When Doonesbury gets preachy (like in the last bunch of strips about Texas) it sucks big time. We can get the point in one strip - we don’t need a half dozen in a row, thank you.
I love Boondocks, too. It’s probably my favorite comic.
I can’t stand Cathy. I hate Fred Bassett. The Lockhorns is just evil. But I read them all anyway, just because it gives me a feeling of completion to read all the comics in the paper. How sad my life is…
Beetle Bailey and that Viking one have not been mentioned yet. They were probably funny the first few times I read them. Now, there’s nothing new. Most of the comics overall have gone stale. Even funny ones like Overboard and Fox Trot have lost a few steps.
I really like Liberty Meadows and Boondocks though.
Boondocks is funny as hell.
Comics that suck that I look at anyway:
Family Circus-Was this ever funny?
Garfield-Used to be funny in th 70s
Cathy-more tragic than funny
Beetle Bailey-Used to be funny
Bizarro-“Far Side” rip off
One Big Happy-It’s the same joke every day-dumb kid misunderstands a word
Baby Blues-was funny, now sucks.
What pisses me off is that “Foxtrot” is in the Washington Times, and nothing will make me buy that fascist rag.
I would gladly trade “Liberty Meadows” from the Post for Foxtrot. I don’t get that strip at all.
Come back, “Bloom County,” America needs you!
Hate Boondocks- 99% of the time. When the granddad was supposed to be the census taker, it was mildly amusing. Why is anyone ammused by that racist strip?
Lockhorns, Beetle Baily fit into the gratutious violence. What’s the point?
Cathy is neurotic but innocuous.
Love Sylvia
Get those Family Circus kids grown up and out of the house.
Ziggy- gack.
Love Doonesbury.
Soap opera strips arent’ supposed to be funny. I did notice that June (Rex Morgan) didn’t get her baby latched on properly (for breastfeeding) until the new guy took over, when June became glamorous and Rex became buff.
B.C.- yea, so we know about the bible. So?
Shoe
Marmaduke
Mark Trail
Gasoline Alley
Nancy (bothers me to no end)
Brenda Starr.
God, I hate this strip. Makes me want to hurl. I guess I still read it because Mary Schmich, the writer, also writes a wonderful column for the Chicago Tribune. Must be held back by the syndicate. Incidentaly, Mary Schmich wrote a column that became the Bars Lurhman song “Always Wear Sunscreen.” (No, it was not a Kurt Vonnegut MIT commencement speech.)
Then there’s Gil Thorp, a high school sports comic strip that runs in the sports section of the Tribune. Preachy, annoying, but I can’t help reading it for the soap opera aspect. That, and I do give it credit for showing life going on. Kids graduate and move on. The team even sometimes loses.
Just out of curiousity, why does anyone think Boondocks is racist?
You said it, goboy.
Would have to be pretty far back, though, before they all started appearing in Fruit-Of-The-Looms on a regular basis. IMHO.
Green Bean writes:
> Cathy: This strip has been annoying me more and more and
> more lately. Yeah, the neurotic single woman thing was
> kinda funny for a while, but she’s gotta be pushing 40 by
> now.
The strip has been around for about 20 years now. Cathy was shown as a well-established career woman right from the beginning, as if she were pushing 30 at the time. If you assume that time passes in the strip like in the real world, she’s almost 50. This is consistent with the age of the writer, incidentally.
When I was living in Juneau, the sunday comics always included the weekly “Prince Valiant.” I used to have to read every comic, so week after week I would toil through turgid text and static pictures depicting some boring medieval battle nobody cared about. Damn you, Prince Valiant! Damn you straight to hell!
On the subject of Peanuts. I used to hate this strip. It never seemed to be funny. Then a couple of years ago I actually looked at it and found out that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Every punchline was an insane non-sequiter that usually had nothing to do with anything whatsoever. After I realized this, I enjoyed the strip immensely.
Boondocks is one of my favorites too.
Read 'em but hate 'em:
Superzeroes. Mike Luckovich (sp?) is a very good political cartoonist, but his comic strip is full of lame puns and sight gags.
