The pleasant surprise being the month ending?
Doug: I preferred the strips where they simply removed Garfield’s thought bubbles. It is amazing how much funnier it was with that small change
I would like to nominate Boondocks. I was glad to see it pulled from my local newspaper about a year ago. I don’t care for Zippy the Pinhead either.
Chiming in on the hate for Family Circus and Marmaduke, and adding the lazy, tired, dead exhausted Blondie…
Clearly he meant PVP…or Penny Arcade…or VGCats (ok, that one’s a bit of a strech, but you gotta admit, lots of slacker-based star-wars reference webcomics out there.)
What is the one with all the babies in diapers and the really really hateful little girl? That one makes me glad I’m childless.
I agree with you about Zippy, but was dissapointed when my Conservative Nazi newspaper canceled Boondocks. I’ve found it in “repeats” on the web.
Hmm no mention of Sylvia so I’ll toss her out there for the wolves to shred. I do like the occasional dialogue involving her cats, but the rest is pretty worthless. I hate strips which have pretensions of being clever but come out as dull, pat or simply incomprehensible.
I have no idea whether Sylvia has good writing or not, I’ve never been able to read it.
That stupid comic always ruined my comic strip reading time on Sunday mornings. Stupid idiots. You summed up the content of that dumbass strip quite well in your example.
Er … Marvin?
I hate Beetle Bailey. Has it ever been funny? Even once?
*Get Fuzzy * is like *Garfield * on drugs–and not the *good * ones that make anything seem funny.
Yes, IMHO racist and mean.
The LA Times has been cutting back on everything. They just cut the comic section down to two pages, getting rid of the third page, which conveniently contained all the truly crappy comics (except for Mutts, which I find amusing sometimes). So, they’ve got all the single frame square comics mixed up together and sometimes I make a mistake and read the Family Circus or Marmaduke. Ruins my day, I tell ya. The only good thing is they killed off Mallard Fillmore.
I like Get Fuzzy. Heathcliff makes Garfield seem funny.
Gaaack! You had to bring up Nancy! I was at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and they had 3 strips showing American comic graphic arts. They showed Ernie Bushmiller as a clean stylist. Fuck, sure it was simple clean line art, but it sucked artistically and was anti-funny, truly abysmal. They had the gall to put it in the same display case with Mickey Mouse! Walt Disney is rolling over in his cryogenic chamber!
Another vote for Boondocks. Repetitive, racist and too politically charged for a general-comics strip.
My local paper prints Family Circus and Marmaduke next to each other. I like to mentally switch the captions - about once a week they work. Of course right now I can’t think of any good ones…
Ziggy stinks like unwiped ass.
Eh? My understanding was that the creator (name escapes me at the moment) decided to spike the comic strip in favor of the animated show on cable TV. The old strips are being published in lieu of new ones.
Aaron McGruder. That would explain it.
Thank!