How can someone hate “For Better Or Worse?” It’s good, realistisc writing with an art style that fellow cartoonists highly admire.
But why, oh why, does “Sherman’s Lagoon” exist? And why does the Chicago Tribune insist on dropping it in place of vacationing strips? Run a freaking re-run, ya humourless twits! I want to see that shark and his damn friends turned into a shishkebob.
Cathy and how could I forget the absolutly horrid Family, Fuckin’, Circus
Then check out Dijon’s link. It kicks serious serious ass.
I too like FBOFW. I like how the family actually AGES!
In syndication, there are no good ones. Garfield started funny - sucks now. But my fave strip of his - Garfield’s bear’s eye fell off and G says " There’s nothing worse than a teddy bear with no depth perception". Loved that…
It had been SO long since I had LOLed at a comic (in the paper, Sinfest is priceless) that when I nearly busted a gut over this comic, I actually sent an email to the comic praising his efforts.
Comics that aren’t my style don’t bother me as much so I actually like some of the ones folks hate here. I take my cue from Matt Groening’s annual forbidden words list in his Life in Hell strip and save my hate for strips with no imagination. My hate list:
The Family Circus gotta hate 'em
One Big Happy
Sally Forth I thought nothing could be as bland as TFC
I’m a diehard fan of For Better Or For Worse. It doesn’t always make me laugh, but the most fascinating thing about it is the longevity and the aging of the characters. Gasoline Alley is the only other one that comes to mind where the characters aged. I’m sick of Dennis the Menace being “five anna half” for fifty fucking years.
Lynn Johnston’s handling of Lawrence coming to terms with his sexuality, deaths in the family, births of children, et cetera … it’s not usually fare for a daily comic strip. True, some of the strips are so weak that I feel cheated, but there rarely are any repeats of weak jokes.
My hate list? Judge Parker, Mark Trail. I skip those, I read everything else. BC is a struggle, and Cathy should just follow Troy McClure’s self-help video Get Confident, Stupid.
Will I really be the first to mention Mallard Filmore. Eww.
I disagree that there are no good comics in syndication. Every sunday I look at the comics for one comic and one only: Pirhana Club, formerly Ernie. Very funny.
The Atlanta paper publishes three - count 'em - THREE lame-o strips by Guy Gilchrist: his horrible reinterpretation of “Nancy,” “Mudpie” and a god-awful how-to-draw for kids on Sundays. Gilchrist must have photos of the features editor in a compromising position to get all this newsprint, because his strips are stupendously bad!
Can I get an “Amen”, brothers and sisters?
Please note I’m not dissing either Watterson or Larson (the former for his penwork, the latter for his humor) but there really hasn’t been the amazing combination of artistry and commentary since those two laid down their pens. For Better or for Worse is in that category but it limits itself to the Pattersons’ view of things. (Although I really dug Grandpa’s recent interpretation of a Canadian national folkdance!)
It seems MF has a limited syndication, thank God. Here in DC it only runs in the Washington Times, which allots all of half a page to comics - such greats as Crankshaft among them. (Sidenote: you ever notice how New York and DC have two papers of the same names, but they’re like evil twins?)
My personal peeve is the sudden rash of “zombie” comics.
Charles Schulz is dead. Peanuts lives on in reruns.
Hank Ketcham is dead. Dennis the Menace carries on.
Reg Smythe is dead. Andy Capp does whatever it is he does.
And don’t even get me started on Prince Valiant.
Enough, already! There are literally hundreds of other cartoonists out there who feel they can offer just as much bland and inoffensive material as these strips who have long outlived their usefulness as vehicles for humor and entertainment. Give the new talent a chance, so at least we’ll have something fresh to gripe about.
And for the rest of you who want some real gems thrown in with all sorts of other bizarre attempts:
http://www.keenspot.com
http://www.keenspace.com
Note: some strips have serious adult content so surfing at work should be done with a modicum of care.
Sylvia is absolutely terrible. I don’t know a single person who even reads it.
Mutts. In my paper, it replaced Citizen Dog, which I adored. This new piece of crap is just really boring. So, the kid loves his dog and misses him while he’s at camp. New story line please.
Wizard of Id. Never ever funny. Always very stupid.
Hagar the Horrible. I’ve had about enough of the exact same “jokes.”
Marmaduke. Also never ever funny.
Adam @ Home (or whatever it’s called now). He is such an annoying person! I think that his wife should just leave him! Ick.
Garfield. The expressions of the characters are the exact same 80% of the time. And it seems that the only storyline is about Garfield killing spiders. What a barrel of laughs!
That’s all I can think of right now. Ugh… I hate bad comics.
I don’t much care for Cathy because it is always the same crap about work or how she looks in summer clothes. Who the hell cares. Garfield is always the same. Family Circus always shows that one kid running around the city. We get it already. There are some I don’t even bother to read because they just don’t seem to make sense at all. Aren’t comics supposed to be funny? Am I alone or do some of them seem to be the most serious and boring things ever?
I must say i loved the conversation in the movie “Go” about how Family Circus ruins the rest of the comics because of how horrible it is and yet for some reason you always have to read it, thereby leaving you with a poor impression of the comics in general.
5-HT
I think you have Mutts confused with Red and Rover.
I want to stand up and say that, while I agree with many
of these, and while fbofw doesn’t need my defence,
I like Mutts. It’s a different sort of sense of humor than
the rest of the syndicated comics, and isn’t that what
we’re mostly complaining about?
I like Mark Trail. I just do.
I’m kind of liking James. Although it’s maybe just a Mutts
wannabe.
For years, “Mutts” got my vote as the worst comic. Poorly drawn, not funny, usually doesn’t make any sense. Then along came “James”. Damn thing looks like it was drawn on an Etch-A-Sketch. It’s not funny because it usually doesn’t have any words. That sounds really stoopid, but it’s true. There’s no dialog. But maybe that’s a good thing.
FWIW, I love FBORFW and Agnes. Agnes is so pathetic you have to like her.
I can identify with that. No matter how much I hate some of the comics, I always read them, especially Family Cirus (and the current repeat of their trip to New York City). I can’t help myself. It’s a horrible disease.
The one that I really wish would just go away and never return would be Close to Home. Horribly drawn, pathetically unfunny, and it features – hands down – the ugliest human beings to ever grace a printed page. The fact that this one-panel strip ever got approved by a syndicate tells me they have no sense of taste.
Runner up: Agnes. Poor white-trash girl living in a trailer park with her poor white-trash grandmother. It’s as exciting as it sounds.
Oh gods, Agnes. I take it as a point of personal pride that I actually called in to the Washington Post the very first day they did a test run of Agnes as a potential replacement for Liberty Meadows. And it worked - they dumped it at the end of the run.
Now if they’d tried replacing Apartment 3-G or something like that, I probably wouldn’t have paid it the slightest bit of attention. But don’t f*ck with Frank Cho.
Which is not to say the man doesn’t desperately need help with his storylines.