Match to Flame 226

There are two remaining “big stories” that require a slightly deeper dive. As I related in a previous volume in this collection, following my auto accident, as a means of working my way back to full strength, Cathy and I began to train to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro with the goal of my placing a small piece of a wooden broom handle that had been a part of my physical therapy into a box, which I knew existed at the summit and which was intentionally put there as a place for climbers to put personal mementos. I had decided early on that this wasn’t something that I would be turning into a story arc in Funky. None of my characters in the strip were people of means, really, nor were they, with the exception of Les’s daughter Summer, very physically fit, and I just couldn’t see any place for a story like that taking place in the strip. What can I tell you? When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. As Bugs Bunny used to say: “What a maroon!”

After a year of training and supplying ourselves with the necessary gear, Cathy and I found ourselves at the entrance gate to Kilimanjaro Park, along with a party including four others, signing in to a visitor’s logbook. One of the things that was required for you to note was your occupation. Normally, when asked to state what it is I do for a living, I would simply put down commercial artist. It saved answering a lot of questions. For whatever reason, that time I decided to put down cartoonist. I must have figured that I was in Africa, thousands of miles from my home where I might be known, what’s it going to hurt. No sooner had we begun the climb, one of our fellow climbers, let’s call him Dan (because that was his name), sidled up and asked what sort of cartooning I did. So I told him that I did Funky Winkerbean, and his first question was: “Who was the original guy who did that strip?” Apparently, forty years in real, not cartoon, time seems like a long time to some people. Went pretty fast for me. Anyway, we kept chatting about it and he finally asked if I was going to be writing about the climb in my strip. I said “no” and gave him my reasons why it wasn’t going to work. I told him that even though I had recounted my car crash experience using Funky as my avatar, I didn’t see him working to get back in shape by climbing Kilimanjaro. He and Holly ran a pizzeria and, as a result, were both pleasantly plump, and I didn’t want to change that. The next day, Dan came up alongside me again and said that Les and Summer could be the ones to make the climb. He told me that Les looked reasonably fit and that his daughter Summer was an athlete. So I countered with my thought that with Les being a teacher and having a daughter in college, they wouldn’t be able to manage it financially and that I preferred to keep the strip real in that regard. Later that day, Dan let me know that he’d figured it out for me. He said that they could win the climb as a trip in a charity raffle, thus covering the financial issue.

I suddenly realized that Dan had swatted away all of my objections and showed me how it was possible for a story about climbing Kilimanjaro to exist in Funky. I told him that what he had suggested could possibly work and that I was now seriously kicking it around in the old brain pan. But Dan was a determined man, and he wasn’t done. Sometime later (it was a fourteen-day climb), Dan asked me how the Kili story was coming, and I said I was starting to work it out. Then Dan, who without a doubt had been blessed with a real cartoon-loving heart, suggested that I include Tarzan swinging by at some point in the story. Again, I pointed out that I wanted to keep the strip as real as I could and that there was no possible way I could do something like that. I figured that was pretty much the end of things with my eager and clever new collaborator, but it turned out that I’d underestimated Dan. The next day he said Les could experience some hallucinations in which he would see Tarzan. Once again, Dan had worked out a solution to the problem because, at nearly four miles up, hallucinations are a very real possibility. Here I managed to do Dan one better. I did a Sunday strip where Les not only imagined seeing Tarzan but also Sheena, Ramar, Jungle Jim, Jann of the Jungle, Congo Bill, and every other jungle action hero I could recall. I later would acknowledge Dan as our boon companion in the final strip of the Kili story.

From the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 14