Looking back on Funky’s opening scenes, I can see a young cartoonist beginning to feel his way into the intricacies of creating a daily comic strip. The art slowly simplifying until the view is straight through the proscenium arch, the writing drawing on adolescent feelings and emotions to propel it. With more than a little luck, I had fallen into a subject matter and work method that both allowed me and forced me to draw heavily from my own experience, which in turn enabled my readers to be able to identify with it and trust it. That trust is important, because, eventually, it permits you to be able to ask your readers to follow you to new places. For now, however, in the strips you’re about to encounter, the characters and I are both growing up together in a world that’s naive, innocent, and relatively carefree. Whatever cares they have at this point are adolescent cares, not adult cares. Those are still down the road.
*From the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume One
