If you could take one comic strip outta the paper forever...

[dantheman]

Ah yes, Sally Forth, champion of the wry look. There’s a wry look in every final panel. Sometimes you get lucky with a twofer. It’s a pitiful strip.

[snac]

TeaRoses, yes, Jeff MacNelly died some months back. The strip continues, however, with other people carrying on much as MacNelly would have.

If Sylvia is still in the newspaper (you see how out of touch I am), it would have to get my vote. Poorly drawn, difficult to read, and never, ever funny.

However, if not Sylvia, then Garfield, Family Circus, BC, Mallard Fillmore, or you pick one of the serials.

I like these comics surveys. I’d guess that about one-fifth of my posts have been to polls just like this one. Wonder if my answers ever change much?

[NDP]

I’m tempted to add myself to the list that wants to banish Mallard Fillmore from the funny pages, but I know that if they ever do that, it will confirm to many people the existence of a vast left wing conspiracy on the part of the media to stifle the voices of all good, flag-waving, God-fearing, real Americans. (Not that I necessarily care what they think but their whining will get to be too much.)

I say put The Wizard of Id out of its misery. It used to be funny but now it’s a pitiful and badly drawn shadow of itself.

Finally, if I may go slightly OT, I think the fact that Peanuts is still run in many papers is proof of the decline of the comics. When Peanuts ended its run three years ago, it was one of the few “big” strips left in terms of popularity (e.g., on Sunday, newspapers usually gave it the most prominent position on the top of the front comic page). However, aside from Dilbert, no other strip has emerged in the last ten years to take its place in terms of popularity. Granted, there are still a number of “big” strips like Garfield or Doonesbury left but they are almost all more than 20 years old. I think it’s because the comics don’t seem to be as big a part of our pop culture as they used to be. To cut expenses, space and panels have shrunk noticeably in the last 40 years. Also, whereas in the past, the Sunday comic section used to be the top page, it’s now buried deep within the newspaper and is often covered up by ads that have to be literally torn away in order to read it (at least it is in my city).

[Mirror_Image_egamI_rorriM]

Eve, it still runs in the Kansas City Star.

However, Basil never shows up now, and she never seems to go to work, either. It’s all just soap opera stories, now.

[tarnik]

They can’t take Family Circus…I revel in its horrid, repetitive pointlessness.

Andy Capp, Beatle Bailey, and you know, Garfield does suck.

[shy_guy]

First I’ll chime in with the usual - Family Circus, Peanuts, Beetle Baily, B.C., Curtis, and Marmaduke. I hate them all to varying degrees.

However, I don’t think anyone so far has mentioned Jump Start. This strip Is. Not. Funny. At all. Ever. It’s like someone invented a “utterly lame jokes” machine and taught it to draw incredibly generic, boring pictures to go along with them. I can’t believe my local paper has this garbage in it when it could be printing Boondocks (which, even when it sucks, can at least be different from the rest of the comics).

The jokes in Jump Start are as bad as the ones in, say, Heathcliff (which I like for absolutely no reason) or Marmaduke, but the strip has the audacity to take up more than one panel. A pox on thee, Jump Start!

[Calliope]

Beetle Bailey and Marvin have just never been funny. I agree with everyone who mentioned Garfield, B.C. and Family Circus. Ugh. And FTR, Nermal is not a cute kitten–he’s annoying.

[Already_in_Use]

*Originally posted by shy guy *
**The jokes in Jump Start are as bad as the ones in, say, Heathcliff (which I like for absolutely no reason) or Marmaduke, but the strip has the audacity to take up more than one panel. A pox on thee, Jump Start! **

Have you ever seen a Sunday Marmaduke? Imagine the same lame joke, with maybe eight or nine panels of badly-drawn filler preceding it. With a consistently unfunny reader-submitted “Dog-Gone Funny!” story at the end that acts as the proverbial maggot in the steaming heap of Great Dane poo.

And a pox on those of you who don’t like Rex Morgan. It’s not like I ever know what’s going on in that strip, but the style of the artwork combined with the cheesy dialogue (“Cheerleading is serious business, Heather… It prepares you for life!”) create a final product worthy of Roy Lichtenstein. It’s so perfect that it must be intentional.

[Chimera]

If elected, I promise to wage an aggressive campaign to erase Cathy from the pages of history.

This includes retroactively altering microfiche and off-site electronic backups to remove it from the records.

All copies of the strip - in any form - will be destroyed.

The Cartoonist will be sent to a North Korean re-education camp.

Then, one by one, each of you shall report to have it erased from your memories.

[IGJoe]

What? No one’s mentioned Archie yet???

Every once in a while, I’ll have a soft moment, and give it a read… I always regret it immediatly after. I always feel slightly stupider for having read it.

Family Circus is more annoying than rage-inspiring.
B.C. and Cathy mostly suck, but theyhave their moments.

[IGJoe]

What? No one’s mentioned Archie yet???

