Crankshaft

Thanks to Josh Fruhlinger at the Comics Curmudgeon, I started reading Tom Batiuk's long-running newspaper comic strip, Funky Winkerbean. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, what started as a strip full of wacky high-school hijinx has slowly transitioned into being an inescapable quagmire of despair...

Over the past few months, I've become increasingly obsessed with Tom Batiuk's Funky Winkerbean, thanks largely to the tireless coverage of Josh Fruhlinger over at The Comics Curmudgeon. What started in the '70s as a lighthearted high school comedy has slowly evolved -- through a series of time-jumps, spin-offs and character deaths -- into an unrelenting parade of suffering and despair, and I'll c