Except for a handful of weeks, every Funky comic strip that has appeared in the newspaper was worked on by me at that board. The few weeks that were not done by me came when fellow artist Dan Davis stepped in to ink some weeks for me while I recovered following my head-on collision with another car. But at the time of the work collected here, that accident was still down the road (no pun intended—it happened by itself ). I also created a few weeks completely on the computer in Manga Workshop so that I would know how to do it in case I got a call someday saying they were no longer going to be making paper. I mastered it, proved I could do it, and I didn’t enjoy it. Back to the drawing board. I’ve waited forty-eight years to write that, and I think I’ve got a ribbon coming for the most patient setup in history.
Perhaps the most telling assessment of all came from my dad when he dropped by the apartment one day as I was at the board working. He told me that the happiest I ever looked was when I was sitting behind my drawing board.
From the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 11