Every once in a while, I’ll have a soft moment, and give it a read… I always regret it immediatly after. I always feel slightly stupider for having read it.

Family Circus is more annoying than rage-inspiring.
B.C. and Cathy mostly suck, but theyhave their moments.

[Ruiniform]

I think giving me this power is a dangerous thing-- I’d give hafl the damn funny pages the axe.

Top Secret-- An absolutely horrible one-panel that ran in the Boston Globe for a fairly short while. Its idea of humor was to show a child mounted on a cattle with the caption “cowboy”. Needless to say, I haven’t shed any tears over its absence.

Mallard Fillmore-- As others previously said, it’s not just that I oppose its extreme conservative bent, but damn, it makes all the smart conservatives look bad.

Get Fuzzy-- I know this is controversial, but I really cannot stand the strip. It’s like Garfield with an attitude problem, only tricky, because at first the joke seems complex, but then you just realize it’s some really bad play on words. It wouldn’t be so horrible if so many people didn’t think it was funny.

Garfield-- Just boring.

Zippy-- What the hell is this? I guess I’m on a lower plane of existence, because I’ve never been able to extract a single joke out of it. Is there even anyone who pretends to understand this comic?

Adam-- Not a really bad offender, just incredibly mundane. The jokes are boring, and nothing interesting ever happens.

comics in the Globe that aren’t really bad per se, but I certainly wouldn’t miss: Mister Boffo, Jump Start, For Better Or For Worse, Arlo and Janis, Heart of the City, Sylvia, and others.

comics in the Globe worth their salt: The Boondocks, Foxtrot, Non Sequitur, Doonesbury, Rose Is Rose (I don’t know why I like this…it’s really nicely drawn and it’s ‘cute’ but not in a cloying way), Rhymes With Orange, Zits
.

[Aslan_of_Narnia]

*Originally posted by DrDeth *
**

Boondocks. Some seem to like this, but I think it is just plain mean. Besides the writer is such as asshole- he once commented that if you don’t like his strip you are either a racist or stupid (as you don’t “get” his “subtle satire” :rolleyes: ). =2

**

Judging from the satirical nature and the type of humor found in that strip, he was probably kidding.

[RobuSensei]

In the past twenty or so years, I have laughed at a Garfield strip exactly once. (“I’m drowning in boredom, and you’re handing me anchors”) I recall seeing a TV special where Jim Davis seemed to be showing great pride in how little he was involved in producing the daily strip.

For some info on B.C. and Jonny Hart’s converting it into an organ for the propagation of fundamentalist Christian ideas, look here.

[dantheman]

Very interesting article. World’s gonna end in 2010, eh Johnny? Cool.

[FriarTed]

I like B.C. even when I think the Christian stuff gets heavy-handed- why? because it tempt & sometimes provokes “open-minded inclusive” newspaper editors to commit censorship G

and hey, Mayor Richard Wilkins likes FAMILY CIRCUS! it can’t be all bad!

[dantheman]

“Johnny is the most controversial person on the comics pages,” says Richard S. Newcombe, president of Creators Syndicate, which distributes “B.C.” “Johnny is also the most courageous person on the comics pages. To be outspoken on the subject of Christianity is exposing yourself to ridicule. It’s easy to mock the religious believer.”

Depending on your newspaper, Doonesbury is a lot more controversial. B.C. ain’t even close.

But here’s the best part:

God, That’s Funny Until He Started Drawing Cartoons About Jesus.

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By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 4, 1999; Page F01
In the beginning, the creator made the Heaven and the Earth.

And the Earth was without form. It was a straight line.

And the firmament looked like this.

And the creator brought forth the winged fowl and the fishes of the sea and the beasts of the field and the creatures that creepeth on the land. The snake felt unloved. The anteater was ashamed because it ate ants. Clams talked. Flowers talked. Rocks talked. The dinosaur said “Gronk.”

And the creator made man. Man needed a shave.

And he made woman. He called her The Fat Broad.

And it was good.

Man, it was good. When Johnny Hart’s “B.C.” hit the comics pages in February 1958, it was an instant sensation. For the fuddy-duddy '50s, “B.C.” was edgy. The squat little troglodytes pondered existential questions. They revealed themselves to be thickheaded, fearful, lustful, prideful, stubborn, duplicitous . . . in short, thoroughly human. “B.C.” was your basic cartoon about men, women and animals, but with an irresistible twist. Hart had reinvented the wheel.

Four decades later, Johnny Hart is still drawing “B.C.” He also collaborates on “The Wizard of Id,” a strip set in medieval times. Each appears in more than 1,200 newspapers worldwide, which reach almost 100 million readers. There are a few strips with slightly fatter circulation – “Peanuts,” “Blondie” and “Garfield,” for example – but only Hart has two bestsellers, and taken together, they far outnumber any of the others. Which means, in a sense, that he is the most widely read writer on Earth.

Everyone loves Johnny Hart. Or did, until recently. Hart is suddenly controversial.

