John Darling (comic strip)
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''John Darling'' is an American
comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...
, created by
Tom Batiuk Thomas Martin Batiuk (born March 14, 1947) is an American comic strip creator, best known for his long-running newspaper strip ''Funky Winkerbean''. Career Born in Akron, Ohio, Batiuk attended Kent State University, from which he graduated in ...
, a spin-off of his earlier comic strip ''
Funky Winkerbean ''Funky Winkerbean'' is an American comic strip by Tom Batiuk. Distributed by North America Syndicate, a division of King Features Syndicate, it appears in more than 400 newspapers worldwide. While Batiuk was a 23-year-old middle school art tea ...
''. ''John Darling'' appeared from March 25, 1979, to August 4, 1990.Tom Batiuk
at the
Lambiek Comiclopedia Galerie Lambiek is a Dutch comic book store and art gallery in Amsterdam, founded on November 8, 1968 by Kees Kousemaker (, – Bussum, ), though since 2007, his son Boris Kousemaker is the current owner. From 1968 to 2015, it was located ...
. Retrieved on October 8, 2016.


History

John Darling, a talk-show host, was originally a supporting character in Batiuk's strip ''
Funky Winkerbean ''Funky Winkerbean'' is an American comic strip by Tom Batiuk. Distributed by North America Syndicate, a division of King Features Syndicate, it appears in more than 400 newspapers worldwide. While Batiuk was a 23-year-old middle school art tea ...
'' before being spun off into his own strip. The original artist was Tom Armstrong, who left the strip in 1985 for his own creation, '' Marvin'', though he did return to draw the final three weeks of the strip. His replacement was
Gerry Shamray Gerry Shamray (born c. February 19, 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American comic book artist known for his work on Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comic book series ''American Splendor'' and the syndicated comic strip '' John Darling''. Shamra ...
, whose first strip was dated March 3, 1985. Much of the strip's humor came from Darling's outsized ego, quirks and frequent displays of ignorance; in one strip, he interviews musician
Prince A prince is a male ruler (ranked below a king, grand prince, and grand duke) or a male member of a monarch's or former monarch's family. ''Prince'' is also a title of nobility (often highest), often hereditary, in some European states. Th ...
, asking him "Exactly which country are you a prince of?" Other featured characters were Darling's co-workers at "Channel One", the TV station where he worked, including ratings-obsessed producer Reed Roberts; clueless old-school anchor Charlie Lord; shrewish reporter Brenda Harpy; and insecure weatherman Phil. However, the strip also featured a large number of parodic appearances by celebrities (often being interviewed by Darling); this was such a feature of the strip that numerous newspapers carried ''John Darling'' on their TV page, rather than the comics page. Sunday strips generally included two panels of "TV Trivia" content otherwise unrelated to the strip as a whole. ''John Darling'' wound down in 1990, as Batiuk by his own account was growing tired of the work it involved. The strip was no longer financially remunerative, as it had been dropped by numerous newspapers. Batiuk also had a contractual conflict with his syndicate over ownership of the character, so he stunned the strip's remaining readers by killing off Darling in the next-to-last strip. (The final strip featured other characters gathered around Darling's gravesite.) Ostensibly, this action left the syndicate with a largely unusable property, although in truth, the syndicate could have easily continued the strip -- either by not running the final two strips and simply continuing on from there, or by creating a storyline in which Darling was faking his death for attention (which would not be at all out of character for the egotistical newsman.) However, with ''John Darling'' having been dropped by a number of newspapers over the years, the syndicate decided the strip was simply no longer profitable, and allowed it to die. John Darling's murder (which had been depicted as being by an unknown assailant) stayed unsolved until a 1997 ''Funky Winkerbean'' storyline celebrating that strip's 25th anniversary. Over the course of the storyline, Winkerbean character Les Moore wrote a book on Darling's murder ("Fallen Star") and solved the case. The murderer was revealed to be Peter Mossman, alias Plantman, an occasional character in the strip who reported on gardening and environmental issues. While Darling himself was rarely mentioned in ''Funky Winkerbean'' in the years immediately following his 1990 demise, Darling's daughter Jessica appeared as a regular in the ''Funky Winkerbean'' strip until 2007, when the feature was reformatted by moving the continuing story up several years. The book about Darling's murder was referenced again during a 2010 strip, and Jessica reappeared in 2011. By 2013, John was mentioned quite often, as a continuing ''Funky Winkerbean'' plotline had Jessica actively searching for information about the father she lost at a very young age. Phil the Forecaster also made very, very occasional appearances in ''Funky Winkerbean'', reappearing most recently in 2021 as he retired from his weather forecasting job at Channel One after over 40 years. Several minor characters in ''Funky Winkerbeans other spin-off strip ''Crankshaft'' have also worked at Channel One.


References


External links


''John Darling''
at
Don Markstein's Toonopedia Don Markstein's Toonopedia (subtitled A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge) is an online encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation, initiated February 13, 2001. Donald D. Markstein, the sole writer and editor of Toonopedi ...

Archived
from the original on October 8, 2016.


Further reading

* Strickler, Dave. ''Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists, 1924-1995: The Complete Index.'' Cambria, CA: Comics Access, 1995. . 1979 comics debuts 1990 comics endings Darling, John American comic strips Comics characters introduced in 1979 Comics spin-offs Fictional television personalities Gag-a-day comics Darling, John {{comic-strip-stub