:::puts him on watch list:::
Nancy was the Zippy the Pinhead of an earlier generation.
And aunt Fritzi was a babe!
Fritzi Ritz was always smoking hot. Wish the strip concentrated on her rather than her deformed niece.
Gary Trudeau is too busy working on Alpha House, his TV series, to write comic strips. That’s why the strip is on hiatus.
All you C&H fans might want to check out a documentary streaming on Netflix called Dear Mr. Watterson: An Exploration of Calvin & Hobbes. Not especially remarkable, but it’s fun in a “Hey! Me too!” way. Included is a discussion of Watterson’s refusal to allow licensing of C&H merchandise.
It was fantastic in the 60s. If all you saw were more recent strips I could understand.
I was born in 1962, but probably didn’t read “Peanuts” until the mid 70s. Boring as hell with the same repeated schtiky jokes every time. I still haven’t seen the Christmas show: apparently it involves a crappy tree.
When did the Aunt disappear? I only remember Nancy from the 70s and it was a waste of space and ink on the comics page by then.
Fritiz “leaned in” all the way up until the end of Bushmiller’s run with the strip. After EB quit doing the comic, I agree there’s nothing more to see. However, for construction purposes, Bushmiller’s Nancy was near perfect. The flow from first panel to last is so consistently smooth. Everyone talks about the three rocks of course, but it is so much more. It’s about how Nancy and Fritzi and Sluggo are always drawn the same – to perfection --, and yet those that inhabit world around them differ wildly depending on what is needed to get to the joke at the end. The joke is the gravity of the strip, the force that moves everything in it towards the final panel.
Don’t just watch the stream; order the disk. There’s enough supplemental material to make another documentary. (I think it was pretty remarkable!)
No, that title must go to that multi-decade assault on the nation’s sensibilities The Family Circus. Bil Keane ranks up there with Kim Jong Il as a human-rights violator. In my sober and reasoned opinion.
Is the web site that changes the dialogue on the Family Circus still around?
But without Bil Keane, we’d never have had the Dysfunctional Family Circus.
I can think of a lot of contenders for unfunniest strip. Tumbleweeds. Pluggers. Ballard Street. Especially Pluggers, because I don’t even see the joke.
I don’t know. Fred Basset would be my vote, although I do remember a day where I chuckled at a Fred Basset strip. I don’t remember it, but there was exactly one strip that made me at least crack a smile.
ETA: I see I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Maybe now that I actually own a dog, I’ll be able to appreciate it a bit more, and not look at it as trying to be “funny,” but merely a fairly straight imagining of what goes through a dog’s head.
Why are we talking about Drek like Family Circus when we could be discussing whether Fritzi Ritz or Blondie Bumstead is hotter?
FTR the mom from Family Circus does have a pretty sweet butt.
Re: The Family Circus, please check out The Nameless Dread.