MEDINA, Ohio – Don’t miss today’s Funky Winkerbean comic strip. It’s the last in a 50-plus-year run. Medina resident and cartoonist Tom Batiuk started the strip in 1972, three years after graduating from Kent State University, where he studied fine art. He announced in November that Funky Winkerbean would end on Dec. 31, 2022.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer and cleveland.com have a featured story about local-ish Tom Batiuk ending the Funky Winkerbean comic strip after fifty years.
The original strip appeared in 78 newspapers. Today, Funky Winkerbean is distributed by North America Syndicate, a division of King Features Syndicate, and appears in 400 newspapers worldwide, including The Plain Dealer.
The article notes that “The final Sunday strip, which ran on Dec. 25, shows more than 50 characters gathering at a church concert.” Tom Batiuk has given us a guide to the congregation.
Hi D. D., as I predicted on TDC, Funky was removed from CK overnight. Gone as of the first of the year.
Jim,
I tried to find that final strip via The Wayback Machine – no luck.
But The Comics Curmudgeon shows all six strips of that last week,
and in a month they will show up on newspapers.com.
What I found curious was, for a brief few hours as the calendar turned to a new year,
Comics Kingdom carried the January 1, 2023 Crankshaft and Mother Goose and Grimm issues.
That 01/01/23 Grimmy even carried a distributed by King Features slug.
Crankshaft has moved from Comic Kingdom to Go Comics. Appears this was effective 1/2/2023.
That’s strange. The announcement said “[t]he effective date is January 1, 2023.”
https://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/crankshaft-comic-strip-joins-andrews-mcmeel-syndication/
And I’ll swear to Swinnerton that Sunday morning I saw that day’s Crankshaft at GoComics
and at Comics Kingdom (with a dist. by AMS slug on it there) too.
But…
Arcamax is showing the Sunday Crankshaft with a North America Syndicate slug,
https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/crankshaft/s-2766003
@D.D.Degg – I saw Mother Goose on GC starting yesterday but did not see Crankshaft there until today (with a month from Summer 2012 that seems to have been added less than thirty days ago). Funnily, one of the featured comics at the top of CK’s home page yesterday was Crankshaft with the image of yesterday’s strip. When you clicked it, it resulted in “feature not available”.
And Funky is still appearing under the Vintage section list with links resulting in “feature not available”.
And Grimmy still appears in the “Get Premium Access” section of the main page.