petroleros de Cienfuegos ‘Oilers’, Habana Leones ‘Red Lions‘, Tigres de Marianao ‘Tigers‘, and the Havana Sugar Kings.
I wasn’t able to find any evidence that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara paid the Havana Reds to play against them in a sugar cane field in the early 50’s though. Maybe I was searching the wrong sources.
Following the Jefferson vs the communists story, we next see Jefferson Jacks in June 2010. Crankshaft and various other former Toledo Mud Hens are invited to play an exhibition game at a Mud Hens reunion.
Cute right? Or Schmaltzy? Depends on how jaded you’re feeling or how manipulative vs genuine you feel the writer’s intentions were. While it seems Jacks decided to help Bushka around the bases after seeing how frail his old tormenter had become, a few months later, in August 2010, we’re given a little more depth into their détente.
I’ll just re-repeat my comment from the last two threads: “Cayla’s whole presence in this arc seems to be adding up to, ‘Yeah kids, but whaddaya gonna do, right?’” (This time with better punctuation.)
Sourbelly
Cayla says, earlier this week, “Frankly, I don’t know how we’re going to change things.” She says this to two young kids who had baited a confrontation with a woman they didn’t know because they didn’t like how they were treated different for looking different.
And I just want to slap Cayla.
Because there are dozens of avenues to change. Some less contentious than others.
And one of those roads is the road of forgiveness. Not silent forgiveness, but an open hand presented. Offering a human connection to someone on ‘the other side’ and hoping that the relationship can be the key that releases them from their cage of prejudice.
It’s a more contentious road than you’d think. There are so many who see the weight of ignorance and hate as a burden that people deserve to be crushed by, because they willingly chose to carry that hate. They want to shut those spiteful people away in the dark prison of their own malice, and throw away the key. Because hateful people have not earned our efforts. Because they have not yet received back the pain they’ve inflicted.
And to withhold forgiveness is their right. No one should force the wronged to reach out.
But I feel that pure, healing change comes from batting away the fingers that pry into scars and want to hold open wounds. The past is prologue, but it is also a mirage we can’t visit, and revenge is an illusion because it destroys to pay for something already gone. What matters is now, and the future, and what will make things better there, whether it be punishment or mercy.
Sometimes change can’t be so kind. But when we can, isn’t better to convince people that the change we want makes things better for everyone? To convince people that the world you’d like to see has a place for them too?
And someone at their back to protect them, who will help push them home.
Spaceman Spiff takes over tomorrow.
CBH out!
*climbs off soapbox and drags it away*
Off The Depend
Today’s strip is both stupid and gross. I have nothing else to say about it.
Here are some better comic strips, read them instead…
Odd Man In
Link to another boring nonsensical strip that I still kind of understood because I’m always asking my housemate and best friend if she wants to go to the store with me but man was this week awful with maybe one almost joke and five days of pointless observation and yes this was supposed to be one long run-on sentence for comedic effect.
Full disclosure: Until I read through the Vintage Funky Winkerbean, I assumed Roland was black. I realized my mistake when Derek popped up, asking Les about why ‘brothers and sisters’ weren’t being covered by the school paper, looking like the lost sixth Jackson brother from the Jackson Five cartoon.
So Roland’s poofy hair was just an Art Garfunkel style jewfro, and Derek is the strip’s first black character. Which other characters seem to only notice and comment on occasionally.
In all of his appearances, there’s only a handful of strips where Derek’s overtly concerned about racism. And it always comes across cringy af. Now-a-days this is the sort of material that gets you twitter cancelled.
Other than these cases, Derek is written as ‘one of the guys’. Sometimes he spouts off Roland-esqe general activist talking points for a laugh.
His main character trait is this sort of weary detachment. In the four years of strips released, I think I’ve seen him smile twice. It’s like, somehow he knows. He knows that he’s stuck in Funky Winkerbean. And the best he can hope for is to feel slightly less than dead inside.
Like Livinia, unspoken identity politics hamstring his range. Because Batiuk wants Derek to be a positive portrayal of a black student, he’s never shown getting into trouble with the principal or being ignorant. He never asks the dumb question. He is the one Funky Winkerbean character that is never the wacky one spouting off inanity. He is all grimace and side-eye.
When Derek delivers the punchlines, they’re clever observations that reveal intelligence, not obliviousness like Batiuk will use for Les or even Funky.
Derek is still showing up in Vintage Funky Winkerbean through 1976. Most recently watching TV with Crazy Harry on 4-10-76.
I doubt he’s going to completely disappear for a while, since he fulfils an important diversity position. He’ll keep showing up until a more gimmicky black boy is introduced, or until Batiuk forgets to remind his audience he’s not racist. In September of 1975 a black female student was introduced, Junebug Jones. She and Derek are dating, and she becomes a cheerleader. Her ‘unorthodox’ cheering strategy is another running gag.
