Okay, I haven’t read Tumbleweeds in a while, but I have to ask, what’s the big deal with the portrayal of the indians/Native Americans? Sure, they’re shown as bumbling, inept, clueless dolts, but that’s the same depiction for everyone else in the strip. It’s not (IIRC, anyway) as if all the indians were bloodthirsty savages and all the cowboys were noble and heroic.
(And call me crazy, but I sorta like the funk-ass angular look the strip has.)
Best news I’ve heard in months.
I’ll put in another vote for Boondocks. You can tell the writer revels in being controversial, to the exclusion of all else. It’s enough for him that people get riled up by his cartoons, and he doesn’t seem to care if they’re funny or not. If you look at a lot of younger cartoonists’ work, they all have the feel and pacing of 80’s Doonesbury or Bloom County strips, so you feel like they SHOULD be funny, they just… aren’t… really.
Liberty Meadows was like this, too.
I will cast one grain-of-salt vote against the removal of Family Circus. I won’t go to the ends of the earth to defend this strip, because it isn’t now, and has never been, funny, but think about all the storytelling conventions and iconography that this strip has created over 40 years! Not Me, the tailless balloons to show the children’s chatter, Billy’s dotted line through the neighborhood, the ghosts of grandparents, Billy (age 8) filling in for Dad on certain days, etc. I also think that post-Calvin and Hobbes, it’s possibly the most technically well drawn and well-colored (on Sunday) strips out there. And I find the strip to be so bland and inoffensive that I really don’t see what would cause such a big uproar. C’mon, just read the same joke he’s always given us, and move on to the next strip!
–Z
Bit of Trivia: Glen Keane, Bil Keane’s son and the model for Billy, is now a very well respected animator (he was the head character animator for Disney’s Tarzan). I bet he sees the badly-drawn Billy (age 8) strips and thinks, “Screw you, dad, I can draw better than you can”.
Zippy the Pinhead
Kill . . . It . . . Now!!!
You don’t think Aaron Magruder wants Boondocks to be funny? I think he cares very much - he’s not just making some tired point about how blacks and whites are Different. In fact, what makes his stuff good is the irony that’s involved - he’ll have characters spout off about something unseemly that African Americans do or are doing (well, specific people), rather than pretending that all African Americans are Nice Folk and it’s just The Man who’s keeping them all down. I think he does a good job of smacking around the dumb people from any and all races, and that’s what makes it funny.
Heck, look at the Grandpa character. Huey was just making fun of him the other week or so because his granpa kept putting “the” in front of diseases (like “I got the SARS”) for no particular reason. I don’t know if this is something that’s typical of some African Americans or not, but I know I’ve seen this phenomenon before.
It’s always the little things in life that are funny. The big things we all know about and are used to. The little things, the tiny everyday occurrences we all share, can be quite amusing. Magruder just applies that theory to current events.
God, where to start.
Doonesbury for one. It used to be funny and relevant. During the Nixon administration. It has been neither since the 80s.
BC used to at least be mildly amusing…now Hart has laid the religious preaching on so thick that it’s just something I don’t read.
Cathy was never funny.
All the soap opera strips from the 50s need to die.
Snuffy Smith hasn’t been funny since the Dukes of Hazzard was cancelled.
Personally, I think we should kill all the post-Far Side single panel gag strips. None of them are ever in the least bit funny save for Bizarro which is intermittently amusing, but not often enough to avoid the axe in my opinion.
dantheman-- I’ll defer to you on Boondocks if you like, since I haven’t read it in a while, but the points you make seem to support Boondocks being relevant social satire rather than a good comic strip. I’ll acknowledge that McGruder has had an odd funny strip here and there, but I lump most of it in with “I have a point, and here’s either something that sounds like a punchline, or someone yelling. Now, LAUGH.”
Wellllll… there’s a fine line, sometimes, between social satire and a comic strip. Strictly speaking, there are a lot of strips on the comics page that aren’t comics. At least Boondocks is supposed to be funny, even if it’s the wink-wink variety. That is, it’s not one of those dopey soap opera strips that’s only on the page to appease 75-year old fuddy-duddies that grew up listening to the old Victrola and sipping their Country Time Lemonade.
Not that I’m generalizing.
How is it that I’ve only seen one mention of Gil Thorpe here? Make it end! Please! It’s not funny, it’s not even entertaining, and IIRC, the author is one of the guys who writes the Tribulation Force books.
(Along with Prince Valiant, Mark Trail, Family Circus, Kathy, Marmaduke, and Sally Forth.)
Personally, I’ve thought about a good thing with the B.C. strips that deal with religion:
It forces Hart to actually draw a “comic” strip.
