Don’t miss today’s FunkyWinkerbean comic strip. It’s the last in a 50-plus-year run by Medina resident Tom Batiuk.
This is the final original Funky Winkerbean comic strip. Creator Tom Batiuk, announced in November that the strip would reach its conclusion as the year ends.
The final Sunday strip, which ran on Dec. 25, shows more than 50 characters gathering at a church concert. Among them are Batiuk, his wife Cathy, and retired Akron Beacon-Journal editorial cartoonist Chuck Ayers, who has penciled the strip since 1994 and also has collaborated with Batiuk on the spinoff comic strip, “Crankshaft.”In an interview in November,
he said he would like to focus on more collections of Funky and Crankshaft. Volume 12 of “The Complete Funky Winkerbean” book was released on Nov. 15, and “while nothing is set in stone yet, he is in discussions to produce a collection of “Crankshaft” strips as well. This week, the Funky Winkerbean strip made yet another of its time jumps, into a sci-fi future and, finally, into today’s conclusion that ties the future strip back to the Pulitzer-nominated storyline of Lisa Moore. One of Funky’s friends and a main character, Moore was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. She eventually dies from it in 2007. With that storyline, Batiuk mixed a serious, real theme -- dealing with cancer -- with gentle humor to build reader interest in a contemporary crisis.