What’s the deal with Bucky terrifying Satchel by sneaking up and crying, “Booger”?
As a young pup, Satchel was frightened by Dr. Johnny Fever.
I’m confident it will be answered by the end of the week. Or for a more in depth answer to ‘why’, I’m just guessing here, but Conley is getting bored, lazy, or just kicked off some easy ones so he could take time off from the strip.
Bucky is gaslighting Satchel.
I believe in the comments someone mentioned that this series has run before.
Whether or not there’s any significance to it, this strikes me as exactly the kind of thing kids might do to terrorize their siblings.
(It also, like much of Get Fuzzy, strikes me as something that would work better in an animated cartoon than in a newspaper comic strip.)
Get Fuzzy has been mostly in reruns for the past year or so, with no announcement as to why, or if or when it will resume. The current “booger” strips are from 2006.
Wikipedia says:
I used to like it, but have gradually mostly moved on.
I assumed it was a variation of this.
I thought I recognized some reruns.
My primary paper carries what is obviously a packaged two-page layout (they get all their boilerplate stuff like weather from Fox) and that means there are now at least four rerun/archive strips in the mix: Peanuts, For Better or For Worse, Doonesbury and Get Fuzzy. I mean, fa chrissakes, I REMEMBER most of the archive strips from first run.
I also subscribe to a long list on Go Comics, and there are so many fresh, witty strips out there that there is no reason to keep carrying these zombies… except that most newspapers no longer run themselves, they are zombies themselves run by central agencies and packaging bureaus.
The Washington Post dropped GF last year because of the increasingly frequent reruns.
Having written a column and worked on magazine deadlines, I can understand how a cartoonist would burn out. I can also understand how it might take a while to let go, so the vacations turn to sabbaticals and the sabbaticals to absences, and the reruns build and build before the strip is either dropped by the syndicate or the artist throws in the towel.
I don’t recall such a practice being so common before the last decade or so - it was a huge deal the first couple of times Trudeau took a break and now many cartoonists seem to work teacher’s schedules. They should move on and let the fresh new kids have a shot. I don’t want to read A Get Fuzzy or Doones… I want to read a new one or something else new. I sure as hell don’t want to see any more goddamned Peanuts or FBOFW!
I stopped following it because the guy has absolutely no sense of comic timing-he tries to cram far too much into most every panel, which doesn’t let the gags breathe. If you compare that to a master of comic timing like Watterson or Schultz, there’s no comparison.
My list of readable comics is becoming short indeed. If GF disappears, that leaves Pearls Before Swine (which tends to repeat itself), Bizarro, Non Sequitur (but only the single panel ones), Wumo (which is hit or miss), Rubes, and Rhymes With Orange (which often misses the mark). For some reason, I still find Garfield to be amusing. The funnies become less so with each passing year.
OTOH, the… ambience of GF is so peculiar that it’s a good read even on its most humor-light, structure-heavy days. I am sorry Conley appears to be burning out. I keep seeing Satchel sitting in a very dimly lit room, softly calling out, “Guys?” every few panels, forever.
I learned to loathe GarXerox early on, and was validated when Jim Davis finally admitted that (1) he started off with one day on drawing and five days on marketing each week (2) deliberately chose to be predictable rather than funny and (3) turned all but executive cartooning over to a team very early on. The absolute antithesis of what a comic strip should be.
Bill Griffith has managed with Zippy, as peculiar a taste as that strip can be.
Have you poked into GoGomics.com? You can build your own funny page and have it emailed to you for something like $9 a year.
The thing I like about Get Fuzzy is that, despite them talking, the animals are animals, and not just people in fuzzy suits. Bucky behaves like a cat, or at least like a cat would if it could talk. Satchel behaves like a dog. Yeah, the people-in-fuzzy-suits approach can be funny, as evidenced by Pearls Before Swine, but that’s what they all do. Seeing the other approach is refreshing.
This hits the mark for me. I want to like GF, and I often appreciate the humor when I make the investment to read it all. But that’s the problem - it always feels like an investment to me, like I have to really settle in to plow through the whole strip. And it’s not quite good enough to make me do that on a regular basis.
(And thanks to Amateur Barbarian for the GoComics tip.)
OMG, Zippy still exists? I haven’t read Zippy since grad school! I still call my cleanroom bunny suit a “Zippy suit”.
Dayton,Ohio’s newspaper has dropped GF as well:http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/entertainment/red-and-rover-to-appear-daily/nd4rD/
So has Topeka,Kansas:Tomari Quinn: Seriously, we're adding five comics to daily Capital-Journal