[dramatic music] ♪ [dramatic music continues] ♪ [dramatic music continues] ♪ [dramatic music continues] ♪ - Hello and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terrence Dollard, a Professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is cartoonist, Tom Batiuk.

Tom, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thanks, Terrence, nice to be here.

- Tom, you recently announced and by the time this airs, it will have already happened that after 50 years you are concluding your run on "Funky Winkerbean".

So, what goes into a decision to end a classic strip like that?

- There were a number of things that the biggest problem with Funky at this point is there's no succession plan.

I've worked, the first 25 years of Funky, I've worked totally alone.

The second 25, I worked with the terrific artist, Chuck Ayers, who was working with me on "Crankshaft" at the same time.

And Chuck decided he wanted to step back.

I tried another artist a while back, it didn't work out and I just decided it was probably time to wrap things up so I could kind of tie a bow in these characters, 'cause they've been so good to me for 50 years they deserved a proper ending.

So that's what I'm doing.

- When you're coming up with the conclusion of this storyline after all of these years, I know these characters, you've had sort of two phases in their lives.

One where it's more of a gag a day and one where it's become serialized.

So as you're kind of coming up with the ending of this, was this something that you kind of always knew the ending of these stories or was this something where you kind of looked at where you were and thought how it should be?

- It was the latter.

I mean, I periodically would think of a good way to end the strip with no particular need for it at that time.

But yeah, this one, I just was looking for ways to kinda wrap it up that would allow me to step back and look at things.

And I kinda needed a witness, a character, who had been there from the very beginning who had seen everything that was going on.

And so I picked the janitor, Harley.

I went, actually went back to my additions of the complete "Funky Winkerbean" until I found a character who'd been there from almost the start and was kind of ubiquitous, but never really played a big role in the strip.

And so, Harley became my witness and I tailored the story that would allow me to have him relate things and relate pieces of Funky that have happened over the years.

- The past few weeks have been interesting as we find out some of the stuff that's been going on.

There's been sort of a guiding hand behind it.

And it's, again, it's I guess going back and looking at those archives.

You're able to find that person who can sort of not only be that sort of the watcher, but also be the person who's been kind of giving the little push here and there.

It's interesting when I'm reading the strip, you have characters that have grown up and have become adults and in this case, parents, grandparents.

So, when you are looking at some of these characters I'm thinking of Les and Lisa, when you kind of think about how you have to step away from them.

Are you going to be satisfied with how everything turns out or you're think you'll have that itch to maybe go back and do a strip here or there just for your own enjoyment?

- Both, actually, I do think the strip's at a point where I've really told the majority of the stories that there are to tell.

That being said, I will immediately contradict myself and say that I intend on my website to periodically post new Funky Weeks.

Maybe a new standalone Sunday or maybe a week or several week series, just because I wanna work with these characters.

But also, I'm still working on "Crankshaft" with Dan Davis.

And some characters we're well into next year and some Funky characters have already shown up.

So, it's going to, I'll still have an opportunity to play with these guys.

And that's nice.

- So let's talk a little bit about "Crankshaft", it's in the same universe, but in a different era.

And these characters that you're kind of bringing in, they're all sort of related, but maybe just not at the same time.

Your involvement in the daily strip for "Crankshaft", how is that going to be different than your involvement in a daily strip like Funky?

- Well, in Funky I was doing a lot more work.

I mean, Dan does all the artwork for "Crankshaft" and I did all the writing for both strips.

And there was a bit of a time gap, because when I jumped the Funky characters ahead, I didn't bring the "Crankshaft" characters along, but I do believe I fixed that either yesterday or the day before.

So, I've kind of straightened out the time problem that I had.

And so, it'll be pretty easy moving the characters back and forth.

I've always done it even after the time jumps, but if something happened in Funky from "Crankshaft", I would do it as a flashback.

And so, I've been sort of doing it all along, but I'm just gonna put it on the same timeframe now.

