| Funky Winkerbean | |
|---|---|
 Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean (February 3, 2012) | |
| Author(s) | Tom Batiuk |
| Current status/schedule | Concluded |
| Launch date | March 27, 1972 |
| End date | December 31, 2022 |
| Syndicate(s) | Publishers-Hall Syndicate (1972–1986), North America Syndicate (King Features Syndicate) (1986–2022) |
| Genre(s) | Humor, drama |
Funky Winkerbean was an American comic strip by Tom Batiuk. Distributed by North America Syndicate, a division of King Features Syndicate, it appeared 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.[1]
Throughout its 50-year run, the strip went 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 (although later strips showed them graduating in 1972), 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 reflected a then-contemporary setting. Following the 1992 reboot and especially after the 2007 time jump, the strip was recast as a serialized drama, though most strips still featured some humor, often based on wordplay. The more drama-oriented Funky Winkerbean featured 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.
On November 17, 2022, Batiuk announced that he would be retiring the strip at the end of the year.[2] Funky Winkerbean ended on December 31, 2022, but many of the strip's characters—including Funky himself—then began to be seen regularly in Batiuk's long-running spin-off strip Crankshaft.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
ab120327was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ "50 Funky Years & Done - Batiuk Retires Winkerbean". 17 November 2022. Retrieved 2022-11-17.