Peanuts was huge. It mainstreamed comics llike no other, going from the papers to TV. It was also very funny and poignant. Shulz kept it together for a long time. Charley Brown, he’s a clown.
I voted for Calvin .
Uh…I’m pretty sure the golden age of newspaper comic strips started before Peanuts.
Frazz is a bit too dry for me to put it at the top of the pantheon as it exists right now (it is in my queue-guess I prefer the more belly-laugh-inducing fare like Mother Goose & Grimm, tho its strikeout rate is pretty horrendous).
Happiness is a warm dog.
Frazz often does a sequence that doesn’t really make sense until the end of the week. You also see this around Halloween, for instance, where Caulfield (the main child character) will always dress up as some literary character, in some overly-clever way, and it’s up to the readers to figure out who he’s going to be, and how he’s going to do it (this past year, for instance, he dropped hints all week that he was going to be Yossarian, and then on Halloween didn’t show up for school).
Peanuts has been so terrible for a very long time and so I was suprised when I read some late 50’s early 60’s Peanuts strips that they actually seemed (even today) to be funny.
I had a very hard time deciding between Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. But Bloom County is right up there for me and Dilbert too. I eventually picked Calvin, but it was a pretty tough choice.
That is better than I remember Peanuts being. Still not in the class of C&H, but a couple of the strips in the storyline are quite funny.
I would suspect that the top three (if it was multiple choice) would be:
- C&H
- Far Side
- Bloom County
I’m really surprised at how many votes Peanuts got, but I guess if:
A. The above is true, everybody who voted for C&H couldn’t vote for FS or BC, and
B. People that love Peanuts don’t like the three above as much.
Maybe it’s the Pulp Fiction argument about people who love Elvis or the Beatles hate the other?
Regarding the appeal of C&H, the #1 reason for me would be the art. Watterson really pushed the envelope of the medium, and hardly any line was wasted that didn’t add to the story. The facial expressions were incredible.
Then, the characters. Every single character had such a complex and consistent personality that never got stale, unlike say Archie where they constantly kept reinventing the character traits to keep the characters fresh.
Then, the stories and the humor. I think Calvin is just about the most imaginative fictional character ever created. Combined with the art, it was nearly impossible to predict what the next strip would bring.
Finally, I really liked the undercurrent of loneliness. He really didn’t have any real friends at all. Even his parents barely tolerated him. But, to Calvin, he didn’t care. To everybody reading, he was a sad, sad little boy, but to Calvin, being by himself was the greatest thing in the world.
Superhal, that is a great summary.
True, that. Calvin & Hobbes strips, taken one by one, poignant or hilarious or clever, are one thing. Sit down and read through a compendium, and the end result is a feeling of genuine sadness.
As much as I love Bloom County I can’t vote for it. Being a political based strip makes it a product of its time.
C&H, Peanuts and Far Side, on the other hand are timeless.
I end up voting for C&H. It could be run in papers one hundred years in the future and it will still connect with people for its wonderous look at the world through the eyes of an imaginative six year old.
Most cartoons were just little adventure serials before Peanuts. Like Popeye and his adventures against the force of evil , Bluto. Peanuts was a thinking strip that was funny and poignant. It was the fore runner of todays strips. It was also very funny.
Pogo was also thoughtful. Little Orphan Annie was decades of adventure stories. Lil Abner was a funny interplay playing off Southern stereotypes. But it was also pretty funny.Peanuts changed everything.
I voted for Far Side.
Best panel IMO: A rioting mob walking from the “Institute for the Study of Migraine Headaches” to the building next door, “Floyd’s School for Marching Bands”; caption: “The dam bursts.”
Tell me that’s not genius.
You know, this is an interesting insight. I never got that feeling of loneliness from C&H. But I’m a heavy introvert, and although I do enjoy the company of others at times, I’m very happy being by myself. I wonder how much of that was influenced or facilitated by C&H, considering that I read it extensively when I was young. I was constantly reading through anthology books.
calvin/hobbes, dilbert, and garfield (without garfield) are all equally funny to me. xkcd isn’t bad either.
Nitpick/correction/what you will:
During the original run (1929-1938) under Popeye’s creator, EC Segar, Bluto appeared exactly once, for a roughly two-week run. (The fight arc is an incredible blur of motion.) The rest of those nine years were spent solving various mysteries, fighting wars between Third World countries, occasionally running said countries, getting rich and giving the money to the poor, and other such things.
*Calvin & Hobbes *for being consistently good, probably helped along by ending still in its prime. Bloom County and Far Side close runners-up.
Good one, indeed.
If this panel isn’t my absolute favorite, it’s awfully damn close.
P.S. And I’m a cat lover.
I never found any comics laugh out loud funny until the web. That’s the first place I saw comics that actually made fun of stuff, rather than trying to put people in funny situations, which requires timing to be funny.