One Big Happy
The Norm (funny 1/14 of the time)
Foxtrot is probably my favorite now (I’m slowly getting over no more Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes). I like Tank McNamara, Zits, and Doonesbury. Family Circus is awful (but somehwo I always read it). Garfield sucks anymore (but I see it). Probably the comic I hate the most but always read is Mallard Fillmore. It’s like Rush Limbaugh in comic form. That same, condescending, “I’m right and if you don’t agree with me you are stupid”.
I just fucking read Ziggy again today. I can’t stop myself. It’s a sickness. The punchline? Some stupid Survivor joke about voting Ziggy off the strip. Fuck that. Vote fucking Ziggy off the comics section and straight to his own special circle of Hell.
–Tim
Dilbert when he’s got the animals.
I liked the real office jokes better. The over-the-top ones just annoy me when I read them by mistake.
Cathy has been described well enough.
Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois and Hagar the Horrible have never ever in my lifetime been funny. My guess is that some people like them because they’re safe and have been around for a long time.
Dilbert stopped being funny about two years in. Maybe it’s still riding off that fame. I don’t know. what I do know is that I used to laugh at it all the time back when and now the jokes are either lame, confusing or both. Either way the one they aren’t is funny.
The Boonedocks goes on and off for me. When it first came out, I actually posted about it in the Pit. I think the bit to really set me off was some two week bit about the kid refusing to celebrate Independance Day because there was still slavery in 1776 or some such thing. All in all very preachy and annoying and it got old faster than a Sunday B.C. strip. Today it doesn’t bother me as much and I even find it amusing often enough to continue reading it. For every joke about white people or preachy racism bit, you also find slams on black institutions like BET and the main character’s attitudes are tempered by the other characters. For the most part, I can look at the irritating jokes and ask myself “If this same joke was in Doonesbury, would it offend me?” If the answer is “No” and it often is, then the problem is with me for not liking the joke in a black strip, not with the strip itself. That’s only for me, mind you, so don’t any of you accuse me of saying nasty things about you.
Blondie is never funny, but you have to admit that Blondie, her daughter, and Herb’s wife are pretty well stacked women so at least it has more to offer than Beetle Bailey. 
I have a brother who is a managing editor for a small newspaper. He is the person who gets to decide which comics get run.
The factors he figures in:
- Reader interest
- Syndication cost
- Whether or not he thinks he likes it
- Balance between old/young; liberal/conservative; funny/soap opera
You would be surprised at how many people really like “Marmaduke” and “Family Circus”. His readership would definitely hate “The Boondocks”.
You can complain here, but you really need to send a letter to the newspaper (and not e-mail) for anything to get changed.
That said, I am strangely drawn to “Mary Worth” which is terrible. “Rex Morgan, M.D.” at least tries to get through some education about medical issues.
This one is enjoyable once you figure out who’s who and understand that the artist is actually spoofing racist 6 years olds. I think this guy is just as politically relevant as Gary Trudeau.
Comics that suck:
Family Circle, natch.
Peanuts, BC, and Zippy (when they turn into “message” strips)
Andy Capp
Sylvia
Frank and Ernest (I hate pun-laden jokes)
Comics that don’t necessarily suck, but I wouldn’t notice if they suddenly disappeared
Garfield (so sad, I was such a fan as a kid)
Dennis the Menace
Cathy
Born Loser
Crankshaft
Wizard of Id
Heathcliff
Comics that I enjoy:
Boondocks
Doonesbury
Sally Forth
Pickles
Mother Goose and Grimm
Foxtrot
Dilbert
Robotman
One Big Happy
For Better or Worse
I can’t figure out Doonsbury any more. I don’t know what it means when the Duke’s head opens up and there’s a guy inside. And Mr. Cigarette seems too stupid to include at all. What’s wrong with a human tobacco head to say the same lines? That would make it funnier again for me.
What about that stupid conservative comic Mallard Fillmore?
Talk about doltish in the extreme…
I don’t get Zippy. That is, I cannot identify what it is about the strip that is supposed to be funny or interesting.
Sometimes I go back and check, but I have never found it to be comprehensible.
IMO, the St.Paul Pioneer Press has dreadful comics. Doesn’t even carry Dilbert.