By 1975, Funky Winkerbean was rounding into the form that would carry it into its middle years. Crazy Harry was firmly ensconced in his locker-as-living-quarters home, and I was having fun playing with that theme. The May 13, 1975, series starting on page 71, where Crazy has to move because his row of lockers has gone condo, no doubt reflected the real-life decision by my wife Cathy and me to look for new digs. Living in the run-down apartment in the run-down neighborhood with the house of the rising sun a couple of doors down and the guy next door who would sit on the stairs in his apartment smoking a cigarette, looking for all the world like the serial killer he may or may not have been as he stared into our kitchen window, and waking up one morning to find his car being winched out of the river behind our apartment following a late night parking mishap just didn’t seem to be our style anymore. We’d moved on, so we moved on. First, to a nicer apartment behind an even nicer gas station and eventually into a house we built out in the country, which is no longer really country, but don’t get me started.
By this point the computer at Westview High had achieved sentience and was beginning to assert itself and interact with the other denizens of the Funkyverse. At one point it would even inaugurate and hold Star Trek conventions at the school. Now, I’m not saying that the role-playing games, social networking, and virtual interacting were foreshadowing things like MMOGs, Facebook, and Siri . . . or maybe I am. Even the lowly school desk got in on the act when it became personified for a brief period.
*From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume Two
