A lot of them blow chunks, but I still read the Comics section on occasion because 1) Hey, I’m reading the newspaper I’m a real sophisticate! and 2) there’s a couple in there with a decent track record of making me crack a smile.
To echo everyone else (and, I’m sure, many future posts in this thread), I haven’t laughed much at the comics page since Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side ended. Dilbert can be chuckle-funny. Mutts can be cute, but tooooooo much sometimes. Everything else in my paper (SF Chronicle) is bad at best.
Robotman used to make me laugh. I think it’s called Monty now. Our newspaper stopped carrying it - I theorise it’s because it was funny. Either it was making all the others look bad (worse), or they just didn’t want people reading their newspaper and laughing.
That was part of the appeal when I was a kid. I could be reading The Paper Like a Grwon-up, when actually I was reading the cartoons. Then I progressed to the political cartoons, then to the columns, then to the headlines.
It’s not the cartoons that have deteriorated; you’re all just growing up, that’s the problem.
Monty is still pretty funny, occasionally. They got rid of Robotman, but replaced him with a series of other “aliens”, for that fish-out-of-water and my-you-humans-are-strange feeling.
That’s just including American comics that are syndicated to newspapers - not including several good online comics, or the Holy Trinity of Norwegian Comics (Pondus, Nemi, Kollektivet). The problem isn’t with the comics, mostly, it’s with the newspapers. They cut strips to save money, and keep the ones that generate the most letters to the editor when cancelled, which tend to be the ones everybody grew up reading (Blondie, Hagar, Fred Basset…). No matter that they ran out of creativity during the Johnson Administration, and that most have outlived their creators; it’s what “the public” wants.
Some of them are certainly funny. Pearls Before Swine, Get Fuzzy, Mother Goose and Grimm (sometimes), and sometimes Dilbert. Sherman’s Lagoon has its moments as well.