I remember seeing Lio as one of the audition strips when my local paper had an opening. It didn’t bother me; in fact, I appreciated the way it strove to be unique. I also realized that it didn’t have the slightest freaking chance of actually being picked.
We don’t blame it because that puts the strip a solid thirty years ahead of Blondie and a solid decade ahead of Archie. Let’s face it, comics don’t age gracefully.
I guess part of what frustrates me is this one could be so much better if the characters changed (a little?) over time. Wouldn’t you like to, say, see the father, with Curtis’ help quit smoking once and for all? How about Curtis’ family adopts the erstwhile villain Derrick because of problems at his home, and Derrick becomes less of a two dimensional character (and Curtis learns something about other people not being as fortunate as he)?
I once opened up a thread on FBOFW here…Ah! I thought. Finally! A thread where I can rant about what an unfuckingbelievably bad comic strip it is.
Not quite. The thread was a discussion thread about it. Dopers were enthusiastically discussing the characters like they were their real family members. I shook my head and left.
Notice how Curtis’s dad used to hate rap, because he was part of the Motown generation? Twenty years on, with all the characters still at their original ages, Curtis’s dad is part of the MTV generation. It’s going to get to be pretty hard for him to pull of those, “Kids these days, and their rap ‘music’” gags, that make up a conservative 95% of the Curtis oeuvre.
Adding Betty to the list, because forgive my French, but those two women–Betty and her friend–are complete, utter and total bitches to any retail worker (salesperson, waitstaff, barista) they come across. I’ve worked in retail for roughly eight years and it makes my skin crawl.
I agree. Prickly City isn’t the total waste that was Mallard Fillmore.
Generally, I try not to “hate” comic strips. After all, I could skip the ones I dislike. But I’ve been hating on two that have appeared in the Houston Chronicle within the last year. (The names have been blotted from my consciousness.)
Why? One supplanted 9 Chickweed Lane. And the other just started appearing in place of The Piranha Club.
I can’t stand 9 Chickweed Lane. Every few days, there will be one like this or this that’s just a complete waste of space. I figure the cartoonist just decided to take a day off.
It hurts my heart to see so many people bashing on FBOFW because I loved it so much as a child, and used to buy the collections for my parents for Christmas every year. But I haven’t read it regularly in about 15 years.
In fact, as a child, I used to like a lot of these strips, but i was young and dumb and the jokes and characters were fresh to me anyway. Familiarity does breed contempt, however. But I’ve always loathed Family Circus. Always. Even when I was a child, I found it patronizing and insulting.
Mutts is cute, though. Look at this one! Surely my fellow dog owners can relate!
Nah, I figure the artist wanted to add another piece to his wanking book. At least that character is of legal age now; it was more icky when she was a high schooler.
I agree. The family is a passive-aggressive parody of a happy family. I keep typing out what I think is going to be a short capsule of what their problems are and it runs overly long - and I discover I’ve only covered one character! Let me think of some low-lights:
Elly hired a girl to help at the shop she used to own, and had April there helping as well. This girl bullied April and Elly didn’t believe April when she complained. (I’m fuzzy on the details here, this event was a while back.)
Mike’s apartment burned, and he left his wife to fend for herself and their two very young children on the fire escape while he ran inside the burning building to rescue his laptop, because it had his novel manuscript on it. (The same manuscript that he’d been typing in the attic while not at work, leaving his also-working-outside-the-home wife to care for their children.) Then he moved his family back to his childhood home, displacing April into the basement with a lot of his stuff, taking over the bedroom set she’d bought with her own money. Meanwhile, he dragged his feet for months at doing any serious looking for a new place, whining all the while about money (when he had insurance plus a $20k advance for that novel) and not being able to find anything, and freaking out about what a big step buying a house would be. Yet his response around the same time to being asked to lay off a couple people at work? Resign because he can’t handle doing it. Oh yeah, that improved your financial situation and isn’t a big step at all! :smack:
Elizabeth has been through a series of boyfriends who she was very passive-aggressive with, even letting one put in a transfer to move near where she was living at the time, only to let him know much later that all along she’d intended to move away. She didn’t really feel like getting back together with one but just kind of went along with it, but then when he broke a date to come visit her, she told him cheerily that it was fine, and went into screaming bitch mode after hanging up. She went back to Anthony to ask him to go to a wedding with her, and after finding that her fall-back choice already had a date, she really flipped out.
Anthony got married after Liz left town. His wife was career-oriented and didn’t want kids, but he pushed her into having one, so he ended up being a house husband. He portrayed this as being awful and cruel of her to not want kids when he knew that going in. He hit on Liz within hours of her being nearly sexually assaulted (and he knew that because he stopped the attack), and while he was still married, begging her to wait for him.
Can I be the only one to be sidetracked by the fact that the ads attached to the site are for Cthulhu, Corporate Social Networks, and Piano Accordion. What hath Google wrought?!
