Funky Winkerbean - warning: spoilers

Billy and Jeffy got jobs playing Goofus and Gallant in dinner theater.

 

You react how you react. Nothing wrong with that at all. I get where you are going and I know that far too many of will be reminded of something painful when we read something like this. I know I did and I appreciate you pointing it out. I don't read the strip, but I spent some time reading back through the strips related to this character's illness and death.

But these threads do also take on a life of their own, and many of us have been touched by fictional stories as much as our real ones. Like Farley's death. Or Gwen Stacy, Captain America or Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics version) in comics. Done well, these are powerful stories that allow us to touch on an emotional place that we hope to avoid as much as possible in the real world. And maybe they help us deal with those real moments, or the memories that come later, just a little bit.

Ok. Maybe I'm being too serious now, too.

 

Dolly is now a featured dancer at the Mitchell Brothers Theater in SF. Billy and Jeffy operate a meth factory in upstate New York. PJ is playing the role of Stewie in the upcoming Broadway adaptation of "Family Guy."

Speaking of comics, there is an upcoming Charles Schulz biography that's probably headed for my Christmas list.

 

I ain't waitin'. Already pre-ordered from Amazon.

 

Anything in that cartoon that happened after April, 1976 is a spoiler to me.

 

If you really want to know what happened to Jeffy, Billy and Dolly check out Pearls Before Swine

 

It's a final:

https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2022/12/funky-winkerbean-ends-today-after-five-decades.html

 

Feeling kind of melancholy about this, even though I stopped paying attention a few years ago, for whatever reason. I had it in my San Diego paper in the '90s and paid attention to it after moving away (online, since my local paper didn't run it). It turned into something akin to "Mary Worth" in its last years rather than the more amusing strip it started out as, but still a good 50 years from the artist. Now, I need to go back and see how the characters ended up.

 

Excellent return to a thread that originated 15+ years ago.

Haven't gone past the first page yet, but I will. Good takes from our distant past.

 

I’ve read a lot of Funky Winkerbean over the years. It started out as a proto fast times at ridgemont high, but it turned “serious” about 20 years ago. It’s had some excellent story lines including the already mentioned Lisa’s cancer arc. Another was the saga of Wally Winkerbean coming back to Westview after being a prisoner of war. Another was the last painful years of the character Bull, the one time antagonist in the series, who suffered from dementia before possibly taking his own life.

However, there were a lot of shit story lines, especially involving Les Moore, who became the star of the strip, so basically I wouldn’t read for months at a time. While I liked the ending, a better ending would have been les being set adrift on a ice flow to die.