A Comic Death

Death be not proud . . . but he certainly got top billing this past week in, of all places, the funnies.

Tom Batiuk, the creator of the once hilarious comic strip "Funky Winkerbean," mercifully killed off his character Lisa Moore, who had been suffering from breast cancer for years. The story as it was told: Lisa discovered a lump in her breast and found it to be cancerous., She beat back her cancer through treatment but it returned with a vengeance. Les, her supportive husband, comforted her all the way through. Lisa thought she'd beaten it a second time until it was discovered that she had gotten the wrong results from the lab and that her cancer had in fact spread. By then Lisa was so sick she decided she had done all she could and decided to appreciate the time she had left. And then she died, her death represented by a tuxedo-clad man in a white mask leading her into the afterlife.

Oh yeah, and the adopted son of the local high school principal confronted her with the news that he was the illegitimate child she had born and given up for adoption before she married Les.

What?

Since when did Tom Batiuk decide to make his strip a soap opera? In its first twenty years, beginning in 1972, "Funky Winkerbean" was one of the most hilarious and irreverent strips in the paper, with gags ranging from Slim Whitman hosting a "Star Trek" convention to burnout character Crazy Harry listening to frozen pizzas on his record player. At Westview High School, we had Mr. Dinkle, the egomaniacal band leader who always managed to schedule an outdoor band competition for a day on which it rained incessantly, and a football team was so bad the fight song was "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." The central characters were the hip title character and his buddy Les Moore, a nerdy type invisible to everyone other than Funky . . . especially girls.

When the gang at Westview graduated, things turned out fine. Funky went into a partnership with the local pizzeria owner, Les became a teacher at Westview (ironic, as he couldn't wait to get out of high school) and married the one girl he was able to date, ex-football player Bull Bushka became the new coach and Westview started winning games, and Crazy Harry became a mailman. Then Batiuk went batty. Soon we were reading stories about alcoholism, drunk driving, teenage suicide, broken marriages, and now breast cancer. Suddenly the Westview High gang went from laughable mishaps to trials of Job that were no laughing matter.

I mean, if Batiuk had to kill off a spouse, why did he kill off the wife of a character who couldn't get a date in high school?

Batiuk is from the Cleveland suburb of Medina, Ohio, and his strip is in fact set in the Cleveland area. More recently, his strip has become less like the Archie-style strip it used to be and more like that of fellow Ohioan Harvey Pekar, whose underground comic "American Splendor" touches on similar issues Batiuk has been obsessed with of late. I know that Batiuk wanted to make his characters grow up after having had them go to high school for twenty years, and they'll never be young again, but when are they going to make us laugh again? :-O