Early fifties here, age-wise, and have always been a big Pogo fan. Used to cut out the Sunday strips from the Daily News so I had them to refer to when necessary. As good as Calvin and Hobbes?..maybe. It’s close.
Krazy Kat I never could get into.
Wow mangled the story, didn’t know that later George showed up and jokingly asked about the cash and thought the Beatles were has-beens. If you haven’t notice, it is 50 years later and the Beatles are still big and popular. Only a handful of music performers have had their staying power in the popular mind. Sinatra & Elvis are the only ones I can think of in fact.
Funny Peanuts would round out my top 5.
I remember Pogo, I have read one collection, like Doonesbury it is not holding up that well.
He is only doing Sunday strips now, he has some sort of TV show going now instead.
As I said above, I don’t think Pogo or Doonesbury hold up the way C&H or Far Side do and both strips ran far past their best days.
Agreed.
I like the comment in the second strip: “I could do better if I had more space.”
I thought Sabrina had white hair? Did it change at some point?
My favourite strips were Peanuts, Doonesbury, Bloom County, and Calvin & Hobbes. The problem with D and BC, now, are that they were fairly topical and what was edgy then isn’t anymore. Peanuts and C&H, on the other hand, are still as relevant as they were when they first run (that is, completely irrelevant).
Peanuts has to be qualified - brilliant for quite a few years but then coasted on the same jokes recycled over and over again. The cautionary tale that Watterson had written he was afraid of in an anthology released not long before he hung it up (also complaining about how much more he could do with more space).
Far Side is timeless and never fell off.
At 55 Pogo’s references went over my head at the time and are dated on later viewing. Does not mean it was not great for its time but classic for the ages? Nope, its greatness was in its time.
What Exit:
I disagree - I think his stuff in the late 80’s and 90’s was fantastic. I don’t think he went down in quality until the George W. Bush election, when many liberals who were once quite articulate lost their senses of humor and/or style and decided that reflexive Bush-bashing was the highest value to be achieved in their medium.
And of course Gary Larson did the same ( general ) thing Watterson did. Retired at the top of his game, which I think was a smart move. Really I admire those guys. They retired on top of the world at a youngish age with more money than they are ever likely to need. And Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes stand as pretty much unvarnished and pretty substantial pieces of art. They’re the gold standard for successful cartoonists.
Folks like Schulz who kept working steadily inevitably entered a decline. I’m glad Schulz was happiest to continue to work, but there is no doubt in my mind his earlier stuff was better. Neither choice is bad from a personal POV, but I think from the standpoint of the body of work being produced Larson and Watterson made the better decision.
“A good woman is a good woman, but a good cee-gar is a smoke.”
-Albert the Alligator.
–plagiarizing Kipling.
Nah, IMHO some of the weaker bits from Peanuts’s last decade or so were ones where Schulz was trying to focus on new characters and new situations (such as Snoopy’s brother Spike, who lived alone in the desert, or Lucy & Linus’s little brother Rerun) that didn’t really have as much comic potential.
Peanuts was definitely past its golden age in the last decade or two of its run, but it never completely "lost it’: there are still strips from that era that I find amusing or thought-provoking or once in a while made me laugh out loud.
I have a lot of respect for both Watterson and Schulz: Watterson for hanging it up before it began to get stale and never lowering his standards, Schulz for continuing to personally and singlehandedly produce a strip, without breaks or reruns, for ~50 years.
I never got the humour in “Peanuts.” It never made me even remotely smirk. It was the most unfunny comic strip ever.
I believe it was Len Deighton who attributed a quote to him as “Walt Kelley, Subversive American Cartoonist.”
I think that’s partly because Watterson is such Luddite. Kids running around in the woods and having imaginary friends is pretty timeless, and since that’s what he’s interested in, the strip holds up. I can only think of a couple of strips that reference something like a VCR that are dated references.
It’s a shame in some ways that Watterson’s career wasn’t ten or fifteen years later. If he’d been writing from 1995-2005, or maybe 2000-2010, he might have been able to transition into a successful webcomic. Given Watterson’s well-publicized fights with newspapers about the size and panel composition of his comic, he might have been a lot happier, since he’d be able to draw his comic in absolutely any size and shape he wanted. Of course, Watterson has also commented that he doesn’t find the same appeal in glowing pixels that he does in ink on paper, so who knows.
Well, “original” Sabrina had white hair, but when they redesigned her to look like Melissa Joan Hart (and made Hilda and Zelda blondes), her hair became more yellow. However, it was never red.
But did Watterson have any say in the strip’s colors? Some dailies had problems with this - just ask Bill Amend.
You half-bailed me out TDG, so I owe you a brew. I just don’t remember–is it possible Sabrina had reddish hair on the Saturday morning (“Filmation” [?]) cartoon in the '60s?
Even if you don’t like “Peanuts”, that honor has to go to a strip like Nancy, Cathy or Ziggy wouldn’t it?
Makes sense, thanks. I wonder if there was another minor Archie’s girl that was a red head? I can’t really remember the others any more. I see a Cheryl Blossom appeared in the 80s long after I had stopped reading them. Maybe it was her?
Absolutely not, that was where my main knowledge of Archie came from. She was white haired there.
Cheryl Blossom, I think.
Hey, don’t rag on “Nancy.” It’s my favorite all-time strip. Perhaps it was not funny, but it definitely was not “unfunny.”
Seriously? Nancy & Sluggo? Maybe you meant some other Nancy? Oh, the other really bad one was Mutt & Jeff.