Favorite Daily Strip: Gotta be Robotman, especially the strips about Fleshy the hairless cat. Runner-ups: Zits is superb, the best new strip to come along in a long time. I really enjoyed Citizen Dog when I had access to it – not groundbreaking, but reliably funny. And Foxtrot is a consistent winner. I enjoy Boondocks sometimes, but I wouldn’t put it at either the top or the bottom of my list.
Favorite Weekly Strip (print): Ernie Pook, all the way.
Some of this is gonna be a little home town-esque but bear with me.
The best new strip I’ve seen in years is a local one here in DC called “Liberty Meadows”. It’s about the adventures at a wildlife sanctuary in Greenbelt, MD, just outside of DC. Frank Cho, who does the strip is a DC boy AND a fanboy. I can identify with him. Occasionally he departs from the normal ‘gag of the day’ thing to do extended stories about alternate universes and evil twins etc. When one of the characters died their last words were, “I would have liked to have seen Montana.” Either you get the ref or not. But it’s all like that.
Mutts I have always thought well of. I admit it sells the animal rescue theme heavily but who ever said an artist couldn’t sell his interests? I rescue Greyhounds (along with my wife) and I identify with the characters in Mutts strongly.
Boondocks I like (as well as Zits) but can easily them getting tired in the mode of Cathy and Momma and such in that the characters become so defined that they never grow or change.
I also like For Better or For Worse because of the actual lives the characters seem to be living. Approaching life with a quiet humor isn’t the worst approach for maintaining your sanity.
My favorite strips to read:
Zits - the one that makes me laugh the most often, and the author knows how to draw. Zits online
Mutts - I can see why people wouldn’t like it, it’s “cutesy” and the gags aren’t spectacular, but I love Patrick McDonnell’s drawings. I think he’s one of the best artists in the comics carried by the Los Angeles Times. You can see samples here: Mutts online
For Better or For Worse - As stated above, the characters have full, interesting and real lives, and sometimes it’s funny. Plus it’s one of the rare comic strips set in Canada (though most of the time canada-specific issues aren’t raised.) For Better or For Worse online
Some that have potential:
Boondocks - Funny, but too many pop culture references for my taste. The author’s grudge against George Lucas has run its course.
Over the Hedge - same as Boondocks, too many pop culture references. Can’t the animals do anything except eat twinkies and watch TV?
Rose is Rose - as in Mutts, I like the drawings, but the comic strip is much too sentimental for my taste.
ROSE IS ROSE has, unless I’m mistaken, exactly three jokes. 1) The Guardian Angel gets big. 2) Rose and her husband dwindle down to child size. 3) The garlic breath comes out like little skulls.
FOUR jokes…Rose turns into a biker chick every time she listens to rock music or puts cayenne in the chili or snorts heroin.
FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE would be enjoyable if the family’s lives were less tedious. Are Mike and Elizabeth BOTH virgins, at the (approximate) ages of 18 and 22? Can Dad lose his dental practice and degenerate into a spiral of alcoholism? Isn’t it time to execute another dog? Why do they keep a rabbit as a pet? Is this not illegal in Canada?
I love the concept behind THE BOONDOCKS, but the cartoonist doesn’t always follow through with the goods…the George Lucas stuff does stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the story lines. The strips which focus on the cool (though child-abusive) grandfather and half-white, half-black Jazzmine are the best ones, I think, although Jazzmine’s Buppie father can be funny (“Yeah, I played a little basketball at Harvard…”).
If we’re counting weekly comics from the alt-papers, I must again cite DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR as THE best continuity/humor strip of the past 20 years.
I’m actually fond of any older character, (except Mary Worth, of course). The wife in Pickles, the hag in Hagar, and even sour Crabby Road. Oh I wish Granny from Li’l Abner were back, someone with age and influence both.
Comics don’t have enough older folks, I guess because starting cartoonists are all young when the cast gets fixed. (Why is that? Grandma Moses started late)
And oldsters like comics. We didn’t have electricity, much less TV on the farms (remember farms? once 80% of Americans lived in farming towns.), so we grew up with them. And older people buy more newspapers per person, I’m sure. I get two, lots of kids just watch TV for news. Somebody is not on the ball here.
My mostest favoritist right now is the K Chronicles (found on Salon on line, among others: http://www.salon.com/comics/index.html). Needless to say the demise of Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes makes me sad. Foxtrot is consistently funny in a Calvin-lite sort of way, and For Better or Worse hasn’t taken up the cloying and simplistic moralising of a lot of family-sit-com strips (I suppose it’s a LESS moralising one. . .)
Has anyone ever seen Gahan Wilson’s drawings? Sort of like the Far Side but far, far sicker and more clever (although die-hard Far Side fans often can’t imagine such a thing).
