My Name is Funky, and I’m and alcoholic
By Tom Batiuk
Published by Hazelden
Thirty-five years ago, Tom Batiuk (rhymes with “attic”), a high school art teacher, launched his Funky Winkerbean comic strip about an amiable character with a goofy first name and an assortment of quirky friends at Westview High.
There was Crazy Harry who lived in his locker, Holly Budd, the always-in-costume drum majorette and Cindy Summers, the most popular girl in school whom he eventually married, and Les Moore, who, at his hall monitor station, had a vintage machine gun bolted to his desk.
In 1992, there was a major change. The cast had graduated from college and morphed from their Archie and Jughead status into post college adults dealing with serious problems like teen pregnancy, child abuse, suicide, breast cancer and now alcoholism.
Funky is syndicated by King Features and carried in over 400 newspapers, and Hazelden has published a soft cover book with about 100 pages of strips on Funky’s struggle with alcohol. It covers the ground from alcoholic thinking to intervention, to first AA meeting, to a “slip” and to recovery.
The strips on this page are a sample of what the book offers to those who are in recovery and those who may need to be. If you like what you see, buy it and curl up in your favorite chair for maybe a good hour’s read. Then pass it on.
