What do you think of the strip Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott? I loved the strip when I was a kid, and still read it daily.
Still pretty good. It’s been pretty consistent over the years, which is a difficult achievement.
It’s rarely howling-with-laughter funny, but it almost always gets at least a smile and a chuckle. That’s worth something.
Have you noticed that Jeremy Scott also does Zits? That surprised the heck out of me when it was pointed out, because the styles (both artistic and comedic) are so different.
It’s been a few years since I read the comics regularly, but when I did, Baby Blues and Zits were easily among the better ones, the ones I’d use as evidence if I had to argue that newspaper comics should still exist. But neither they, nor anything else I know of, approaches the level of, say, Calvin & Hobbes or Peanuts in their prime.
I like and follow both strips daily. Since my job is dealing with teenagers, Zits strikes home the most.
The creators’ commentary can be hilarious, so if you see a collection at a garage sale, it will be worth your time.
Not horrible, not wonderful. Really stupid names for the kids.
Considering Jeremy’s older brother in Zits pulled a Chuck Cunningham many years ago, I always wonder when one of the Baby Blues kids is going to go missing without any explanation.
Darryl MacPherson and Jeff Miller should hang out together and get drunk. They both have a huge nose and a bratty son that needs a hard crack on his ass. And both appear in a comic strip that isn’t all that funny. Though I’d take Baby Blues over Marvin 7 out of 7 days a week.
I read Baby Blues daily and still like it. This is despite the fact that they did a strip years ago where Darryl and Wanda privately labeled some neighbors of theirs as “childless yuppie scum”, even though the neighbors were nice pleasant people.
I love Baby Blues. It’s gentle humor, and not stupid. The little girl is a know-it-all - she thinks! She’s going to be a bossy little honor student/cheerleader someday. The boy, well, he’s just full of beans, always making messes, and gross behavior. The baby is a cute lump. The parents go through the everyday drudgery and charm of work and child care and sometimes it gets cliched, but it has a ‘real life’ vibe at times, not just dumb sit-com contrivances.
Yeah, that’s the one thing that I remember most strongly about the strip–in the early years the being really judgmental against people who choose to not have children.
It probably helps to keep the strip fresh that they’ve let the kids age (albeit at a slow and inconsistent comic-strip rate). When I first started reading it, Zoey was the baby, and Hammy and Wren weren’t born yet.
The proper term from 20-30 years ago was “dinks” — Double Income, No Kids.
it was mildly amusing when I read it in the paper
i remember the show when they had a binge of " if it was a popular strip it was a show" post-Simpsons and adult swim reran it after it died (same with Dilbert) … did they ever age up the kids?
As Chronos noted, the creators have slowly aged the kids over the years.
There’s a quote from the creators in the Wikipedia article on the strip saying that the strip’s timeline is “roughly a 3 to 1 ratio” with the real world (that is, the kids age about a year for every three years that pass in the real world). The article indicates that, as of last year, Zoe was 9, Hammie was 7, and Wren was 19 months old.