Funky Winkerbean - warning: spoilers

He'll be fine for our purposes, because we'll get to skip ahead 10 years. I hope the characters get to have some happiness in that time. Between dying (now dead) Lisa, grieving Les/Darrin/Summer, the one-armed pizza girl, the deaf band director, the emo cartoonist with the massive schnozz and all the other tragic faces we've seen in FW 2.0, it'd be nice if they got back to, I dunno, funny funnies.

 

Hence its charm. It is so over-the-top awful you can't turn away.

Whoever made the point about comics living long past their prime was dead on. I was going to ask a snarky question and ponder how the Katzenjammer Kids resolved their run. I presumably thought they died at Stalingrad or something.

A mind-blowing Google search informed me that the Katzenjammer Kids are still published. I've never seen it myself, but apparently they're in about 50 newspapers.



Ach du lieber!

A significant percentage of the Google image hits has the Katzenjammers getting their asses kicked. Don't know if that's still a prominent feature or not.

 

Having had to say goodbye to my mother in a similar way (stroke, not cancer) I almost couldn't read the entire month leading up to that. Compelling, powerful stuff though. Wow.

 

Maybe I'm just getting older, but I really enjoyed what Funky and FBOFW did/are doing with their current storylines.
It's so much more interesting and fulfilling than the Family Circus, which should have been euthanized years ago.
Stupid jokes that only a 5-year-old with an IQ of 41 would appreciate.
Make it stop!

 

But sometimes it's so bad, it's awesome.

 

Family Circus is for the very young, the very old, those with difficulty with English and/or certifiable morons.

The satiric websites devoted to it are pearls beyond price.

 

I like that one of the guys has an accordian leg.

 

I think you could do a dissertation on comic strips and newspapers. How they are about the last consistent thing in newspapers, how many classic strips are dying out (similar to papers) and yet still provide perhaps the most vital bond between reader and paper. People read the strips because they always have read the strips. Yet, when I started getting USA Today as my paper, I didn't find I missed the strips so much.

 

I believe the entire arc, from Lisa's initial diagnosis to her remission to her flubbed diagnosis and recurrence to her death, will be released in book form in the coming months. That might be pretty ... well, cool isn't really the word, but a good purchase at any rate.

 

Just finished catching up with the last month of strips. Some pretty touching moments, and the whole thing was handled well.

I remember when my uncle died of cancer in 1992, one night we were watching the NBA Finals in his room (it was the night Michael Jordan went crazy and shrugged). He was still "there" and watching the game, murmuring every time Jordan scored. Then he started talking of bunny rabbits. He was an avid hunter and fisher, so I figured he was "hunting," kind of like the leaves with Lisa.

 

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/funky.asp?date=20071005

Apparently the 10-year skip ahead took place before Lisa's body got cold. Strange call; I knew it was coming, but I thought we'd at least see the funeral before we moved up.