Rugrats?
Not so many I hate now (I can stand The Lockhorns and Family Circus and Sylvia and Cathy and even Garfield). I can live with the existential weirdness of “Zippy the Pinhead” (Although I hate the rants that occasionally show up there.)
I don’t like Get Fuzzy. I think Mallard Filmore (I thought of that name years before the strip) has almost no sense of humor and light-years to go before it becomes the conservative “Doonesbury”.
The strips I really hate are the ones from when I was a kid , and they either don’t exist , or at least I don’t see them. “Our Boarding House with Major Hoople”, “The Teeny-Weenies”, anything by Jimmy Hatlo (“Little iodine” and “They’ll Do It Every Time”), “Bugs Bunny” (Done by some non-Warner Brothers hack with no proper conception of the characters. He had Bugs always saying “Unlax” instead of “Relax”), and most of the adventure and romance strips.
I’m pretty sure she means Baby Blues, which I kind of like. But I also like Mutts, so I’m not getting a lot of love here. However, nothing in the world has made me laugh as hard as some of those *Barfield * strips.
Hating the Doonsebury, myself.
My paper is running an atrocity called* Lio* at the moment. May it die a thousand deaths. I am also underwhelmed by* Close to Home, *a strip that thinks it’s The Far Side but has terrible drawing, dumb concepts, and poor wording.
(Bolding mine.) Come on now, you can’t be serious. I just bought the complete 1927 set of Our Boarding House, and it’s the best strip I’ve ever seen. As far as I know, the strip went downhill after the original artist, Gene Ahern, quit drawing it in 1936 or so (not that I was around, or anything). As far as I know, *Our Boarding House * continued on into the 1980s, but never approached the level of deft humor that Ahern was able to provide.
I’m surprised there’s been no mention of Henry or Nancy. Both strips had their charm at certain times (and were often wildly popular in the past) but they’re certainly not to everyone’s taste, and usually take a drubbing in this kind of thread.
Anyway, I probably sound a hundred years old bringing up all of this ancient stuff, but I’m really not.
Our paper started running it to replace FoxTrot when it stopped running dailies. The suckage is even more painfully obvious by comparison.
Nope, ours does too.
I wouldn’t know about Our Boarding House in its heyday – I saw it in the 60s and 70s, and it was, in my opinion, a waste of paper.
And Nancy was mentioned above – se Darryl’s post.
For what it’s worth, I hate Mutts, too. Especially the mush-mouth pronunciation.
[astonished but rude comment deleted]. Lio is one of the best strips out there. It’s the darkest humor there’s been in the mainstream funny pages since Far Side folded.
Who are you people who are still getting Boondocks in your papers? That strip ended a year ago, after being in reruns for a year before that.
I agree. Maybe they won’t flame both of us.
Sorry I missed the Nancy hits above. But I still maintain that the early years of Our Boarding House were excellent. I have no doubt that the strip sucked later on. Some comic strips lose it quickly but manage to drag on for decades. Not so long ago I thought Dilbert was outrageously funny. I can’t read it anymore, and I hope it goes away soon before it turns into 2030’s Family Circus.
I tend to think that the creators of the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were smart not to let their strip continue on when they’d had enough. So many comic strips, like so many rock bands, go on years after the initial inspiration dries up.
I’d rather have that *Lio * thing (although the samples I looked at didn’t get much reaction from me) than the god-awful *F-Minus * that the *Arizona Republic * replaced *Foxtrot * with. Apparently, it’s by a local boy, so for some reason they thought that was a good enough reason to run it. It’s hideositiness is so bad, I just coined a new word to describe it.
I think another comparison would be TV shows. A good comic strip, a good TV show, and a good rock band can only go on for so long before entropy sets in.
Agreed. But at least TV seems more ruthless and practical about the situation. Most shows don’t last a decade before going off the air. The majority don’t even make five years, and then they’re gone. Television doesn’t let Jerry, Kramer, George and Elaine hang around for a twenty-fifth season, long after they should have moved on. Once you’re done in TV, you’re done. One hundred episodes is a real achievement. Two hundred is a show for the ages. And you don’t get to hang around for five hundred more, coasting on points. But TV wisely hangs onto and replays the good stuff. Cheers is still fun to watch in re-runs. But imagine if Sam, sixty now, was still leering at Kirstie Alley! With Nahm and Cliff (are they still alive?) cracking moronic from the sidelines.
Strangely, cartoons on TV do get to hang on longer than necessary. The Flintstones, The Simpsons – maybe Family Guy will still be pumping out new episodes in 2030.
Yeah! Krazy Kat totally sucked after 1927!
(major ;))
I love Zippy the Pinhead.
And I love Nancy.
And Lio seems a lot better than some of the old stuff out there.
But to the topic:
Snuffy Smith needs to go (I think it used to be called Barney Google?)
I don’t bother reading BC, For Better or For Worse, Family Circus, and several others mentioned
Once. In 1978. For two seconds.
Although Sarge pounding Beetle into pudding, breaking his ribs and crushing his spleen has its antic charm.
Rose is Rose is sweet, but only slightly funnier than FC.
What’s wrong with having politically-charged strips in the general funnies section?
Agreed. Nobody in America lives or talks like that any more, not in the Appalachians, not in the Ozarks.
Joel and Rufus in Gasoline Alley also represent dated white-trash stereotypes of a kind I have never, ever encountered in real life. Joel seems to be some kind of 19th-Century grizzled-ol’-coot prospector.
I will mention the loathsome Prickly City , an if-possible-even-less-funny-and-more-poorly-drawn exemplar of the Mallard Fillmore school of "let’s guilt-trip editors into buying a “conservative” strip for the sake of “balance” which the Tribune thankfully dumped recently.
I quite like Lio, Mutts, and Get Fuzzy, though. I even like FBOFW!