Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 26, 1992 TAG: 9203260075
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Two decades in high school is long enough for anyone," said Tom Batiuk, who introduced the "Funky Winkerbean" comic strip 20 years ago Friday. "If these characters are going to grow, I'm going to have to graduate them and continue their stories."
The 45-year-old cartoonist has decided not to track Funky and his pals through college. Instead, immediately after their graduation this June, he will simply age them four years overnight and have them reappear as adults. He calls it a "comic strip time warp."
Bull Bushka will become assistant coach of the hapless Scapegoats football team, for example. Les Moore will return to his alma mater to apply for a teaching position.
Funky will be unemployed, "which for the summer of '92 seems pretty apropos," Batiuk said.
At the same time, new characters will be showing up in the strip. Among them will be Susan Smith, the smartest and shyest girl in the school, and Rhonda Victor, whom Batiuk calls "the drum major from heck."
The freshman class will include Funky's nephew, Wally Winkerbean, and Cindy Summers' little sister, Mercedes. She will succeed Cindy as the school's most popular girl.
There will be another change after the time warp, too. Band director Harry L. Dinkle will have his doctorate.
The Dinkle character is instantly recognizable to anyone who was ever in a high school band. Burdened with indifferent musicians and the never-ending need to raise money for uniforms and band trips, he nevertheless remains dedicated to his calling.
The character has been a hit with real-life Dinkles. Batiuk, who was a high school trombonist of unexceptional ability, has received the distinguished service award of the Music Educators National Council and the Band Directors of America Medal of Honor.
Incidentally, Dr. Dinkle's dissertation is on the neurological effects of singing "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall" non-stop during four-hour trips on the band bus. As "Funky"-philes know, the song is by Dinkle's hero, the great composer Clyde Barlow.
In a telephone interview, Batiuk said he had the time-warp idea two years ago and has been working out the details ever since. It has the advantages of updating the strip, multiplying story possibilities (by introducing new characters and giving the veterans four years of instant history) and doesn't stray too far from the familiar halls of Westview High.
"I think it's going to be a lot of fun for longtime `Funky' fans," said Batiuk, whose last name rhymes with attic. "I hope new readers will find the strip more attuned to today."
Batiuk is an Ohio kind of guy. He was born in Akron and reared in nearby Elyria. He graduated from Kent State University in Kent, with a bachelor of fine arts degree and a certificate in education, then returned to Elyria's Eastern Heights Junior High School to teach art.
Today, he lives about 40 miles south of Cleveland in the community of Medina.
"Funky Winkerbean" grew out of a cartoon panel that Batiuk started drawing for the teen page of the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram in 1970. His students helped name the strip, which first appeared nationally on March 27, 1972.
The title character is one of those people who amiably shrug their way through life. Though pleased enough to graduate, Funky probably would be just as happy to stay at Westview for another 20 years. Like all of Batiuk's characters, Funky is part invention and partly drawn from people the cartoonist has known.
"Funky Winkerbean" is carried by more than 400 newspapers in the United States and abroad. It is distributed by North America Syndicate.
The strip made comic page history in 1986 by dealing with the subject of teen pregnancy. The story generated 60,000 requests for reprints and thousands of letters, almost all of them favorable. Most of those that weren't favorable didn't object to the content, Batiuk said. They just didn't think it belonged on the comics page.
The strip also turned topical in 1987 with a well-received storyline about dyslexia.
Batiuk's alma mater, Elyria's Midview High School, is the model for Westview High and a continuing source of inspiration.
"Ever since `Funky' started, I've been going back to my old high school to substitute teach," he said. "They let me kind of hang around and sit in on the classes, too. I have seen how the school has changed and grown."
The teachers he knew have begun to retire, and some of his classmates are nowon the faculty.
"I wanted to reflect that in the strip," he said. "Also, my writing has changed. I like to tackle more mature themes and deal with human relationships."
He hints that one such relationship will be between Les and Lisa, the girl who had the child out of wedlock in 1986. They will meet again at the five-year reunion of their class. It was Les who stood by Lisa during her pregnancy.
Poor Les could use a break. His student years at Westview have been a casebook in adolescent angst. He can't get a date, he frets about his schoolwork, he's bullied by the jocks and he's hopelessly phys. ed.-impaired. Les gets stuck on gym ropes the way cats get stuck in trees.
The drawings of him hanging on for dear life above the gym floor are among the most familiar "Funky Winkerbean" images - a metaphor for the paralyzing anxieties that we all remember from high school.
"That's such an intense period," Batiuk said. "You're going through a lot of emotions for the first time - first love, first breakup, all that. The way people treat each other and all those emotions are so accentuated.
"With the cliques, things are so categorized. It's a black-and-white situation. There's the jocks and there's the social clique and so on. The feelings are a lot more on the surface in high school. In later life, you don't have to climb any more gym ropes."
Of all the characters in "Funky Winkerbean," Batiuk said, Les is the one who most resembles the cartoonist himself. His high-school years, for all their later richness as a source of cartoon ideas, were not the best of his life.
"I was pretty happy to get out of there," he said. "It was pretty traumatic. That's part of the reason things like the rope come in there. I think people forget about waking up in the morning and thinking, `Oh no, I've got to take phys. ed. today.' "
by CNB