Match to Flame 236

Let me tackle the concept of closed endings vs open endings with a couple examples from my own work. For about eleven years, I did a strip called John Darling about a TV talk show host. When the strip ended, he was shot, murdered. Full stop. Nothing after that. No epilogue where the murderer was found, and aside from a brief single-panel funeral scene, no real closure for the readers, no nothing. An entire comic strip stopping with a straight-from-leftfield-wide-open ending. Talk about going out with a bang. What it was was a total shockeroo that left anyone still reading John Darling (and there weren’t many at that juncture, to be perfectly honest) surprised and stunned. Frankly, surprised and stunned works just fine for me. The readers were left with any number of options to ponder and mull over, and I don’t think that was a bad thing. Full disclosure, I would later go on to solve the mystery of who killed John Darling in Funky, but that was certainly not my plan at the time. I was in the middle of a lawsuit with my syndicate, and I wasn’t sure if I had a future in the comics—let alone if John Darling had one. Added to that, there’s even a sweet-and-sour coda to that story collected in this volume.

From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 15