Life Not Always Funny On The Comic Pages

They call it the funny pages, but Tom Batiuk often has other ideas.

Sure, the artist and author of “Funky Winkerbean” wants you to chuckle. But he also wants you to think, and be challenged and, most of all, become enmeshed in characters and a story that will bring you back tomorrow.

So Batiuk, who has been drawing “Funky” for nearly a quarter-century, deals with high school life, and it’s not always pretty: teen pregnancy, guns in the classroom, even suicide.

“There used to be comics that covered the depth and breadth of human experience, not just a gag-a-day scenario,” he says. “The type of thing Lynn Johnston (whose “For Better or for Worse” killed off a beloved dog last year) does and I do is expand the palette and try to touch on other things.

“I’m not leaving humor behind. I’m just trying to expand on it.”

On the phone from his home in the northeastern Ohio town of Medina, Batiuk is discussing the subject because this week’s strips push the comic envelope a bit further than before, with even more relevance than he had intended.

“I guess you can tell people to quit reading now if they don’t want to know what’s going to happen,” he jokes.

Consider yourselves warned.

The four-week series starts with strip regulars Tony Montoni and Les Moore listening to an inflammatory talk-radio show in Montoni’s pizza parlor. Their discussion of whether hate-filled rhetoric leads to action is interrupted by a - we’ll use the comic-strip special effects here - BOOM!

It’s the post office, presumably a terrorist target, and Les’ fiancee, Lisa, is inside.

They’ve had a pretty uneventful engagement, Batiuk says, which got him thinking, “What can I do to keep reader interest? I always want to walk up to cliches and turn them on their head. What can I do to derail this?”

Last year’s bombing in Oklahoma City provided a peg.

“I thought, this can happen to anybody,” he says. “I wanted to look at something which unfortunately is becoming a fabric of our society.”

The explosion early Saturday that disrupted the Atlanta Olympics made the comic strip more timely.

The “Funky Winkerbean” drama will play out in the comics as the Centennial Park bombing unfolds in the news pages. Look for some poignant hospital scenes in the weeks to come, with no resolution for the time being of who caused the explosion.

“Obviously, you’re trying to be timely, but there’s no satisfaction getting caught in the middle of a tragic situation,” he says. “I would much rather see the thing contained in my comic strip and nowhere else.”

Batiuk says he hasn’t heard of any newspapers that objected to the story line, either before or after the Atlanta bombing.

“I would really like ‘Funky’ to be sort of a blend,” the cartoonist says. “It’s still humor, but it’s real life. After all these years, I think the readers cut some room for you to do some different things, and I think it makes the strip better.”

If you’re worried about Les and Lisa and their engagement, Batiuk is ready to spill a few beans, but only if you want to know. Stop here if you don’t.

Ah, we knew you’d want to peek ahead. Look for a happy occasion around Halloween. It should be touching, life-affirming, all that - and a little goofy. This is, after all, the comics.