About Funky Winkerbean

I was teaching Junior High arts and crafts in Elyria, Ohio when I dropped by the local paper, The Chronicle-Telegram one afternoon looking for a part time job. My thinking was that I might get a job doing freelance spot cartoons for them. I was ushered to the to the desk of the managing editor James Dauble. I had taken my sketchbook filled with drawings of kids at school and Dauble liked what he saw. He asked if I’d consider doing a cartoon for a new page they were starting called the Teen-Age Page. I jumped on board and began doing a weekly panel called Rapping Around.

I did that panel for a couple of years and was getting a good reaction to it. Deciding that I’d like to take a shot at getting it syndicated in newspapers, I worked up a bunch of strips based on that material and took it to the various syndicates in New York. As luck would have it I succeeded on the first try as Publishers-Hall offered me a contract. I need a name for the strip about high school kids, so I had my art classes write down any names they could think of, and somewhere in that pile of suggestions were the words “funky” and “winkerbean”. I decided to call my new strip Funky Winkerbean. One newspaper editor, upon buying the strip, said that I had come up with either the best name ever for a comic strip, or the worst. The jury’s still out.

As it traveled through time, Funky became one of those rare comic strips where the characters age through the years. So the readers and the characters who started together as high school students can now enjoy each others company in late middle age.