Agreed on Best Ever: Calvin and Hobbes
Current: Non Sequitur because I like the social commentary and Sally Forth for the same reason, but from a feminist slant.
Missing: Bizarro! I loved it just as much as everyone else loved Farside. What great humor all in one frame. 
Wish it’d come back.
What, nobody mentions Family Circus? Even the ones where Billy leaves a dotted-line trail around the neighbourhood?
I’ve always loved Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, Bloom County a bit less so. The current comics that I actually read are The Boondocks, Dilbert, Doonesbury, Fox Trot, Get Fuzzy, and… damn, I can’t think of any others. I get much more reading pleasure out of webcomics. At the moment, the four I read regularly are Wigu, Diesel Sweeties, Achewood, and 8-Bit Theater. I read This Modern World, Tom the Dancing Bug, and other wacky leftist cartoons in both online and dead-tree format.
As for best ever, I can’t really decide between C&H and The Far Side. Best current changes regularly.
… and does anyone else just HATE Beetle Bailey? What annoys me the most are the strips where the punchline is essentially, “Ha ha! INTERNET!”
I go Pogo!
C&H has the edge with Calvin’s fantasies, but Pogo’s political satire cancels that out. Walt Kelly’s artwork puts Pogo ahead, for my taste.
Currently the only strip I read regularly is Sluggy Freelance, which seems not to qualify here.
Artistically, all-time:
Little Nemo in Slumberland Winsor McKay
Dennis the Menace Hank Ketcham
For Better or For Worse Lynn Johnson
Calvin and Hobbes Bill Watterson
Nancy Ernie Bushmiller
Innovative, all-time:
Peanuts Charles Schulz
Krazy Kat George Herriman
Doonesbury Garry Trudeau
Zippy the Pinhead Bill Griffith
The Far Side Gary Larson
Artistically, current:
For Better or For Worse Lynn Johnson
The Boondocks Aaron McGruder
Innovative, current:
Bizarro Dan Piraro
It’s suffering from the “old man at the wheel” syndrome in comic strips. In this syndrome, cartoonists who once were good-to-great (Johnny Hart, Bill Keane, Hank Ketcham, and even Charles Schultz) have had the quality of their material go down as they grow old.
I think the leftie alt-weekly comics are generally much wittier and often much funnier than daily strips. Tom the Dancing Bug, This Modern World, and, back in the day, Life in Hell are the best. The old Life in Hell’s still make me giggle just thinking about them. Also Slow Wave (also available at www.slowwave.com) is a comic where readers send in their wierdest dreams, and the artist draws it in four simple panels of unpredictable surreality. No gags, but always fun to read.
For the guys that have to do it every day, Bloom County was the champ. Currently, Bizarro may be the best. Boondocks was great, but it has very quickly become predictable in a Garfield kind of way.
Some classic strips that merit your considerations:
Terry and the Pirates in both the Milt Caniff and George Wunder versions for rich detail and nifty plots (Where have all the Dragon Ladies gone?)
Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond
Li’l Abner by Al Capp, in the early days, before he turned right wing. What other comic strip has given us a national holiday? (Sadie Hawkins Day, November 15, first appeared in the strip in 1937 and was celebrated in American high school for decades thereafter, as a dance in which the girls invited the boys. Anybody know if it’s still being honored?)
Dick Tracy by Chester Gould. Oh, those two way wrist radios! The Crimestoppers Textbook every Sunday… The weirdest villians in the world - Flatttop, Mumbles, Pruneface… And weird character names, too - Gravel Gertie, B.O. Plenty, Sam Catchem…And don’t forget the in-panel killings and dead bodies (that were often censored when reprinted in comic book form).
But the strip started going south when Gould added the moon maid, with her antenae and the “floating trash bucket” device.
And I have to give a shout out to Odd Bodkins. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this fearless creation of legendary “underground” cartoonist Dan O’Neill introduced the world to such sterling characters as Five Dollar Bill O’Brady, the Werechicken of Petaluma and Norton, the Wonderbike, not to mention The Lesser Hoo-Hoo, and the nominal viewpoint characters, Fred and Hugh. O’Neill was also responsible for the legendary Air Pirate Funnies and Dan O’Neill’s Comics and Stories, underground comics of which several issues (also featuring the talents of Bobby London, Ted Richards and Gary Hallgren) were published before the immense Wlt Dsny machine shut him down for taking liberties with Mcky M**s. Hunt up one of the books collecting his work (“The Collective Unconscious of Odd Bodkins” and “Hear The Sound of My Feet Walking Drown the Sound of My Voice Talking” and see what it’s all about)
Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond era
Thimble Theatre
Liberty Meadows (art only)
Doonesbury
Tiffany Jones (the art was freakin’ incredible!)
Gordo
My current favorites are Dilbert and Monty (the former Robotman) for being what Dilbert once was…relatively ordinary people combined with bizarre characters, resulting in very unusual comedy.
My all-time favorite is the Far Side, though.
Another vote for Get Fuzzy as a current favorite, and Calvin & Hobbes for all time.
White Lightning, you can go to this site, which has Get Fuzzy, among others, and sign up to get comics in your mailbox.
I’m not going to add anything new to this thread, but I just wanted to be the 2,587th person on this thread to mention Calvin and Hobbes as best comic ever. So what do I win? 
