Ah, that’s why I couldn’t find it! I was mixing up Sally with Rose…
What? No votes for The Born Loser? It makes me long for the days of Priscilla’s Pop.
Also not funny: Andy Capp, the adventures of a wife-beating drunk, and The Lockhorns, the US version of Andy Capp.
And of course, Mallard Fillmore plumbs the depths of not funny.
Is my local paper the only one still running the suckfest that is B.C.???
Dinette Set. Every day I wake up and hope that it will have been cancelled. And every day I’m disappointed.
Here’s the link. Imagine if Peggy Hill wrote a comic strip and you’ll pretty much have it.
It got its start in my college campus newspaper. I didn’t like it then, either.
The third strip down is the comic that introduced and addicted me to Medium Large. I view Francesco Marciuliano as the funny pages equivalent of Bob Saget. And if you’ve ever seen Saget’s stand-up (as opposed to his horrible, horrible TV shows) you’ll know just how high a compliment I mean that to be.
The L.A. Times has got one called “Ballard Street” (I think). Must be funny to some, but not to me. Day after day, same premise: neighborhood kooks doing strange things. …Like an old coot who likes to dress up like a shark before his wife serves him fish sticks - or something.
The L.A. Times has “Chickweed Lane” that occasionally manages to be quite, er, sexy. I like it then.
I can usually get the most subtle expressions of humor. Still, I just fon’t “get” Dinette Set. Unless the humor is based on just how mundane and “midwestern” the characters are, but even then, the premise, if there really is one, gets old.
I’ve seen this cartoon a number of times. I think the cartoonist is busier coming up with text to put in the background of each strip than she is with the dialogue.
I followed the link. Not too bad, actually. Seems to be going for an understated, “About Schmitt” kinda vibe. It definitely has a keen sense of irony, which Peggy Hill does not.
I’m not going to defend Andy Capp, but I wish to point out that Andy is not a wifebeater. He treats her like crap, to be sure, but every other strip ends with him sporting a black eye and stars around his head from being clobbered with her rolling pin. I could be wrong, but I don’t remember ever seeing evidence of his hitting her.
As for The Lockhorns, I admit to having found it funny on occasion, because my parents are an awful lot like that. I am also the only person on earth, it seems, who likes The Fusco Brothers, but I’m well aware that it’s indefensible.
Definitely not funny: flodnak, you say the last original gag in Garfield was in 1997? I think you slipped a digit. Word on Dinette Set and Fred Basset. I’m told that FB strips always have a missing final panel that shows a foot booting the dog across the room. Ballard Street’s visuals make my eyes burn.
Haven’t liked Monty since Robotman left. When he was in it, though, it was one of my very favorites. I don’t like Boondocks as much as I used to, basically since McGruder decided to make Jazmine retarded. Better or Worse has become a sprawling mess of unresolved plotlines and minutiae presented as drama. (Liz gets assaulted? Eh, moving on. Elly hates vacuuming? The horrah, the horrah!) Jump Start was good for a while, but for some reason, when Marcy fell pregnant with the twins, I lost interest overnight.
Whenever he’s “breaking in new pens”. Yawn.
Frankly, I feel the same way. Dilbert’s been declining for several years now. It was hilarious at first, but now I read it mostly out of habit.
Pat Brady is actually a guy. Not sure if this makes it better or worse.
I like “Rose is Rose.” I know, it’s saccharine, it’s schmaltzy, and I don’t usually like that kind of comic, but for some reason I like it anyway. I think it might be the cat. 
How can anyone say that Peanuts has declined? It’s author is DEAD. None of the strips have been new for years and years now. The Peanuts appeal isn’t really about knee-slapping gags anyway: it’s just a classic bunch of familiar characters playing to type. In that, it belonged to a different era. Recycling it into this one is just part of the phenomenon: it’s comfort food rather than anything new or groundbreaking.
What I don’t understand is why we can’t have more Calvin & Hobbes-like strips. There have to be some talented artists and cartoonists out there. Where the hell are they and why aren’t they in newspapers?
They’re online, because the newspaper features syndicates are obsessed with not offending anybody. So obsessed, that they censor new cartoonists until the kids just give up because of the aggravation.
Online offers meager returns, but at least no out-of-touch moron is telling you that your character can’t throw a pie at somebody “because it’s an imitative act”. :rolleyes:
Anyway, newspapers are becoming irrelevant.
When I first ran across this cartoon, I thought I was missing something. But then I grew fascinated by not only the complete lack of humor but sheer awfulness of it. I made everyone I knew read it, just to make sure I wasn’t imagining how awful it was, but then everyone I knew had the same visceral distaste for it.
Reading it feels like being forever on the outside of a group of people’s in-jokes.
Have you taken a look at Frazz? Very stylistically reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes–smart writing, gentle humor with a bit of a bite, and a main character who could well be the grown-up Calvin after he’d assimilated the Hobbes personality, while the young-Calvin role has been taken over by the smart but bored 8-year-old Caulfield.