Was just reading the Wikipedia article about Funky Winkerbean, which the cartoonist wrapped up a few years ago, after a 50-year run. It was a rare example of a daily comic strip whose creators allowed the characters to age in more-or-less real time, allowing them to add drama around character growth and change to the daily gags about family life.

While Winkerbean was less ubiquitous in newspapers than Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse, which took a similar tack, both strips launched a cottage industry of hate-reading comics blogs in the 2000s. These readers tuned in every day to complain about and mock the storylines which often dipped into drama or outright tragedy as characters suffered challenges, and loss, and sometimes death. This was perhaps most infamously realized with Lisa from Winkerbean battling breast cancer for years before finally succumbing to it. The Wikipedia article’s talk page includes 20-year-old comments from people who just hated the idea of a daily comic strip frankly addressing cancer, and enjoyed sharing this opinion wherever they could.

And this concept seems so strange to me now, something that could only exist on the internet of 2015 or before. Or maybe I’m just reflecting on how my own tastes have changed; dropping by today’s Comics Curmudgeon, shows that it’s still doing it’s thing, observing that all of Batiuk’s characters continue to have “a terrible inability to feel pleasure, like in a pathological way.” (Winkerbean may be wrapped, but its spin-off Crankshaft is still going, and the surviving, retirement-age Winkerbean cast has largely migrated over to it.) I should learn to take more pleasure in things that stay constant, perhaps.