- Now, I may be wrong and I frequently am, but I'd read somewhere that you work quite a ways ahead in terms of the date that you complete the strip and the date that it's actually published.

So, is that the case?

And if so, how far out do you actually work to get the concluding Funky out?

- Both strips, both "Crankshaft" and Funky for the past decade or so have been a year ahead, and that's just out of necessity.

As you get on in life, you see things that are coming up that could create problems for you and the short deadlines just aren't gonna work anymore.

I had to actually burn off a lot of those for Funky to end it.

And I did some with "Crankshaft".

So "Crankshaft" right now we are about six months ahead on the strips, and I'm a year ahead in the writing.

I just decided, I like writing in season.

I like to write about Halloween when Halloween is taking place.

I like to write about Christmas at Christmas time.

So, I just wrote myself ahead so that I could be there at that point and do the writing like that.

We may catch "Crankshaft" up, or maybe we'll just leave it where it's at, but that's where things are now.

- That's really interesting, because I often wonder when you go to the store and you see the latest Christmas album that came out in November, you know that was recorded maybe in Spring.

- [Tom] Great.

- So it's just interesting that you find it's I guess, more real for you to be inspired by the season and the events and just kind of write ahead of time.

- Yeah, well, for the first 25 years it was just me on like a five-week deadline.

And so, it was always immediate.

You were right there, you were always just front running the season by a couple of weeks.

And I like that, I enjoy that Funky, the whole premise was always, it started with the school, so I always stayed with that sort of the high school calendar.

And I like to just sort of follow that and it gave a rhythm to the strip.

And so, yeah, it just feels better if I'm in the same spot as my characters at that moment, yeah.

- I'm having a hard time thinking that more people aren't doing that, because it's just a great way to stay.

You know, when it's Thanksgiving, you're writing about Thanksgiving and when it's Christmas, you're writing about Christmas rather than it's July and you're thinking about what's gonna happen in October and trying to make sure that you figure out the dates in the calendar just right and make sure you get the right pumpkin spice reference in or something.

- Well, I remember Chuck Ayers when we were getting ahead on "Crankshaft", we were doing Christmas trips in the middle of the summer.

And he was up in his hot attic studio and he was playing Christmas songs and put some decorations up and everything.

So, yeah, it helps, it just sort of adds to it for you.

- And I do wanna talk, because the name of the strip is "Funky Winkerbean", but obviously it is an ensemble piece and you have a few characters who throughout the years have sort of stepped up to become the leader of that ensemble and I'm thinking of Les and Lisa.

So when you create the strip and it becomes apparent to you after you've been doing it for a while that these other characters have a bit stronger voice, how do you make that shift?

- It just kind of flows through the characters themselves.

I mean, Funky was originally supposed to be the main character.

What he became is sort of the main straight man for the kids, especially when I was doing just gags and things.

And as the characters become stronger they begin to just sort of take over things on their own.

The first character to really do that was my band director.

I was in marching band in junior high school, started writing about band directors thinking I was just doing a very personal type of story.

Turns out there's a lot of people in bands, a lot of band directors out there.

And he became, once I started getting that kind of feedback, once somebody tells you they like something, this is going well, you just start doing more of it.

So he was the first character to really kind of create more space for himself within the strip.

So, it's kind of an organic thing.

It just kind of flows and it depends on what kind of stories develop.

And so, some characters will wane for a while and then come back strong.

Lisa actually disappeared for a complete, probably one of my biggest characters, and she was gone for several years and then came back into the strip again.

So, you sort of followed where things need to go a little bit.

- Yeah, I know one of the running bits is that there are these frozen turkeys that they try and sell for the band.

And I'm just wondering, having not read the final strip, I'm hoping that we've sold all the turkeys by the time it ends this December 31st.

- You know, it is funny, when I was going through the strips, the later ones around Thanksgiving time, I thought about that and I thought, oh, I didn't do a band turkey thing, because I'm involved in this big story.

