Dammit, I switched between The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes about five times.
Life is not fair.
In reading Pogo, it helps to have a fairly good working knowledge of the people, events, and political issues of the 1950s and 1960s. Walt Kelly was essentially a satirist with more than a touch of the whimsical about him and a lot of his story arcs were lampoons of the headlines of the day. In its way it’s as dated as Bloom County but much, much more wonderfully drawn and written (and I say this as a fan of both); even if much of the topical humor is lost on readers two or more generations removed from his original audience, re-reading Kelly’s books always reveals something to admire in his artwork.
Krazy Kat, on the other hand, is surrealist humor at (I would argue) its best. A few story arcs here and there, and the occasional touch of politics (beaning Kaiser Wilhelm with a brick) but for the most part just zanily drawn fun focused on a triangle of unrequited love, brick pilfering, and mangled English.
Pogo is sometimes funny in a silly way. I’m less keen on the political and/or sentimental stuff.
Krazy Kat is just not my cup of tea. I’ve never laughed once at it.
Another vote for Calvin and Hobbes. Not much to say about it that hasn’t already been said. I think it benefits from having ended when it did. I’m enjoying the old Peanuts they’re running now, and appreciate it more than when I was a kid, but Schulz kept it going at least a decade too long (maybe two), and the final few years were just terrible.
One of my current favorites that hasn’t been mentioned here is Scary Gary, about a suburban-dwelling vampire and his malcontent henchman Leopold. It’s sometimes bizarre and often sick – right up my alley – and usually very funny.
Same here. Some years back, I received one of the bound Krazy Kat collections as a gift. I read through it without once cracking a smile, much less laughing. Herriman’s work is as inaccessible to me as that of R. Crumb. I’m just not seeing what other people find so wonderful about their work.
A great example of Peanuts at its best (both worldly wise and, yes, funny) is the series of strips wherein Charlie Brown starts waking up every morning and seeing the rising sun as a giant baseball. Eventually, he develops a rash on his head in the pattern of baseball stitching, and then he heads off to camp. I wish to god I had a cite, but I don’t feel like searching through the decades of archives over at snoopy.com.
Other good examples of Peanuts bringing the funny:
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When Snoopy goes back to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm to give a Fourth of July speech, only to get caught in the midst of a riot stemming from a Vietnam War protest.
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When Peppermint Patty decides to drop out of her current school and cluelessly enrolls in an obedience school.
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The series wherein Peppermint Patty takes up figure skating with Snoopy as her coach.
For me, the reasons I love Bloom County are that it came out right around the time I was in college, and was really the first “subversive” comic strip I ever read (I never read Doonesbury–it wasn’t in my local paper). The characters were amusing, the jokes were funny, and…most importantly…the political and social humor was rather gentle. It didn’t seem so at the time, sure, but looking back on it now I really appreciate Breathed’s ability to skewer the things he wanted to skewer without resorting to meanness, crudeness, and the general nastiness that dominates political humor today. “Impeach the peach!” was a lot funnier to me than the mean-spirited crap (sorry, fans, but that’s my opinion) that appears in strips like “This Modern World.” I’m by no means a conservative (I’m a weird bird–completely liberal on things like gay rights and reproductive choice, but a lot more conservative on things like welfare reform) but strips like that just annoy me because I don’t like meanness in my comics page.
I honestly can’t explain it.
For those that don’t find Peanuts funny, I am stunned. It was hilarious.
Found a link to the beginning of the beloved rising-sun-as-baseball storyline. Enjoy it. I know I’m going to!
I get what you’re saying here, but I want to point out that Peanuts doesn’t get props for being surreal, but it was. It was just quietly surreal - it didn’t hit you over the head with it.
If we’d never had Peanuts, and about the time of Calvin and Hobbes somebody introduced a strip with a bunch of kids - never any adults - and one of them ran a psychiatric booth like a lemonade stand, and another played complete piano concertos on a toy piano, and the dog had involved fantasies where he flew a Sopwith Camel against the Red Baron in WWI, and flew his doghouse to the moon, I think people would agree its surreal elements would rival Calvin and Hobbes. It’s just most of us grew up with Peanuts, so it all seemed so normal we never questioned it.
Extremely well put, bup! Those are good damned points all!
Quoth winterhawk11:
I think that Frazz is the best comic strip currently running, but it’s got a ways to go to catch up with Calvin and Hobbes. Certainly, though, there are enough similarities in style that anyone who appreciates C&H will likely also appreciate Frazz.
Agreed. Seriously, who can look at Frazz and not see Calvin “all grown up”? It’s almost like he grew up and became Hobbes, serving as the wise, loving, but somewhat gently sarcastic mentor of a whole new crop of too-smart-for-the-room kids. It’s one of the few comic strips I read regularly anymore.
Yowza.
I’ve never heard of Frazz before, but I took a look just now and have to agree. That could have been drawn and written by Watterson himself, although the writing seems slightly more adult than Watterson would write.
That said, I don’t get today’s strip. I backed up and read the other comics from this week, which puts it in context, but I still don’t understand what’s happening.
Yeah, this is a really bad time to start reading the strip–even those of us who’ve been reading it for years aren’t quite sure what’s going on. Best guess is that Caulfield (the boy) enlisted the help of Miss Plainwell (the cool young teacher) to steal and copy the summer reading list from Mrs. Olsen (the crusty old teacher) and then read all the books ahead of time. But nobody’s sure yet. And there’s evidence that Mrs. Olsen might be in on the whole thing.
If you’re interested in the strip, I really suggest finding some of the older ones (there are archives online) and not judging it by this sequence. 
Heck, last week’s “You can make bread out of beer? :eek:” sold me on it already.
Good points. I only knew Peanuts when it had grown hoary with age and familiarity.
Seems likely that the creator of Calvin & Hobbes ended the strip to avoid that.
I had to vote for Calvin and Hobbes but Bloom County was a close second. Peanuts was great and my childhood favorite but C&H was the best. Doonesbury was another great one but it peaked a long time ago and just kept going on with far less quality than the Peanuts. So a higher peak but lower overall run.
It is amazing to see how much Calvin and Hobbes is winning by. There is not much that dopers usually agree on this much.
Far Side is another good one and one online Comic I really enjoyed is User Friendly which is on hiatus. A cartoonist inspired by Bloom County at least.
Well, that and the fact that he got mega-rich from selling all of those truck decals.