Permit me a slight digression here because it’s relevant to some of the work collected in this volume. A question I get asked a lot, and I mean A LOT, is why I didn’t do a time-jump in my Crankshaft strip at the same time as Funky. I didn’t do that because, if you think about it, a comic strip with a senior citizen as the eponymous lead character isn’t going to weather a time-jump with the same facility, shall we say, that a high school student will. Granted, my first time-jump only covered four years, but, even so, Crankshaft didn’t have even that kind of time to spare. However, I have always enjoyed writing those stories where the two strips would cross over with one another. It was great fun when I read comic books as a kid to see the Flash show up in Green Lantern or vice versa. Somehow knowing that the Flash and Green Lantern shared the same universe heightened my enjoyment of the stories. That innate crossover thrill carried over to my adult work on my comic strips. So how was I going to deal with this? Well, since the Funky time-jump covered such a short span, I decided that the Funky gang would jump forward four years and arrive at . . . now (or, more correctly, the then now). Since now happened to be where the Crankshaft characters lived, I was still good to go with the crossovers. Yes, I know; I fudged things. It was a clear breach of temporal law, but I figured that if Einstein can have a “fudge factor” for his Grand Unified Theory, then I can have a fudge factor for my crossovers.
From the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 10
