Funky Winkerbean - Controversy

Controversy

The more dramatic turns of the storyline have led to mixed responses from readers. Negative reaction to a 2007 strip featuring Wally getting blown up by an I.E.D. (which turned out in the next strip to be him playing a computer game), including two papers that ran the strip receiving irate phone calls and letters to the editor, led to Batiuk issuing an apology soon after the strip ran.

Reactions to the most recent chapter of Lisa's Story led to further complaints over the comic's gloomy content, and Batiuk has mentioned in interviews about the storyline that he has received complaints about the current direction of the storyline. Web comic Shortpacked produced a satirical strip in which most of the words of Funky Winkerbean characters' dialogue are replaced by the word "cancer." The Comics Curmudgeon also makes frequent reference to the seemingly unremitting gloom of the strip, calling it "a black hole of bleakness and depression and cancer from which no joy or laughter can escape."

A Crankshaft strip from May 23, 2007, sarcastically addresses the more recent controversies from Batiuk's perspective, with a character remarking of newspaper comic strips that "everyone knows they're supposed to be funny". In the Funky Winkerbean strip published on September 30, 2007, Les essentially echoes the Crankshaft comment.

In a September 2009 storyline which many readers also interpreted as Batiuk's addressing of the strip's latter-day bleakness, a group of parents protested a school production of Wit because the themes of cancer and death offended them. In her defense of the play, the character of Susan Smith, a Westview High teacher and drama director, was viewed by critics as a mouthpiece for Batiuk's views on the importance of dramatic entertainment.

Over the week of July 7, 2008, Pearls Before Swine parodied the tendency of Funky Winkerbean towards killing off main characters when it killed off Rat and the strip's own author, Stephan Pastis (the two would later be returned to the strip via the intervention of United Feature Syndicate), even utilizing Batiuk's representation of the Angel of Death. A year earlier Pastis had drawn a strip parodying the seemingly revolving door of changes in Lisa Moore's condition in Funky Winkerbean and actually got the blessing from Batiuk to run it. However, Pastris pulled the strip before the scheduled publication date because he did not want to cause any more controversy than the storyline itself was already creating.