The Witness

I wanted to do some way-back-whenning as I wrapped up Funky, so I began by searching for a witness. I wanted someone who had been there from the beginning but who hadn’t played a major role in the strip. Fortunately, I have the Complete Funky Winkerbean books to use for research, and it wasn’t long before I settled on Harley the school janitor. Harley was there in the strip from early days, but pretty much always in the background, never as someone driving the narrative. He was my perfect witness to pretty much all that had unfolded in Funky over the years.

Then it occurred to me that it would be fun if Harley had not only seen things happen, but had somehow influenced events in the strip from behind the scenes. However, the deeper I got into that, the creepier it became. That was when I came upon the rather elegant solution of having Harley be from the future and on a mission to return to the past to make sure certain events happened as they should. Along with that, I now had a raison d’tre to revisit past events in the Funkyverse.

So I basically introduced a little science fiction into the strip. Interestingly enough, in looking at the old strips, Harley seemed to have a bit of SF about him from the start. I’ll admit, it’s been rather priceless watching twitterdom losing its collective mind over my time-traveling custodian. And in the end, it was all a dream… wasn’t it?