Close to Home wins the prize, for being consistently unfunny and terribly drawn. Cardinal sin of a comic strip, IMO.
Runner-up: Marmaduke, simply because if I had a big dog that caused that much trouble, I’d have done the simple thing and had him put to sleep eons ago.
Wow, I’m outnumbered here. I love Cathy, Garfield, Close to Home, and Wizard of Id. And I don’t mind Family Circus at all.
Ones I’m not fond of:
Marmaduke
Ziggy
Doonesbury
Funky Winkerbean (sp?)
Gasoline Alley
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Lizard *
**
FTR, Jeff MacNelly, author of Shoe (and I disagree with you on that strip; it’s consistently one of my favorites) died last year. So, either someone else is drawing Shoe, in which case it can never be better and which is an unforgiveable sin in my book, or they’re re-running old strips, a la Peanuts.
sigh I miss Jeff MacNelly.
Robin
Andy Capp. Good grief. I think the “nitpicking wife and husband who goes to the bar to escape her” type of thing got old a long time ago.
Please tell me that this is the strip I’m thinking of, with the large wife and the guy in the stupid hat that falls over his eyes? I’ve had some trouble I.D.-ing characters lately.
I second everything said in this thread so far (or at least about all the strips that I have seen myself.) I especially dislike Garfield, probably because of all the cutesy fan product success (i.e. despite being total crap. I don’t mind other fan products per se.) And despite its popularity I’ve never seen it in the papers without feeling a bit queasy afterwards.
In fact, I’ve noticed that about 95% of all newspaper comics are complete crap. I’ve forced myself to read all of them on occasion, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything good, and I wasn’t!
Oh Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County… Where have all the good comics gone???
The magic Triumverate also includes The Far Side, proving that the '80’s weren’t all bad.
Frankly, I’m sort of glad the above guys retired. The Far Side was starting to become too self-referential and from what I’ve read of Watterson and Breathed, they were becoming tired, too. I can’t imagine a world in which Gary Larson is still plugging out Far Sides years after he runs out of ideas. (Check out some old Family Circus or BC books sometime. These strips used to be funny and relevant.)
Bil Keane’s son Jeff (aka Jeffy) is preparing to take over The Family Circus. The art is different now (rounder heads, different eyes). The writing is incomprehensible. What used to be glurgy, smarmy, “chicken-soup-keeps-the-soul-wher-it-is” is, anymore, downright surreal. Today, PJ fell off a basketball and is lying on the floor in what strikes me as a sort of neo-fetal position. Dolly says “I told PJ he shouldn’t try to sit on a basketball.” Huh? Que el fucko? I read Family Circus for the same reason I watch Pokemon. The thing make no damn sense.
The worst strip in the paper, however, is a little thing called “The Born Loser.” Imagine Dave Berg’s increasingly unfunny “The Lighter Side of…” in your daily paper with incredibly bad cookie cutter art and unbelieveably shitty gags. Ick.
And didn’t Cathy retire at the end of last year? Or maybe not. How could anyone really tell one Cathy from another, anyway?
BTW, Liberty Meadows is the neo-Bloom County. The strip is obviously inspired by Berke Breathed and it has continuing plots, zany animals, and a healthy dose of Man Show testosteroonie! Wish my paper carried it.
Zits is the neo-Calvin and Hobbes. Yes. It is. You may not like it, but one of guys who do this strip worked with Watterson and there is obvious inspiration. And at least the art tries to be interesting. Giant blocks of text (read: Cathy) just don’t do it for me. Both of the above mentioned strips are pale imitations of the originals, but there you go.
There is no neo-Far Side, although many strips think (or wish) they are. Remember the days when Mother Goose and Grimm was the literature and folklore equivalent of the science in The Far Side? O how the mighty have fallen.
Cordially,
(Myron M. Meyer)
The neo-Man Who