So if you look carefully as Summer is talking to Harley, the janitor, I have one point where somebody in a band uniform goes by carrying a Salmonella's turkey box.

So, maybe it was a return, I don't know.

I did put one little knot into that, 'cause yeah, it was a fairly long running gag in the strip.

- I just can't help but notice you just said the turkey is, was it Salmonella's.

- Salmonella's turkey farm, yeah.

- Now and you are known for your wordplay.

So, what is it about wordplay that tickles you so much that you're using that so frequently in your strips?

- I don't know, I think it's when you raised my dad liked, it's the type of people he listened to on the radio, like Jack Benny's and Bob and Ray's and people who did a lot of wordplay.

I liked reading people like that.

I love Dalton Nash, I thought his stuff was really amazing.

And so, I guess it's just the kind of humor that appeals to me.

But I was inculcated in it from a very young age.

- It's always clever when you read those little quips there, you know, it just shows that there's, I guess the mind that's working is having fun.

Trying to find those ways to put things together, and present it to the reader.

And now another thing that I do know about you is that you are a fan of comic books and you have included arcs about creators who are working on new comics.

I believe they're Atomik Komix, and then there's the comic shop in town.

So, what is it about comics, comic books and putting them into your newspaper strip at a time, frankly, when they were not as popular as they are today?

- Well, comic books, you know, we used to go into Akron to visit relatives on Sundays and once we'd moved out of Akron.

And I would go up to the Rexel Drugstore and one time I walked into that Rexel Drugstore and picked up a copy of "Flash" number 115, and the book rearranged my molecules.

It was just opened a door to a whole new world.

And so, I've always loved comic books.

They've always been inspiring.

It's really what I tried to do.

When I graduated from Kent State, I went to New York and tried to get a job with DC Comics or Marvel Comics, either one, and I got rightfully turned down.

I think I had a portfolio that was filled more with nerve than anything else.

But it was really my first love.

Never thought of doing humor comics at all until I came back from that trip and I went to a local paper and started doing, or I took my sketchbook in and they asked me if I would do a cartoon once a week for their Tuesday team page.

And so, then I had to kind of learn to write humor on the fly.

But like we were just discussing, I've always been kind of fooling around with it and playing with it.

And I had a friend and in high school, we'd get together and make these tapes and we do interviews.

And the early Funky stuff was really a lot like that.

In fact, John Darling, the anchor, came in, because I needed somebody to interview people and do that kind of stuff for me.

So, it's kind of been there all along.

- It's interesting, "John Darling" was a, another strip that you had, and I remember growing up on Long Island.

Newsday carried the strip and there were all sorts of great characters.

It was around the time, at least in my household, when WKRP was a popular show and it just seemed to be, it kind of fit in with that whole, talking about the media, behind the scenes mentality.

But then you made a radical change by ending the strip with a murder.

So, I know that there are some other things going on there, but from a creative standpoint, when you kill off your character, how do you sort of get over that?

- At that point, I was in the middle of a lawsuit trying to gain ownership of my strips.

I was doing three comic strips and it was getting a little hectic and I decided to end "John Darling".

I wouldn't have murdered him under ordinary circumstances, but I thought I didn't want somebody taking over the strip and running with it.

So I thought, if they're gonna try to do that, I'm gonna make it really difficult.

So, I murdered John Darling and he's stayed Bucky dead pretty much ever since so.

- I know that his daughter has appeared in Funky and there's been, you know, she solves the murder after all these years and it was sort of a nice tie into this whole shared universe that you've created.

- Yeah, it really, it just been one big story.

The three strips are very similar, they look very similar, and it is just been fun weaving these characters back and forth.

And it was fun to bring Jesse, John Darling's daughter back, and have her play a part in this storyline.

In fact, the ship, she gets ahold of the gun that was used to murder John Darling.

They make, this has already appeared in the paper, made into a spaceship for her son, Skylar.