I’m of two conflicting minds on Junebug. On the one hand I wonder if she plays into the lazy stereotype of black girls as loud, aggressive, and tactless. On the other hand, I love seeing a lady with some backbone.
Derek and Junebug, one of the first couples in Funky Winkerbean. She might not have liked the odds, but she should have placed her bets. By the 1998 class reunion arc, they are confirmed to be married.
And by the 2008 reunion they have grandkids!
Junebug shows up again in 2015, as part of The Upcoming Reunion planning committee.
So, really, despite all his grumbling, it seems like Derek and Junebug had it pretty good for Funky Winkerbean characters. They escaped the plot before the Act II drama hit, and every subsequent cameo appearance has only reinforced their happy ending.
Gut Check Mates
Link to the first almost passable strip of the week.
If Livinia lost her main character status due to being too bland, Roland had the opposite problem. In the very first year of Funky Winkerbean, Roland Mathews had the strongest characterization of anyone. It’s apparent from the second strip he appears in.
He’s an ‘activist’. But unlike Livinia, his activism is vague and almost always played for laughs. The joke is usually Roland’s underlying hypocrisy, or the way he uses his ostensive political stances to ego trip and divert responsibility.
In the first couple years of FW, when he isn’t just rounding out the trio of guys, he has three recurring gags/storylines:
First is his rivalry with ‘Wicked’ Wanda, a student who is a women’s lib activist. These strips invariably lead to a sign smashing gag.
Second is his underground newspaper that Funky often helps with.
And third is his antagonistic relationship with his unnamed father, who is always shown sitting in front of the TV like he is some kind of bald chair-human hybrid.
As was shown in my spreadsheet yesterday, Roland shows up quite a bit in that first year, with 57 appearances. A distant third behind Les and Funky, but handily beating Livinia. He continues to show up regularly in 1973, though it’s clear that Crazy Harry has supplanted him. By 1974, Roland is on his way out. He shows up 10 times that year, 5 times in relation to his dad.
There’s the last mentions of his underground paper.
And, on September 3, 1974, his last appearance at school.
What is really really weird is that his chair!dad has continued to show up a few times since then, most ‘recently’ on 1/10/76. He seems to be taking a protoCrankshaft role.
Did Batiuk intend to write the topical and tragic story of a passionate teen with an uncaring and emotionally abusive parent lashing out against society, acting out at school, and eventually dropping out? Presumably leaving home with an incomplete education and no support structure, and disappearing into the world like so many hurting and alienated young people of his generation?
I’d put a sizable chunk of change on NO. Batiuk stopped using Roland because he’d decided to stop pulling from the counter-culture so much. On my first read through of 1972, I was shocked at how political it was. Batiuk doesn’t have his characters preaching THE TRUTH from a soapbox, like he does now, but he was constantly referencing politics, social issues, and the environment, usually with a kind of helpless sardonicism. It’s so weird that FW of 2022 feels more ‘hopeful.’ The preachy characters of today are a call to action to fix Batiuk’s pet problem of the week. The 1972 FW characters can’t change anything, and the joke is they try.
FW starts off with this chip on its shoulder, personified in Roland. It references the hippie values and politics because it’s trying to prove that, “It’s not like most strips.”
From the very beginning, I had some definite ideas about how I wanted to approach a teen strip. The crop of teen strips in the early seventies seemed oblivious to the time in which they existed. The enormous changes taking place in the youth culture were quickly making the strips with the jalopies and letter sweaters irrelevant… I decided to avoid the standard teen strip clichés. There would be no teenagers hanging on the phone or parents yelling at them to clean up their rooms; there would be no letter-sweatered football hero trying to decide which cheerleader he wanted to date. Instead, I was going to write about the realities of the school that I knew, from the tedium of being an unheralded and unrecognizable member of the band to the horrors of having to climb the dreaded rope in gym class. Rather than focus on jocks and cheerleaders, I was going to write about everyone else.
From the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Vol. One
Of course, that quote just shows how willfully myopic Batiuk has always been. He wants so badly to be unique, that he builds up a fake version of something to put himself next to. I’ve never read much Archie comics, but I am sure that it’s not a shallow as he wants it to be. And the irony is his strip relatively quickly morphed into something rife with teen cliches. Crazy Harry steps in with his wacky personality, and omnipresent hat, and apolitical non-confrontational weirdness, and Roland disappears. Roland was angry. Crazy is effervescent, his antics just confuse and amuse those around him.
As BillyTheSkink pointed out a few days ago, Roland did show up at the 2008 Reunion. He looks like he’d just gotten off work at the hardware store, and has what BTS calls “the haircut my grandfather was given when he joined the Air Force (and kept for the rest of his life).”
So that’s my headcanon now. After dropping out of school, Roland joined the Air Force, where he worked in logistics and communications. Finally getting the structure and support he needed and working in an organization that he felt got things done, he mellowed out. He became a successful small business owner and votes straight ticket GOP every election.
Son of Stuck Funky 
