Spinoffs
Two minor characters have been spun off into their own strips: the bus driver Crankshaft in 1987 and the talk show host John Darling in 1979. The latter caused a sensation in 1990 when Batiuk had Darling murdered in the penultimate strip after a real-life financial dispute with the strip's syndicator. In Funky Winkerbean, Les Moore wrote a book about Darling's murder and solved the case in a 1997 storyline.
Read more about this topic: Funky Winkerbean