Best/Worst comic strips.

Cafe Society
81

I was all set to come in here with my list…Richard John Marcej made me rethink the concept of “worst”. I think we can all agree “Reply All” is an excellent example of horrible though…how does that thing has over 5,000 subscribers on GoComics?!?. (If you type “reply all comic is horrible” into Google, it comes back with “Did you mean: reply all comic is terrible”.)

Other comics end up on my “disappointment” list rather than my “worst” list. “We The Robots,” for example, looks like fun but has fallen hard into sticking with traditional, bland work/home humor. And I can’t stand to look at “Dilbert” anymore because Scott Adams has turned into an MRA clod.

I haven’t seen any mentions of “Scary Gary”…it’s not side-splittingly funny, but its absurdity is enjoyable. “Sarah’s Scribbles” is also a good one (though it tends to break the traditional comic format, so it might not count).

82

Tom the Dancing Bug (and its daily reprint companion, Super Fun-Pak Comics). Frequently brilliant.

83

BWT, a link to the entire Simple J. Malarkey storyline from Pogo (satire on Joseph McCarthy).

(Click on each image to see full-screen-size.) (Malarkey makes his first appearance on page 14.)

84

“Pogo” transcends mere comics. It is the essence of the universe.

The same way that Baseball transcends mere sport.

85

Thanks – those are very good.

86

Yeah, started reading Cul de Sac last night based on this thread. A couple strips after the linked one was this strip that gave me a laugh out loud moment and I started from the beginning.

87

Please check out Sequential Art when you get a chance. Very well drawn, interesting character design (some are downright sexy), great stories and jokes. I’d link to it but I’m on a tablet and have no clue how to do it.

88

Oh, yeah! Thompson’s Cul de Sac is one of the contemporary greats. I enjoy interjecting “YOU CAN’T TIE DOWN A BANJO MAN!!!” randomly into everyday conversation.

89

I cast another vote for Pearls Before Swine. I like the way the characters give the cartoonist a hard time for his puns - just like we do to punsters IRL.

An excellent comic about family life with kids is Baby Blues. It’s the opposite of Family Circle in its portaryals of family, kid, and parent situations. It always hits home in a hilarious way.

90

I’m so glad you both took the time to read some strips and that you enjoyed them! The whole 4 year run of the strip was awesome. I’ve collected pretty much Mr. Thompson’s entire body of work over the last 10 years or so and they are truly his pinnacle achievement, something his entire life and career were just preparation for, IMO.

I love that line! I never use it because I already get enough strange looks from saying “I blame society” at inappropriate moments.

91

See, e.g., Close To Home.

92

I’m going to try to avoid repeating all the bests and worsts already mentioned. Here are some that I think are worth mentioning:

Sherman’s Lagoon - Consistently funny. There’s often a tag line at the end that’s at least as funny as the actual punchline.

Six Chix - Truly awful. Poorly drawn, unfunny and smug. The idea of splitting the work among six artists reminds me of the old saying: If you want to win the high jump, you need one guy who can jump seven feet, not seven guys who can jump one foot.

Marvin - Dirty diapers weren’t funny the first ten thousand times. Maybe they’ll be funny the ten thousand and first time.

Mark Trail - The comic where all the characters look like they were laid out with a drafting set. Has some of the most stilted dialogue of any strip, which is saying a lot. Bad, but possibly unintentionally funny.

Gil Thorp - The excitement of seeing sports in a four-panel format. The biggest problem this strip has is with continuity: it happens often that the panels have nothing to do with each other. Pretty awful.

Medium Large - One of my favorite on-line strips. The author is Francesco Marciuliano, who also does the newspapr strip Sally Forth. In Medium Large he sometimes parodies classic comics such as Peanuts and Beetle Bailey, which is fun for fans of the form.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Another of my favorite on-line strips. It combines juvenile and philosophical humor, sometimes in the same strip.

