Funky Winkerbean
| Funky Winkerbean | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Tom Batiuk |
| Current status / schedule | Active |
| Launch date | March 27, 1972 |
| Syndicate(s) | North America Syndicate |
| Genre(s) | Humor |
Funky Winkerbean is a long-running comic strip by Tom Batiuk. Distributed by North America Syndicate, a division of King Features Syndicate, it appears in more than 400 newspapers worldwide.
While Batiuk was a 23-year-old middle school art teacher in Elyria, Ohio, he began drawing cartoons while supervising study hall. In 1970, his characters first appeared as a weekly panel, Rapping Around, on the teenage page of the Elyria Chronicle Telegram. In 1972, Batiuk reworked some of the characters into a daily strip, which he sold to Publishers-Hall Syndicate.
Since its inception on March 27, 1972, the strip has gone through several format changes. For the first 20 years of its run, the characters did not age, and the strip was nominally episodic as opposed to a serial, with humor derived from visual gags and the eccentricity of the characters. In 1992, Batiuk rebooted the strip, establishing that the characters had graduated from high-school in 1988, and the series began progressing in real time. In 2007, a second "time warp" occurred, this time taking the strip ten years into the future, ostensibly to 2017, although the events of the strip still reflect a contemporary setting. Since the 1992 reboot and especially since the 2007 time jump, the strip has been recast as a drama, featuring story arcs revolving around such topics as terminal cancer, adoption, prisoners of war, drug abuse, post traumatic stress, same sex couples attending the senior prom, and interracial marriage.
Centered at Westview High School, the strip initially focused on several students: Funky Winkerbean, Crazy Harry Klinghorn, Barry Balderman, "Bull" Bushka, Cindy Summers, Junebug, Roland, Livinia, Leslie P. "Les" Moore, majorette Holly Budd (daughter of Melinda Budd, original majorette for Westview High), and Lisa Crawford.
From 1972 to 1992, the strip was highly gag oriented, with humor coming from physical and prop comedy and surreal situations: running gags included the school's computer having become sentient and subjecting the students to its obsession with Star Trek; student "Crazy" Harry's ability to play pizzas like records; the school's winless football team; and band director Harry L. Dinkle's attempts to win each year's "Battle of the Bands," despite the contest always coinciding with a natural disaster (usually a downpour from a heavy rainstorm).
...
Wikipedia