During these years, Les Moore was blossoming as a character as well and had usurped Funky on the stage as the school’s leader of the out crowd. His great desire to be just like his peers at Westview High was constantly being thwarted by his even greater inability to pull it off. His struggles reached something of an early apex with the June 27, 1975, cartoon on page 90, where Les is seen with a bicycle alone at a drive-in movie. Just for the record, this cartoon was and still is a personal favorite, probably because rather than relying simply on clever wordplay, I was beginning to figure out how to write a different form of humor that came from within my characters and that could walk hand in hand with humor’s opposite. That’s always been the kind of humor I have tended toward. Once, on a questionnaire for a physical where I had to select my usual state of mind from choices like always happy, mostly happy, never happy, etc., and not finding anything that quite nailed down my true state of mind, I added a box of my own and wrote “bemused melancholy.” It’s always seemed to me that the best humor walks that line down the carnival midway between cotton candy and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy. No doubt that’s why those two theater masks are always joined.
*From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume Two