Sterling: “Boondocks” got a lot of flack from the readers of the San Jose Mercury News, when it 1st came out there. mail was & is running 10-1 against. The writer responded by saying something like “a lot of people are not intelligent to understand my deep sarcasm, and some don’t like it because they don’t like to see a black oriented comic strip”. You can get & search the SJMN online if you want to find it. The “peppermint” thing would have been OK while Sparky was alive, but to do it as a “tribute” is simply sick. The main protagonists are all mean, and it is one of the few strips I would have to call blatantly racist. he had his characters say it’s alright to deface things & steal-IF you are black. I suppose that was sarcasm.
I wish so much that I liked Liberty Meadows. It’s set somewhere within walking distance of my apartment (since they frequently mention both Beltsville Agricultural Research Center and Goddard Space Flight Center). Occasionally some of the stuff about Frank’s mooning over Brandy is mildly funny, the way that Charlie Brown’s agony about the little red-haired girl was thirty-five years ago. The stuff about the animals though is an absolute insult to the name of humor. Why am I supposed to laugh at animals who act like drunken frat boys? It’s as unfunny as Cathy is most days.
The Boondocks is satirizing the attitudes of the two kids. The writer (Aaron McGruder) doesn’t agree with them. But that’s not what bothers me about the series. Within the first few weeks of the series, McGruder had already used up all the good jokes and is now just recycling them. Also, McGruder doesn’t know diddly-squat about living in the ghetto. He spent his entire childhood in Columbia, Maryland. That may be why the two kids are so one-dimensional.
I’ll have to vote with Koffing on at least one of the online comic strips…my family has all been fans of User Friendly pretty much since it began. http://www.userfriendly.org
…then Baby Blues is actually quite good. I had forgotten to mention this strip in my post. The scenes in the strip are almost too real for words. If you have no kids(yet), buy yourself a book as you raise your brood. Scary.
Wendell
I worked at the Meat Lab for USDA/Beltsville, 1960’s. Should I read the strip???
Clark, i’m with you on Mutts. but i have to agree with Lynn on Shermans Lagoon. I find the zen of Mutts to be… well… quite zen, and Shermans Lagoon is just a nice “normal” type of feel. Shoe seems to have the tao thing going for it. so my envelope contains the entries…
**Mutts
Shermans Lagoon
Shoe
**
too bad we can never have Bloom County again though. I feel a part of my life is lost since the demise of the strip.
Just FTR, I didn’t change my sig because of Liberty Meadows; I changed it because Mr. Rilch and I watched Hunt for Red October over the weekend. Odd coincidence.
I’ve long been an old fashiond kinda guy about comic strips, which is to say I get mine from black and white-ink-on-your-fingers newspapers. I grew up with Peanuts (my alltime fave) and Beetle Bailey (always good but beginning to repeat gags). Nowadays, I think Boondocks is great, and the Peppermint Patty/Marcie reference made me laugh out loud.
Alas,
I was reared on Bloom County, Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes. Nothing today can hold a candle to the “Big Three”.
For runner’s up:
Sherman’s Lagoon - I see so much of myself in Sherman
Baby Blues - 7 different strips on the fridge at once. Still the record at our house
Zits - The recent strip where he outgrew the shoes while trying them on reminded me of that time in the shoe store…
Losers:
Boondocks - When did such hate become OK in the “Educational” section
Cathy - When is enough of the same joke going to be enough?
Six Chix - A Washington Post newcomer. They took Kudzu off for this? The comics should be funny.
All “Soap strips” - The comics should be funny.
I read comics every once in a while - there is only one that makes me laugh out loud. True, I don’t laugh at every strip, but when I do laugh at if, I laugh so hard I almost cry…
ANyway the strip is “Tom the Dancing Bug”. I guess it’s not really a strip - it’s a fairly large rectangle-sized comic. Specifically, his “Super-Fun-Pak Comix” are incredible. The funniest thing I’ve ever seen there has got to be his “Dogma Comics” one. That kept me really amused for weeks. Read on http://www.salon.com
Red Meat is also good - and Life in Hell is occasionally great.
I really like Lynda Barry and Ernie Pook’s Comeek, even though our local weekly no longer carries it. I wrote Lynda a note a couple of years ago, and she wrote back and sent me some personalized book plates and an inscribed drawing. She rocks.
I also like The K Chronicles.
I agree with whomever said that Zits is like Calvin and Hobbes, which I loved. In fact, a lot of things about Zits remind me of Calvin, including the drawing style and the way things in the main character’s imagination appear to be real.
No, I don’t spend all my time reading the comics. Just time when I’m in class
IIRC, both are authored by the same guy, but they use a different illustrator.
“Zits’” illustrator, Jim Borgman, is a Pulitzer prize cartoonist who resides here in good ole Cincinnati, Ohio. He still does political cartoons in the Cincinnati Enquirer several times a week.
I agree, though, that Calvin & Hobbes, the Far Side, and Bloom County were all great.
