The Complete Funky Winkerbean vol. 3 178–1980

by Tom Batiuk, Joe Walsh (Foreword)

The Funkyverse continues to expand In this third volume, award-winning cartoonist Tom Batiuk continues to chronicle the lives of a group of students from the fictitious Westview High School. Funky Winkerbean fans are introduced to a host of new characters, including black cheerleader Junebug Jones; Melinda Budd, Holly Budd’s ambitious stage mother; Jerome the drum major; Nancy the school librarian; Ron the tennis pro; Irma, Rita Righton’s tennis partner; Channel One reporters Brenda Harpy and Minnie Cameron; talk show host John Darling; news anchor Charlie Lord; Phil the Forecaster; and program director Reed Roberts. Batiuk also features a troupe of inanimate forms achieving sentience, such as talking trees, clouds, school desks,video games, and a talking tennis ball machine that goes on to play at Wimbledon. Not only does Batiuk grow his  Funkyverse” through its cast of characters, but he adds a number of recurring set pieces, too, such as “The Guide to Taking Tests,” course descriptions from the student curriculum guide, final exams on “Shakespeare the Hard Bard,” Les’s Record Roundup, plus Crazy Harry’s “Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes and His Monstrous Limericks.” Volume 3 will entertain readers with Arab sheiks buying the oil rights to the football field, an exploding nuclear power plant, and the school’s computer playing Star Trek and beaming people around the building. By the late 1970s Batiuk’s talent for character- and story-driven work was coming into its own. Not only was Funky Winkerbean evolving but the strip-within-a-strip about John Darling and his bottom-of-the-ratings-barrel TV station, Channel One, spun off into its own strip called Darling.  W ith life imitating art, Batiuk even found himself as a guest on The Today Show, following his story arc about Darling filling in for the vacationing Tom Brokaw.

512 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2014

About the author

Tom Batiuk is an American comic strip creator. His best-known comic strip is Funky Winkerbean.

Batiuk attended Kent State University, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in painting. He went on to teach art in junior high school. He put his experiences to use in his gag-a-day Funky Winkerbean, which first appeared in print in 1972. With the success of the strip, he abandoned his teaching career, occasionally returning to the classroom to refresh his sources. He authored two spinoff strips, John Darling, which ran from 1979 through 1990, and Crankshaft, which began syndication in 1987. These strips sometimes experience crossovers.

Over the years, Batiuk's strips have taken on an increasing narrative continuity. Starting in 1986, Funky, and to a lesser extent Crankshaft, sometimes abandoned humor to explore serious, even tragic subject matter.

His stories often involve strong drama elements combined with generally rosy outcomes. They also show a strong belief in God, as well as sympathies for the American military. On the other hand, Funky Winkerbean dealt very critically with Intelligent Design, and two students in the strip even did a pro-evolution take-off on Johnny Hart's BC.

Reviews

[Andrew]

While still very much a gag-a-day strip, relying a lot on recurring joke themes and more puns than an entire season of the Muppet Show, this volume gives us some longer continuities (particularly in the form of a teachers strike) and some slightly deeper character interaction. The strip still has a ways to go to become the more character-based humor strip it is today, but I will absolutely claim that the jokes here hold up, because they made me smile.

[Rex Libris]

This volume brings us the first strips containing Band Turkeys. Other great story arcs include the teacher strike where the teachers end up in jail and a teacher who vows to no longer touch donuts.