'Funky' ending after 50 years

SANDUSKY — Longtime northern Ohio cartoonist Tom Batiuk is retiring his long-running newspaper comic, "Funky Winkerbean," at the end of the year. The last daily strip will run on Dec. 31. Batiuk will continue his other newspaper comic, "Crankshaft," and promises that some "Crankshaft" strips will have crossover episodes featuring some of his "Funky Winkerbean" characters. Batiuk, 75, who was born in Akron, broke into the comics business while living in Elyria and now lives in Medina. "Funky Winkerbean" and "Crankshaft" have both run for many years in the Register. Batiuk also had a third comic strip, "John Darling," that ran from 1979 to 1990. Batiuk's cartoons first appeared in 1970, in a weekly strip, "Rapping Around," that ran on the teen page of the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram newspaper. An editor named Jim Dauble gave him that first break. At the time, Batiuk was teaching art in an Elyria junior high school. In 1972, Batiuk turned some of the characters into the daily "Funky Winkerbean" strip and sold it to a syndicate. The first "Funky Winkerbean" strip ran in newspapers on March 27, 1972, so the final strip will wrap up more than 50 years of the comic. Tom Batiuk sits at his drawing desk, working on an episode of Funky Winkerbean. Provided photo/COURTESY OF TOM BATIUK At first, "Funky Winkerbean" was a standard daily joke comic, focused upon the adventures of a group of high school students. Batiuk himself played trombone in his high school marching band, and many of the gags in the strip's earlier incarnation were about his fictional high school's band. Batiuk told the Register he thought he was doing the band jokes for himself. He discovered there are a lot of band directors in the U.S. and many Americans who used to play in such bands. After all, students are more likely to play in the band than to play football or to be cheerleaders, he said. The strip featured a title character, Funky, who was supposed to be a typical teen, but Funky eventually was upstaged by a nerdy student named Les Moore and his girlfriend and later wife, Lisa Crawford. Many daily comic strips tend to grow stale over the years, recycling their jokes and failing to venture into new territory. Batiuk avoided that fate by evolving his strip, which twice has jumped ahead in time. One jump turned his characters from teens to people in their 20s and 30s. Another jump made them middle-aged. A final jump that ages them further will take place as the strip ends, he revealed. As the characters aged, Batiuk changed his focus, concentrating on long-running storylines about his characters and often tackling serious subjects. Probably his most famous involved Lisa, who becomes ill with breast cancer and then dies. It was those cartoons that made Batiuk a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in 2008. Batiuk often makes references to northeast Ohio in his strips. A Sunday comic in 2009, for example, mentioned that a teen character named Summer was off at Cedar Point for the day with her friends. "I like bringing in local references," Batiuk said. Batiuk also sometimes appears in his own comic strip, as the character Batton Thomas. His wife Cathy, whom Batiuk met in study hall while in high school, and his son, Brian, also will appear in this weekend's color episode. Batiuk originally did all of the work on "Funky Winkerbean" by himself, including the writing and the artwork. As his workload grew and he expanded into as many as three comic strips, he began working with other artists. Batiuk decided to retire "Funky Winkerbean" after the strip's artist, Chuck Ayers, told Batiuk he was ready to retire. Many of the recent Funky comic strips have looked back on the comic strip's history. Recent strips this month showed Summer, Les and Lisa's daughter, walking past places important in the comic strip's history. A blog post, "Summer's Walk Annotated," at Batiuk's website, tombatiuk.com, delves into that history. Batiuk says he'll continue to work in comics. "I'm sort of slowing down just a little bit," he said.