If you're paying attention in the very last week, another shoe drops in regard to that.

So, just bear that in mind.

- So, when you are working on Funky at this point in your career, are you doing the pencils?

Is someone else doing the inks?

'Cause you said you're working with an artist or is it something where maybe you're doing a rough layout and letting them finish?

- Toward the end here, Chuck was doing the pencils and then I'd step in and do the inks and Dan Davis helped with tones, did the lettering.

And that was on the computer now so I did all of that stuff after Chuck's pencils rolled in.

And of course I wrote everything before that showed up.

Did change for the last week.

John Byrne stepped in and penciled the final week for me.

And John did, Chuck didn't wanna do it.

I can't tell you why, because it would give away what happens.

But John just did a masterful job.

It was just, in fact, he told me it fell out of his pencils and it was just beautiful.

- John Byrne, of course, the great comic artist working at Marvel on the X-Men, on the Fantastic Four, rebooting Superman for DC in the eighties.

And I know he had worked with you, I guess in the nineties after you had foot injury, if I recall correctly.

So, when you have a heavy hitter like that step in, how do you step up your game?

- I was just, you know, I've just been a fan of his work for so long.

I admire what he does and the type of story that I was doing with Wally in Afghanistan, bit more into his milieu.

I thought it would kind of work better.

It allowed me to get a little bit ahead so Chuck could do some catching up on where we were prior to that.

And it was seamless.

And it's very easy when you work with people that talented.

John is so talented.

You give him the script, you talk about it, and then he takes it from there and you trust him completely.

And I have found that when you let other people play with your toys, you can get some very nice surprising and enjoyable results.

So, in fact, on my blog just a little bit ago, Tom Zeller did a comic book cover for me.

He did something that I wasn't expecting and in the blog I explained what that is and it's just very nice.

They'll do things that kind of enhance what's going on that you didn't think of so it's fun.

I just enjoy working with people.

It's just fun to do.

- Well, it's interesting, because in my work we do a lot of, well, it's television production, but if I'm working with students and we're working on some sort of narrative project, it's always better to see.

You know, the script is one thing, but what the actors bring to something is completely different, because they see it a different way and they show you something that you never saw.

So I'm imagining working with different artists, it's another way for you to see something that you didn't see and then you can maybe add to it.

- Yeah, absolutely.

You just described the process and that's what makes it a fun experience.

I grew up reading about Stan writing about the non-existent bullpen that used to exist in Stan's mind only.

And I thought that sounds like a lot of fun.

And I spent my whole life with great collaborations with great artists like Tom Armstrong on John Darling and Chuck Ayers on "Crankshaft" and Dan Davis on "Crankshaft" now and John Byrne.

And it's just working with them, it just becomes a seamless process.

I'm very lucky to have been able to do that.

- When you're working with someone like John Byrne who's known for superhero comics, do you sort of have to steer him into the Funky style?

- No, when actually John sort of created a new Funky style for me that Chuck and I adopted.

It was part of the way between what I was doing initially and his style.

And it found a nice sweet spot in between that was perfect for the type of stories that I was writing for those characters now.

So, no, I wasn't giving him direction.

He came up with that all on his own.

And that's the thing, when you work with talented people, it's very, very easy.

- You've done a lot of really interesting stories that wouldn't normally be in what we consider the funny pages.

So when you're handling something like CTE or maybe a DWI, how do you kind of balance between what the reader might wanna see first thing in the morning with their coffee and you as an artist wanting to tell a compelling story?

- Well, I just basically went ahead and did it.

I think my readers have learned to trust what I do and that I'll handle situations like that in a good way, in a thoughtful way.

And so, they come along for the ride.

And in each step I would take my readers, I'd move them over a few inches and say, let's go over here and then do this.

And they'd all come over, and then little while later, now that we're here, let's go over here.

And then I take 'em a little further.

So, I think the Funky readers have come to expect that.

