Oh, there’s plenty of material. Family Circus, Marmaduke, Blondie, Curtis, Red and Rover…I’d have to look at the Dallas Morning News for more, but those are just off the top of my head. Pastis has done several Family Circus parodies, I know that.
Monstera deliciosa writes:
> . . . I don’t see how these facts are vital . . .
Knowing more facts is always vital.
Yes, but not to the point of nitpicking things to death.
Back on topic: I wonder if The Onion will have Jean Teasdale lamenting the demise of Cathy, seeing how it’s her favorite comic strip.
(I too miss Calvin and Hobbes.)
Now, if we could only get rid of The Family Circus…
Cathy must have had an audience, but I’ll be damned if I could ever find one person to admit to it. That strip, along with For Better or Worse were the two worst strips for decades, and yet they continue this crapola.
Thank the heavens for Cathy’s demise. PLEASE don’t let the strip rerun through syndication. The fact they are doing that with For Better or Worse is bad enough.
Prince Valiant is still out there? I never understood who this comic appealed to.
Something that has always annoyed me is Guisewhite’s habit of jamming so much verbiage into the panels that there’s hardly any room for the artwork. It’s not funny - it’s just bad writing. You’d think with all the repeated “jokes” she would have learned to tighten it up, but in fact she got sloppier over time. Lazy.
The WORST strips? Do you not get Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke, and Family Circus? Blondie? Momma? Pluggers? I’d say that FBOFW and Cathy are/were…well, not BETTER, as that would imply that they are good. However, I’d say that Cathy and FBOFW don’t suck as much as the other comics I’ve mentioned.
There’s no excuse for Blondie, or Dennis the Menace, or Marmaduke still existing. Cathy falls into this category of comic, because the strips in all these comics are essentially the same from one year to the next. The writers do occasionally make token efforts to include new elements in the strips (Dennis the Menace included non WASP characters, and one of Dennis’ friends is actually a GIRL) but these strips have formulas, and apparently most of their fans LIKE reading the same jokes over and over.
Ha! You kids are too funny.
Oh, now you just wait a minute. I’m sure there’s some 67 year old retiree from Kankakee, IL somewhere who, in between knitting sweaters for her grandchildren and gardening, reads Cathy comics and finds them just darling!
Yeah, she should just give up on her children.
You know what I hate about Cathy? She had no nose, and then when she turns sideways suddenly the nose appears. Well is it there or is it not there? C’mon you can’t have it both ways.
Now the Family Circus ROCKS!!! You can have so much fun with the comic strip.
Cathy was a very funny strip. The word to focus on is WAS. If you read her early stuff, and you’re over 30 you’ll get it. It stopped being funny for me around 2000. But Peanuts stopped being funny as soon as Charles Schulz kids grew up.
The only consistantly funny strips I can think of were Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side and that is only because the creator knew when to quit while he was ahead.
I don’t really read it, but the local paper does run it and I do look at it. Even if the stories are slow and ponderous, the artwork is really good. Shoe is the same way in that the artwork is good, but the pacing is really bad.
Cathy managed to embody just about every single ugly stereotype about women.
She’s materialistic, obssessed to the point of lunacy about her body, incapable of managinging her finances, greedy, shallow and simply boring company. Perhaps once upon a time the comic had something important to say about the lives of women but that was a very long time ago.
I disagree. More facts are always good to have in a general sense; they aren’t always relevant to a particular discussion.
Knowing when Ms. Guisewite’s birthday falls, and whether she was 59 years, 11 months and 8 days old, or 60 years old, wasn’t relevant. Neither was the fact that her daughter was adopted as an infant, rather than her biological child.
To everyone else: Sorry for the hijack. I won’t continue it.
Yeps all around:
The strip introduced a few “truths” that comics hadn’t previously discussed, such as:
Serious problems with self-image
Binge eating
After those issues had been observed from a few dozen angles, there was no reason for the strip to continue.
The artwork was hideous. The characters were repulsive visually and personally. I don’t even like thinking about “Cathy”.
She wasn’t the greatest artist in the world but their are worse. I suppose she could’ve hired someone to draw Cathy better but I’m glad she didn’t. It’s too bad none of her earliest strips are in books, 'cause her drawings were really, really, really (did I mention really) bad when she first started.
She got a lot better.
Has this thread really gone this long discussing tired, unfunny comics that have been wearing the same lame jokes thin with repetition for years without any mention of Garfield?
And the hands.—the hands.
No detail at all, just blobs, with bumps that might be fingers,but of wildly different lengths…they look like they were drawn by a child in kindergarten .
I agree. I always found the strip incredibly misogynistic, especially astonishing for being written by a woman. Cathy embodied the absolute antithesis of any woman I would ever want to be involved with.
I’d ask for a link, but really I don’t want to see.
Another of the strip’s innovations was the love/repulsion relationship between daughter and mother.
I don’t think any comic had been so explicit about that social dynamic before. I’ve since noticed it in real-life many times, but Cathy was what stuck my nose in it originally and made me alert to it.
“Cathy” fulfilled a very important function. It allowed newspaper editors to argue that they already had a comic strip drawn by a woman, so there was no need to go looking for another for balance :rolleyes: (Also “Jumpstart” for a Black cartoonist and “Mallard Fillmore” for a conservative point of view, with “Jumpstart” being the odd one out here as it is sometimes actually funny.)
If you’re looking for a funny strip drawn by a woman and with a feminist point of view, I recommend “Stone Soup”.
“The Onion” notes Cathy’s demise:
I have to agree, and its sad. Cathy was a pretty bad strip IMO, and I have never met anyone who actually liked it. Surely they exist, but I’ve never encountered them.
I hope that the space left behind from Cathy’s departure will be filled with a strip thats actually funny.