Funky Winkerbean’s Homecoming

A fan at a con showed me this picture of a brick in a walk at their high school. The brick refers to Funky Winkerbeans’s Homecoming, a musical I created with Andy Clark in the eighties. Andy was a music publisher who wrote works for high school bands, and he had originally approached me for permission to write a Harry L. Dinkle march. Not long after that Norman Lee began publishing collections of band strips from Funky. Signing those books at events like the Midwest Band Directors Conference was enough to make a person feel like Charles Schulz for a day.

The success of the books led Andy to suggest that we write a high school musical featuring the Funky characters with me writing the book and Andy writing the music. I agreed to do it which was slightly nuts because I was working on two  comic strips at the time with Crankshaft waiting in the wings. I had actually written a spec piece for television based on a homecoming at Westview High School, the avatar for my own high school Midview, so I was able to cannibalize much of that material for the musical. I wrote the book as well as the song lyrics and Andy supplied the music. The lyrics were all written to Beach Boys songs in my head, but Andy wrote new tunes for all of them. Once completed, the musical did very well and Andy and I got to attend any number of “world premiers”. It was interesting to how, based on the strength of a student’s performance, different characters would rise to the top in any given performance. The musical was never going to win a Tony, but it did merit a brick in a high school walk. 

On a more somber note, Andy passed away recently, and it’s sad to think that I’ll no longer hear his lighthearted laugh again.