And so, it's less jarring in the morning for them.

I think they know where I'm going.

And I think they kind of almost expect it these days.

- And when you as a writer have to shift between a strip that might be more serialized, more at times dramatic into something that might be a little bit more gag a day like "Crankshaft", how do you sort of change gears and make sure you don't slip in something a little too serious in one and maybe something a little too silly in the other?

- You're doing it all the time.

It is just sort of styles of humor.

When I started it was gag a day and then it became sitcom.

So, you're writing these short little weak bursts of stories and then it became like writing for a movie.

And once you do that, when you're writing like a movie scenario, the humor changes from gags to more behavioral humor.

It comes out of the people, but there are always ways to slip things in.

And a lot of times I'll have my characters make a joke and it's not the final part of the panel, but it's something I wanted to do.

It's a natural humor that people would do.

So, the humor's always there in one way or another.

It's just a different style.

- And when you are writing the strip, are you occasionally tempted to, or maybe even making changes to the copy that you've written, because the art is pushing it in one direction?

You realize that maybe you can cut a word out or cut something out and just go in a slightly different direction because of what's being presented?

- No, I never really did too much of that.

The artists I worked with they took the scripts and they gave me what I wanted.

They gave me a slightly better version of what I wanted and it always looked sensational.

but nobody ever took it off in different directions, wildly different.

They just kind of hued to that.

So that never really came up, no.

- As we get, I guess closer to the final week of Funky, are you, I know you're bringing back references to things that have happened throughout the years, but is there a storyline to you that when you look back at you think this might have been the high watermark for you?

- Oh, obviously, I think probably Lisa's story was the high watermark.

I was in a certain zone at that point and really writing way above my pay grade.

It was pretty, I look back at it and sometimes wonder who wrote this stuff because it was in a different place and I was really felt I was able to take the work and be strong with it.

So yes, that's absolutely a huge watershed for Funky.

- And you've gone back and you revisited Lisa's story in different ways.

There was the film version of it.

There was, I guess Les realizing that he could move on with his life and maybe get married again.

So, all of these different elements that come up, is this something again where you're just, it's just as it hits you or is it just, maybe you had a few ideas in mind and over the years you just kind of said, well, now's the time for this one?

- Again, it's really both.

You sometimes you bogart some ideas and you hang onto to 'em for an awful long time.

And other times, it just sort of flows.

And that's the beauty, it's just fun of the job.

You never know when you sit down to write exactly what's gonna be happening and where it's gonna go.

The references to Lisa's story are just there, because that was such a strong piece and it was a strong thing for the readers.

And so, I like to go back and touch on it every now and then.

I do so in the last week too, so I couldn't resist.

[Tom laughing] - Well, I guess, it's sort of like if you are Paul McCartney, you're not gonna end a concert without going back to "Let It Be".

- Yeah, probably.

Yeah, really, and I think I wanted to make the ending fun and not typical and that'd be something like Les walking out of his classroom for the last time and turning off the lights.

I wanted it to be a bit more than that.

So, I hope I've managed to pull that off.

- Well, the one thing I can, I've been thinking about before our conversation was that, Charles M. Schultz who we recently celebrated his 100th birthday, he ended his trip after about 50 years or so, and I remember being disappointed that Charlie Brown didn't kick that football.

So maybe it's good that Les isn't turning off the lights one last time.

- Yeah, I think you're right.

- We have just a few moments left and I just wanted to ask you this question.

How does it feel knowing that "Funky Winkerbean" is Marge Simpson's favorite newspaper strip?

[Tom laughing] - I think it's pretty cool.

I think that was just absolutely a fun thing to see pop up in "The Simpsons".

And it's getting a shout out from something you like really enjoy it's always fun.

So yeah, it was fun.

- Well, Tom, I wanna thank you so much for taking time outta your schedule to talk with me today.

It's been a fun and fast half hour.

- I appreciate it.

I've enjoyed it, Terence, thank you.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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