Funky Winkerbean: Comic strip Breast Cancer death
September 10, 2007
The ink is dry. Funky Winkerbean’s Lisa Moore does not survive breast cancer. Upon learning the final fate of Lisa, who has been battling breast cancer since 1999, Funky Winkerbean readers have been emailing Funky Winkerbean’s creator and cartoonist Tom Batiuk to request that he change the story, ink a new ending, and save Lisa Moore.
Batiuk has indicated that he completed this storyline months ago and will not change how Lisa Moore’s story ends. Batiuk has moved on to new comic strip storylines. For Funky Winkerbean readers, Lisa Moore’s story will run through October of this year. Ironically, and perhaps fitting, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Such is the stuff of life. Not all stories have happy endings.
Although statisticians currently report that more breast cancer
patients go on to become long-term breast cancer survivors, the bitter
truth is, breast cancer can still kill. And does. Batiuk, a recent
prostate cancer survivor, knowing more intimately than most, the
heartache of loss cancer can bring to the family and friends of someone
who loses their life to cancer, may have focused on this sad and dark
fact when deciding the ending to Lisa’s story.
But a cartoon strip? Are there no bastitions of retreat or safe
harbors from the grim realities of life? In the case of Batiuk as
artist, he has chosen to make art that imitates life. This is not the
first time the cartoonist has tackled serious issues within the realm
of comic strip storytelling.
According to former high school teacher
Batiuk’s bio at King Features Syndicate,
“Funky Winkerbean began in 1972 as a laugh-a-day look at high school life and
has matured into a series of real-life stories, highlighting such
sensitive social issues as alcoholism, cancer, teen-dating abuse, teen
suicide, guns in the school and teen pregnancy. These groundbreaking
series have placed Tom Batiuk at the forefront of a new genre in comic
art history. His bold characterizations and dramatic plots engage his
readers (teens, parents and educators alike) in stories with which
they can identify.”
In 2007,
approximately 178,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be
diagnosed among women in the United States. Although there are an
estimated two million breast cancer survivors alive today, 40,460 women
and 450 men will die from breast cancer this year. At this time there
are slightly over 2 million breast cancer survivors in the United
States.
Breast cancer
is the second leading cause of cancer death in women, exceeded only by
lung cancer. The chance that breast cancer will be responsible for a
woman’s death is about 1 in 33 — 3 percent. In 2007, about 40,460
women and 450 men will die from breast cancer in the United States.
Funky Winkerbean. Real life in comic art.
