Funky Winkerbean, Before the Misery Began

In 1992, 20 years after Tom Batiuk launched his syndicated daily comic strip Funky Winkerbean, the cartoonist revamped the feature, changing it from the mildly absurd adventures of a group of high-school kids to the generally more sobering stories of those same kids as adults. Though Batiuk had dealt with some serious issues in Funky before—drug abuse, teen pregnancy, learning disabilities, and the like—the strip evolved over its third and fourth decades into a morose soap opera in which characters are frequently confronted with their own mortality and failures. Even after Batiuk jumped ahead in time again in 2007, it was mainly to show how the children of his original cast suffer from the same kinds of disappointments as their folks.