Funky/Dick: The Crossover Of The Year Is Here

Friends and neighbors, it is truly a blessed day: Funky/Dick is finally here.

A few months back, we found an announcement buried in an article in Variety, of all places, that revealed plans for ComicsAlliance's two favorite comic strips, Funky Winkerbean and Dick Tracy, to cross over at the start of the year. Now, the day has come, and there is a very good chance that Les Moore will either be violently murdered or framed for murder. If I was a betting man, I'd put money on the latter, but in my heart, I know I'm hoping for the former.

Here's Dick's half of the crossover, referencing a crook called the Jumbler and a cache of Golden Age comics:

And here's today's Funky Winkerbean, where the exact same amount of plot setup is conveyed with dialogue that is 1,000,000% more awkward:

I wonder if there has ever been a human being who would say the sentence "Now that the trial for that criminal known as the Jumbler is over..."

The crossover is the result of a meeting between Funky creator Tom Batiuk and Tracy artist Joe Staton at a convention, and while it might not seem like the two comics would go together that well, there's actually a pretty good chance that they could really work. I mean, sure, Staton and Mike Curtis's version of Dick Tracy is built around hologram-projecting Wrist Wizards, super-powered moon people, and crime solved by violent fistfights on top of burning minigolf windmills, while Funky is primarily concerned with puns, smirks, cancer and death, but still. One of the most pivotal Funky Winkerbean plots of all time involved a homicidal maniac known as Plantman shooting somene on national television, so, you know. There is that.

Either way, I'm comfortable declaring this to be the biggest crossover event of 2015 even before we're out of January, but if you want to keep up with it yourself, you can find Funky Winkerbean at Comics Kingdom and Dick Tracy at GoComics daily.