Buni - Another online strip, about an optimistic but hapless rabbit. The strip takes some surreal turns sometimes. The humor often comes from surprising places - there’s no predicting what’s going to happen in this strip. Unfortunately, I think it’s losing some of its edge, but I still think it’s pretty funny.

93

Izzat the one where an occasional panel will focus on something completely irrelevant while the dialogue continues unabated, like a bird or a tree or something?

94

That’s Mark Trail. Which is amusing when the effect looks as though the animal is talking.

95

A few people have already mentioned Richard Thompson’s Cul-De-Sac, which has been my strip of the century so far. I thought it would be the next great strip, the next Calvin & Hobbes. (Bill Watterson seems to have thought so, too, as he wrote a glowing introduction to the first Cul-De-Sac collected volume.) Alas, the Parkinson’s Disease that eventually took Mr. Thompson from us, restricted the strip’s run to less than five years.

His weekly one-page comic, Richard’s Poor Almanac, ran for years in the Washington Post The archives can be read at www.gocomics.com

96

As for other good strips: I like Mark Tatulli’s stuff (Lio, Heart of the City) and Zits. Luann has gotten a lot better since she graduated high school and moved on to college. Legacy strips are usually a blight on the comics page, but new creative teams at Dick Tracy and Judge Parker have breathed some life into them.

I wasn’t going to list this, as it is very new and also a webcomic, but I will since it’s now at gocomics.com. Two Party Opera is a cross between a comic strip and a political cartoon that uses all 45 Presidents of the United States as its dramatis personae. Here is a recent strip featuring Presidents Kennedy, Wilson, Nixon, McKinley, and Andrew Johnson.
As for bad strips: The Archie comic strip has the lamest jokes I’ve ever seen. And then there is Crock, which has been running for 40 years and never been funny. At it’s best, it’s a poor man’s Wizard of Id with cultural insensitivity thrown in.

97

I enjoy 9 Chickweed Lane. It has long term stories and is entertaining. The French Resistance story from a couple of years back was awesome. I enjoyed Hugh and Xuilan’s wedding and their parental interactions.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal? I don’t really think of it as a Comic like Pearls or Luann, but it is one of my personal favorites and I sponsor him for $3 a month through Patreon.

98

I’ve heard a lot about the current Dick Tracy, could somebody link to a good starting point?

99

Of all time, I think it’s got to be Calvin and Hobbes. Back in the day, I would have said that Bloom County was a contender, but it hasn’t aged as well. The Far Side is also up there, but while Larson was the best at surreal/absurd humor, he doesn’t have much breadth beyond that.

Of current comics, my favorite is probably Frazz, and I’m also quite fond of Sally Forth, Zits, and Non Sequitur. Get Fuzzy used to be up there, but it’s tough to justify even calling it a “current comic” any more, with as many re-runs as it runs.

Cul de Sac didn’t really last long enough to qualify as a “great”, but what I saw of it, I loved.

For worst, it’s too easy to list amateur efforts like Reply All, so I’ll restrict myself to strips that run in my local paper, the Plain Dealer. The worst has to be Prickly City, an incoherent political strip written by a guy who appears to hold liberal positions but who thinks he’s a conservative because he’s swallowed the narrative that liberals are evil idiots for… reasons.

Right after that comes Mutts, whose typical MO is to take one not-very-funny joke, and then tell that same joke six times in a row to fill out a week, interspersed with a week of nothing but six “inspirational” quotes or a week of a shelter animal saying “Adopt me” six times in a row.

And of Garfield, I’ll say this: A few years ago, it jumped the shark by having Liz start going out with Jon, and it actually worked: For at least a little while, the strip had a new source of jokes, and was funny again. He’s now mostly run out of that humor, too, but it helped for a year or two.

100

It might not be “the best”, but I’m a big fan of Maakies. Maakies

May make a case for “best artwork”, however.

Never heard of Reply All till today, bet egad! That’s gotta be near the worst!