This second Tempo book came out around 1977 and included work from the latter part of Funky Winkerbean’s first five years. The cover (still being hand colored) featured one of the very early tropes from Funky… the mass registration for classes. I’d always admired running gags or situations that would appear annually such as Sadie Hawkins Day in Li’l Abner and Charlie Brown kicking the football in Peanuts, so when Funky started I was immediately on the lookout for a recurring bit of my own. The idea of mass registration seemed perfect because it allowed me to kick off each school year showcasing the characters. The premise never really quite caught on with readers the way that I’d hoped, but I accidentally found what I was looking for with a silly bit that never failed to garner a response… the talking leaves. Which is probably why I included one of those sequences in the early pages of this book.