But seriously, it’s amazing to see how much impact one little cartoon can have.
I also very much like the Far Side.
And of course, there’s the comic I do, but I doubt that even registers…
And would anyone take offense if I said some episodes of Garfield?
Mandatory Simpsons quote:
– Dewey, who had to explain The Far Side to his mom just about every day when he was in high school.
Back in the 80s I cut out of the newspaper,and saved, the comic strips that made me laugh the hardest.I just sorted them by title and the biggest stack is of “Bloom County”.Another sizable stack consists of “Willy 'n Ethels”,a strip not previously mentioned.
There might be some out there who raise their eyebrows dubiously upon seeing Peanuts nominated several times on a list of “Best Comic Strips,” and that’s understandable given the near-Family Circus levels of inanity to which the strip sank in its last years. Bear in mind, however, that (with all due respect to Charles Schulz) this comic strip ran on about fifteen years too long, and if you’re only familiar with the comic strip from that period, your disdain is well justified. At its prime, however, Peanuts was one of the most consistently funny, intelligent and subtly topical comics ever. Pick up a collection of strips from between 1965 and 1980, and see just how wryly amusing Schulz could be when he was still at top form. For some reason, United Feature Syndicate only seems to want to reprint strips from the declining years, where Snoopy was reduced to limp golf humor and begging for cookies.
I think Peanuts is still the only comic strip whose characters have had spacecraft named after them (Apollo 10:
command module=“Charlie Brown;” lunar module=“Snoopy”) There was a seriously cool sequence in the strip at the time where Snoopy flies his doghouse to the Moon; “I beat the Russians; I beat everybody… I even beat that stupid cat who lives next door!”
best strip of all time: calvin and hobbes. hands down. so many little reasons why. the tracer bullet angles alone make it so for me. and the time calvin’s environment became neo-cubist. lol
best strip running right now: redmeat. it’s hysterical. anyone who hasn’t read it must do so right now.
Terrifel, all I can figure is that most of the posters here are very, very young. If you’ve never seen the good stuff how would you know about it?
All Peanuts can be divided into two era: the first 25 years and everything else (which coincidentally is also about 25 years). Schulz essentially reimagined the kids comic strip and reinvigorated the whole miserable genre of kids acting like adults strips that nobody else has managed to do as well since. Everything we remember about Peanuts, every character, the Red Baron series, the little red-haired girl, the baseball team, the whole bit, came from those first 25 years. Then Schulz rested. But he influenced everyone who followed. Calvin & Hobbes and Garfield owe as much to him as Bloom County did to Doonesbury. And both originals were better.
But Peanuts had the misfortune of sharing the 50s with Pogo. And since Pogo is the acme I had to make it number one over Peanuts.
Inane, yes, but Peanuts never succumbed to the saccharine ickiness of Family Circus.
Remember the series where Charlie Brown’s head develops a rash that makes it look like a giant baseball, and he starts to crack up and see baseballs everywhere, in the sun, in his ice cream cone? And how he eagerly awaits the sunrise, wondering if it will be the sun or a baseball, wondering if he’s insane…AND THE RISING SUN IS THE HEAD OF ALFRED E. NEUMAN! Brilliant!
In my Comedy and Satire class (I’m in high school), we recently had to choose a comic strip to dedicate a paper to, while picking out certain favorites and explaining their humor. Naturally, having read every single Calvin and Hobbes strip ever published (through the book collections), and finding them to be some of the smartest comedy I have ever seen, well you can guess what I chose. Here is an excerp of my paper.
"This is not just one of my favorite comic strips, but Calvin is one of my favorite characters in all of modern entertainment. I could read Calvin and Hobbes strips all day if I had to. The effort that Bill Watterson put into making Calvin and Hobbes a superior comic strip is really admirable. Where other cartoon’s mainly are nothing more than talking heads, Watterson took it to a whole new level, actually turning newspaper comic strips into art, while still remaining fresh, unique, and absolutely hilarious. Comics like Dilbert and Foxtrot, arguably the best of today’s paper, while sometimes inducing a laugh out of me, never truly impress me. I could draw just as good as Scott Adams and Bill Amend with my eyes closed, and anyone can come up with a few good punch lines. But when I look at some of Bill Watterson’s better work… not only does he truly know how to use language and diction for humor, but he truly knows how to draw, and from the beginning, that’s what cartooning has been about. I can’t imagine a better-written, better-drawn cartoon than Calvin and Hobbes.
Calvin and Hobbes, at its peak, was distributed internationally to 2,400 newspapers. By comparison, only Peanuts was more popular during Calvin’s ten year duration at 2,600 newspapers. But while cartoonists like Shultz and Jim Davis (Garfield), among others became incredibly wealthy from their creations due to merchandising, Bill Watterson refused to sell out his product. He never allowed a single shirt to be woven, a single mug to be made, or a single stuffed toy to be stuffed, let alone television specials or such ridiculous items as toiletries and what have you. He valued his work and refused to allow mass exposure to cheapen it. This major decision could be considered as the strips only weakness, or its greatest strength. While most fans of the strip never got all the Calvin and Hobbes that they wanted, they also found themselves much more anxious to check out the comic section each morning. They never grew tired of Calvin. They never grew bored of Hobbes. And when Bill Watterson quit drawing the strip, he quit when he was on top."