Options
Current Funky Winkerbean story line <possible spoilers>
phansford
Posts: 221
Anyone else reading the current story line in Funky Winkerbean?
Quick overview.... Crazy has retired from the Post Office due to cut backs. Its an early retirement. He sells some "assets". Gets a job at the comic shop.
I absolutely love Funky. Great stories. Love the artwork. I love the continuity of the strip. Its not a joke a day strip (even though it started as that type of daily).
Quick overview.... Crazy has retired from the Post Office due to cut backs. Its an early retirement. He sells some "assets". Gets a job at the comic shop.
I absolutely love Funky. Great stories. Love the artwork. I love the continuity of the strip. Its not a joke a day strip (even though it started as that type of daily).
Comments
I'm sure you know Tom Batiuk is a big comic book fan. John Byrne has even done a few guest-artist strips. Tom gets a lot of criticism for doing so many depressing storylines, but I do think it's one of the better strips being produced today.
The strip is just fine as is, a slice of life comic, sometimes humorous, sometimes funny, always interesting, and deserving of better readers than the snarks it seems to to draw.
But, really, how many band turkey jokes can you make? How many times can Les get stuck at the top of the climbing rope and it still be funny? Frankly, the strip needed a change. Maybe not such a dramatic change, but I think Batiuk wanted to get the characters to an age where he could deal with a greater number of issues, and I applaud him for having the guts to do it.
Yet Peter Parker is still the same person as he was 30 years ago.
If you've read Caniff's run on Terry & Pirates, Terry went from a young boy to a pilot during WW2. Caniff let his characters age with time.
The bashers are fools. Batiuk taking real life issues head on and letting us contemplate the world around us. He's very much of his generation. This is a guy who was of age during Kent State. I think in time people will come to recognize that Batiuk is creating some of the best literature of our times. There just aren't any lunch boxes, trading cards, action figures or blockbuster movies to accompany the strip.
Maybe if I read it as a whole instead of cherry-picked strips with snarky commentary I'd enjoy it more, but it just doesn't seem like my cup of tea. I do give the guy some credit for actually putting effort into his strip, though, as most strips seem to be written on auto-pilot these days. Aside from the obvious financial reasons, I'm baffled as to why so many strips that have been around for decades still exist.
Incidentally, while Comics Alliance column is pretty much bashing, Comics Curmudgeon is actually a fun blog that makes fun of pretty much every strip, and I get the impression that the writer genuinely does like comic strips, he just sees the humor in the execution of some of them.
I haven't seen Comic Alliance to comment. I'll check it out.
On a related note, the Garfield Minus Garfield blog—where he takes Garfield and Garfield's dialogue out of the strip and leaves the rest—is pretty funny, as is 3eanuts, which is Peanuts without the last panel. They both get a little surreal at times.
There are exceptions, a few strips that the blogger genuinely doesn't like, but in most cases, I find him justified. With all respect to Stan Lee for all the great work he's done in the past, the current Spider-Man strip is about the laziest strip out there right now.