“B.C.” was never exactly P.C. The Fat Broad wasn’t designed to please women. The Wizard’s world has dungeons and torture; peasants are routinely hanged. But no one complains.

Then, one Easter Sunday a few years ago, Johnny Hart started drawing Christian themes into some of his “B.C.” cartoons. These cartoons – which tend to run around religious holidays – are about peace, love and charity. But mostly, they are about Jesus as Lord and Savior and the only messenger of Truth. They cite Scripture, sometimes literally chapter and verse.

People reacted.

It turns out, Americans feel strongly about their comics page. A little torture is one thing.

But Jesus Christ?

That’s when all hell broke loose.

The Washington Post still carries “B.C.” Monday through Saturday, but if you leaf through the comics section today, you won’t find it. Several months ago The Post dropped “B.C.” from the color Sunday comics, because Sunday is the day Hart’s religious cartoons most frequently appear. The file of reader complaints on the strip is as thick as a stone tablet. Some Jews were offended. Some Muslims were offended. Some secular liberals were appalled.

For similar reasons, the Chicago Sun-Times dropped the strip entirely – daily and Sunday. Other papers, such as the Denver Post and the Los Angeles Times, have asked to be warned when one of the Jesus strips is to run, so they have the option of killing it and substituting something else. Sometimes, they do. Five times in the past year alone, The Washington Post has yanked daily “B.C.” strips because of their religious content.

Hart won’t go broke. He’s an institution. When the Chicago Sun-Times dropped him, the Chicago Tribune gleefully picked him up. But the fact is, he is taking a risk with his reputation.

Religion is not entirely absent from the comics pages. Bil Keane’s “Family Circus,” for example, is sometimes set in church. A berobed Grandpa is sometimes seen beaming at his cute-as-a-button grandkids from his perch up on the clouds in Heaven. But the message is safely nonsectarian, and dippy enough to alienate no one.

Hart’s religious strips are nothing like that. They aren’t namby-pamby. They are unabashedly evangelistic. Appearing on pages otherwise known for gentle whimsy, these strips sometimes seem to hit like a caveman’s club to the head.

For example, the one below ran in 1995:

These religious cartoons are usually clever. They are often funny, but not always. From time to time, the intensity of the message seems to extinguish the humor, such as the one that appeared on the Friday of Easter week 1996. To many, it seemed inscrutable.

The cartoon was simply four empty panels, with no art. The first panel was gray. The second was darker. The third was darker still. And the last was completely black. That final panel carried the caption: Good Friday.

And last year, around Easter, Hart drew this one:

The citations were to Christ’s agony on the cross. The Post did not run it.

All of which raises two questions:

Why is Johnny Hart doing this if it gets people so riled?

And:

Why does it get people so riled?

“Johnny is the most controversial person on the comics pages,” says Richard S. Newcombe, president of Creators Syndicate, which distributes “B.C.” “Johnny is also the most courageous person on the comics pages. To be outspoken on the subject of Christianity is exposing yourself to ridicule. It’s easy to mock the religious believer.”

Newcombe says the cartoons are inventive and thought-provoking and he has encouraged Hart to continue them despite objections from some newspaper editors. Every time one runs, he says, the syndicate gets hundreds of letters. Some are critical, but most, he says, are from approving Christians.

To understand why Hart does it, Newcombe says, you have to meet Johnny: He is humble and filled with love.

Johnny Hart has been talking amiably for six hours. His voice is gentle, almost timid.

He says:

Jews and Muslims who don’t accept Jesus will burn in Hell.

Homosexuality is the handiwork of Satan.

America was founded as a Christian nation, and should remain one. The country’s moral decline began the day that prayer in the public schools was outlawed.

Angels travel at the speed of thought. Some are the lackeys and stooges of the Devil, and they whisper temptations in our ears.

God probably engineered the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin as punishment for trying to give away holy land in violation of biblical commands.

The end of the world is approaching, maybe by the year 2010.

And:

Johnny Hart is going straight to Heaven.

That’s not “controversial.” That’s bordering on hatred.

[dantheman]

Yikes! I didn’t mean to paste the whole dadblasted thing!

can’teditcan’teditcan’tedit

[BrotherCadfael]

If they’re going to rerun Peanuts, why can’t they rerun the strips from back when it was actually good, pre-1970?

[Nutty_Bunny]

*Originally posted by RealityChuck *
[B Totally unfunny (oddly enough, by Joe Martin, who does the excellent Mr. Boffo). However, due to a poll (and my comments, which were quoted), the local newpaper pulled it a month ago. **

I was wondering which one the Gazette took out. I suppose if I could never figure out which one was missing, then I wasn’t missing it.

Didn’t they also have Nancy? I haven’t read the comics in a couple of months, so maybe I’m mixing it up with some other paper.

Anyway, that would be my vote…Nancy. (Admins, we still need that puke smiley!) That “comic” is so unfunny, that it makes me angry that I lost the 3 seconds of my life that it took to read it. :mad: