My god, all of you, right now, go and read This Modern World.
RIGHT NOW!!!
Order of the Stick, Sluggy Freelance.
Of print strips, I think that Mutts, Pearls Before Swine, and maybe Zits are about the best I see regularly. Get Fuzzy would have been on that list a few years back, but it seriously went downhill…and, when the Chicago Tribune cancelled it, I couldn’t be arsed to go online to see it.
Thanks, but no. It shows up in my area’s alternative paper every week and it’s waaaay to liberal-biased and mean-spirited for me. And I’m by no means a conservative (in fact I’m probably liberal in quite a few more areas than I’m conservative). I just don’t like nasty political humor on either side of the spectrum.
Just my opinion, though. YMM (and probably does!) V. 
I voted for FoxTrot even though it’s Sunday-only now. Otherwise, I’d have gone with Pearls Before Swine.
Cyanide & Happiness (webcomic), The Argyle Sweater and Bleeker: The Rechargeable Dog.
Go to the archives and read the ones he wrote during the Clinton years. 
I voted for Get Fuzzy, but Cul de Sac is riding right up there too.
And Doonesbury still tickles and intrigues me.
Here’s one of my favorites from the Clinton years, but you have to be familiar with the Elian Gonzalez situation:
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/comics/this_modern_world/2000/01/31/tomo/index.html
Online comics are light-years ahead of the current newspaper comics, most of which are dreck.
Achewood gets my vote for the best.
The Perry Bible Fellowship is up there too, although the author has left the strip on hiatus for some time now.
EDIT: Holy shit, there’s a new PBF comic for the first time in months. It’s not that great though.
Pearls Before Swine is the only one I read daily, but it just hasn’t grabbed me in the last few years like it did circa 2004-2005. I’m not sure if the humor has changed or my tastes have changed.
Actually I wish I had voted for Zits, as it is the most consistent laugh riot I read (tho that may change if Jeremy & Co. don’t go to college soon). Lio nonetheless gets a lot of mileage out of what is admittedly a rather simple setup-predictably unpredictable at worst. Many strips mine a rather narrow shaft of tropes. Peanuts: neurotic kid has to deal with his often-cruel peers and weird dog, which peturb him to no end.
PBS: I’m sure there’s a good reason why most of the cast have generic names. I read it, but it is definitely hit or miss, the latter often being a rather overreaching pun.
Our newspaper just got Pearls Before Swine. Like it!
9 Chickweed Lane I like, but when it went to black and white they stuck it in the classified ads section (?).
Get Fuzzy can be excrutiatingly funny, but lately…not so much. I do have the collections (books) though.
But I have to say Mutts. Sometimes the sheer Japanese-y artwork, the summer vacation strips with Crabby, the Shelter Stories, and the always kind-to-animals vibe just gets to me. I even have Mutts pajamas.
I also would have voted for Lio if it had been a choice. Usually it’s pretty stupid, but every so often it’ll be brilliant. One example was when he was babysitting some baby, trying to get it to quit screaming. He tempts it with all these toys, but then the baby quiets down when it spots a block of knives on the kitchen counter and tries to reach for the knives. Unfortunately, the Chicago Tribune got rid of Lio a few months ago.:mad:
I think Gary Trudeau has really lost his sense of humour about the world since 2003 (invasion of Iraq), but it is plainly the best comic strip still in publication. Whether its strips published nowadays are better than the other strips published nowadays is a different question…
He kinda hit a nadir of unfunniness around '04-'06, when the election and Iraq War drove him around the bend and he lost the balance between political content and humor, and was touching on Mallard Filmore territory for a while.
It’s been much better since though, I’ve been liking the current “Duke as BP spokesman” story line. I agree its the best strip still in print, and rivals Penny Arcade for best comic strip (xkcd is good when its good, but too much of its humor is just based around making the reader feel good that the recognize a given obscure physics or computer science reference, and making a lame pun out of it).
I read Dilbert, Garfield, and Xkcd everyday (well not xkcd but since I never remember when it’s issued I check everyday). I voted for Get Fuzzy since whenever I get a print paper I get a chuckle out of it.
My parents have told me that Pearls Before Swine is writen in my home town and the artist publishs each script in the local paper before it goes national.
Nor is ‘Life in Hell’.
That said, Cul de Sac gets my vote.
woot! I knew I couldn’t be the only person reading it and buying the books.
It was not easy to choose between Dilbert and Doonesbury. I decided on Dilbert since it is always funny ( I love the Wally Report!), while Doonesbury is largely biting social & political commentary. Honorable mention to Zits, which any parent of a teen would appreciate.
Pears Before Swine.
*
Get Fuzzy* is very good as well, and I’ll admit I still enjoy *Dilbert *more often than not.