Are there any updates at all as to why we’ve been tortured with 4 years of reruns of Get fuzzy? Has Darby Conley gone off his nut, or does he have health problems or what? The strip is now boring and predictable as I’ve already goddamned read them 16 times! :mad:
Meanwhile my local rag dropped certain strips in favor of unfunny slop like “Mister Boffo” "Ziggy’ and the “Family Circus”.
What helps a paper decide what strip it carries? I’m thinking money but have no evidence to back up my theory. How much do papers pay to run a strip? They better be getting paid to run “Family circus”. It was never funny and stopped being cute 40 freaking years ago!
While it is true to form in its unfunniness, I thought today’s Family Circus was at least quite interesting in its negative portrayal of the kids. That’s some serious bad sportsmanship all around. Jeffy is just being an asshole, and Billy is seriously pissed off. Dolly is in tears over a fucking game of Candyland. Even the Dog looks unhappy. But just look at that expression on Billy’s face. I didn’t think the minimalist style of the Keanes’ art could accommodate the portrayal of such smoldering hate.
That’s one seriously intense strip, for Family Circus!
My own favorite is, and has been for years, Tumbleweeds. The immense cast of characters is astonishing. I used to think that Pogo had a lot of characters, but Tumbleweeds outdoes Pogo by nearly an order of magnitude. I’m still learning the names of characters!
Tumbleweeds went into a serious decline, some decades ago. It stopped being funny, and it stopped being fun. But something truly wonderful happened: it pulled out of the tailspin and got good again! I do not know exactly what happened, but my guess is that Tom K. Ryan took on a staff of assistants. Whatever the reason, the strip is, even today, one of the funniest of them all. Yes, sure, it depends on formula too often, but at least once a week, it busts out of the mold and gob-smacks me with a laugh that is usually from some wholly unexpected direction.
I stopped buying the paper years ago. I’d probably start again just for the comic strips if they were better. I really like Lio but I’ve never seen it in the paper.
Rex Morgan, Family Circus, Garfield, Peanuts, and others need to make room for newer, funnier, and better drawn comic strips.
When I was in high school, our local paper solicited comments about the comics page to see what people liked or didn’t like. My brother sent them a letter telling them how unfunny “Andy Capp” was; they printed his letter, alongside a letter from an old geezer who claimed that “Andy Capp” was the only funny comic they had. Chacun a son gout.
Get Fuzzy is reruns? I had no idea. I read it every day and love it, and I’ve been reading it for at least 5 years, and either I have a terrible memory or we haven’t gotten to the reruns.
And yes, I am easily amused. Yesterday’s Fuzzy for example, when Bucky and Satchel are talking past each other. Made me giggle.
I know a rl Bucky. He was an LJ friend named Gobo. Same personality. He’d post some demented essay or comic strip, proclaim it the best work ever, and get angry when flaws were pointed out. He’d do his best to discredit me online if I criticized him, which I often did because I liked to push his buttons.
I only read a few. Bizarro is usually good, and the art is amazing. I often laugh at Rubes and Non Sequitur, and Pearls Before Swine has its moments. I enjoyed Get Fuzzy for quite awhile, but now it’s dead to me. And I admit a guilty pleasure in Garfield. I don’t bother with the rest.
Once a month the old editor of the Buffalo News wrote a article saying what was going on at the paper. She said the letters and calls to the paper about the most controversial subjects were dwarfed by any changes to the comics.