I’ve grown under the impression that Hart has some stock drawing that he did in the 1960’s and 1970’s, that he’s been repeating over and over again (look at the “dictionary definition” strips, for instance).
Meka Leka Hi Meka Hiney Ho, another vote here for ‘Fred Basset’, it’s screamingly unfunny.
I’d say ‘The Gambols’ if it wasn’t already gone. That was good for quite a while, but then they just cycled the same stories every single year.
Cathy - the only thing worse than the strip was watching her turn up on The Tonight Show all the time and flirt with Johnny Carson.
Family Circus - seems a waste of effort to kill it since Bil Keane will probably keel over soon or finish going senile and they’ll have to end it anyway. Besides, I enjoy playing the “crosshairs” game with it.
Jump Start - it should just be broken up into four different strips, since there are so many bland characters and the family is together so little in it now. Joe and Crunchy’s cop on the beat stuff, the wife’s (un)wacky hospital antics, the Sunny’s fights with her hair and “shock” at her past selves, and the stupid preschool kiddie “yuppies” stuff. I was never a fan of the strip, but once it took the “family” turn and the “Joe lusts for an SUV” strips it was all over.
Hi & Lois - By now Chip should be shooting heroin in his eyeballs (probably why he wears the cap over them) during his jam session with his band. The baby should have died of skin cancer from lying in the sun so long. Hi should have run run off with the wife of his lazy drunk neighbor/buddy (since she’s obvious not getting any from her husband) after figuring out how much of a nag Lois is. The little boy should be in a diabetic coma from cookie stealing, the girl should be a police snitch, and Lois and the garbage men should be running a meth lab out of the garage.
Blondie - just kill it off already. Blondie may have a catering business now, but the strip is still stuck in the Eisenhower era. Besides, I’m troubled by attraction to Herb wife, anime babes I’m okay with, but not this.
Beetle Bailey - to paraphrase Jimmy James on Newsradio, “I quit reading Beetle Bailey when I figured out nobody was going to get killed.” The only changes I can see from the occasional glances at it are that pointless tech guy (“Sparks”?, “Gizmo”?) and Lt. Fuzz’s hair is only 20 years out of date instead of 30now. But his old afro would almost be back in style now.
Herman - Aw. How nice they let someone draw a strip while having the D.T.'s.
Zits - I know some people like it, but I have yet to see why. For some reason it reminds me of that 80s SNL sketch “The Whiners”.
Wizard of Id, B.C., Garfield, Frank and Ernest, Hagar, and most everything else I see in the paper should go because they have been on auto-pilot for so long it wouldn’t matter now anyway.
Boondocks I like, Born Loser I can’t hate for some reason. Dilbert is on life support. Peanuts can stay because I like the reruns (Hell, they’ve apparently been running reruns of Henry for 20 years, at least Peanuts was good). I didn’t know Tumbleweeds was still around, but I still like the art, even though that website in the link was painfully unfunny as were the recent strips I looked at.
I think it’s because a lot of people my age identify with it, it reflects the feelings, words and actions that happen to most teenagers. I find it funny, because the humor is set for someone with my perspective, just like Dilbert is probably more funny to those who are in jobs like Dilberts. It’s a demographic thing.
Very astute point, Aslan2. Zits rocks - Jeremy is my younger brother.
Gasoline Alley used to be considered remarkable because it was a comic strip that allowed its characters to grow and age and change. But the world in which they live their lives does not grow or age or change. It’s like the whole town is stuck in the 1940s. How many modern, real-life proles or hillbillies are anything like Joel and Rufus and Melba?
Of course, I have not seen Gasoline Alley in years. That’s just what I remember. I don’t even know if the strip is still around. My local papers don’t carry it.
My brother collects Garfield books, and I’ve read through a few of them. Jim Davis has actually used the same joke more than once. The one I remember in particular was about Garfield having a cold, and he points up to the little bubble and says something like, “Look, eben my thoughts are stubbed up!” or something stupid like that.
The Saturday morning cartoon was funny, but the comic strip no longer is, if it ever was. Please put that stupid 26-year-old cat to bed.
According to my ArcaMax “The Human Factor - Living Today for You” newsletter of today, this is what Garfield and Jim Davis are about:
I like Garfield, but it has perhaps grown a bit old.
F_X
Perhaps? Ya think?
A lot of worthy choices, but one has been overlooked. It appears in the crappy Parade magazine tucked in with many Sunday papers. I refer of course to “Howard Huge” and it’s neighbored untitled comics. These comics go beyond not being funny into an area whereby they actually make me angry simply because they exist.
Even though I rarely read a Sunday paper anymore, I know those single panel assaults are out there, lading the world with a karmic debt such as all our collective goodness can never hope to repay.