Just of couple quick questions.
- Why is Shoe named that since Cosmo is clearly the main character?
- Why is Family Circus still around? Besides being incredibly lame, Isn’t cruel to make fun of children with mental disabilities?
- Famliy Circus is still around for the same reason Peanuts was around for such a long time. Tradition.
Yeah, but Peanuts is good.
No, Family Circus is around because thre are still enough comics page editors who mistakenly think that anyone reads it on purpose instead of absorbing it while skipping ahead to an actual entertaining comic. It’s the same reason such gems as B.C. and Dennis the Menace and Hagar the Horrible are still around. That and because the thirteen old cranks who still read these shitty comics always complain any time an editor tries to dump one of them and bring in something good.
The Washington Post did an online comics survey a few months ago and it was quite interesting. (The article has expired even though there is still a link to it on the comics page.)
Several comics fell into “the most hated” and “the most loved” category. E.g., Zits. I don’t recall Family Circus’s rating.
There definitely appears to be 2+ distinct groups of comics readers, each of which hates the other group’s favorites. No doubt this increases the Features Editor’s woes.
Cathy finally has bored the hell out of everyone though. Zippy the Pinhead is strongly disliked by most but does have a very small loyal following.
Family Circus is consistently ranked #1 or #2 favorite comic in the Southeastern Wisconsin area. Of course, they print Mallard Fillmore in the paper here, too.
Do you hate Mallard Fillmore because it’s concervative, or because regardless of political affiliation, you just don’t find it humorous and interesting?
It’s the same joke over and over. Liberals and moderates are bad. Then when Enron and Worldcomm scandals are breaking, it runs strips about how bad the postal service is.
I love PJ O’Rourke’s conservative humor. I just find no humor in Mallard Fillmore.
Ok, gotcha.
My favorites, Sylvia and Boondocks, are in the most hated list. I don’t quite understand why. The ones I hate are the ones that were good and then go lame sporadically. Peanuts was like that for a while. Early peanuts was great. It declined as he aged, but what I don’t understand is why they don’t go all the way back to the beginning. they seem to be rerunning the lamest strips. Anything showing angst seems to have been stricken.
Actually, lee, I would consider Boondocks to be one of those strips that started out good and then has gone “lame”, and quite quickly for such a young strip, too. It started out as a quite interesting strip about two black brothers from the city who find themselves in the suburbs living on a street called “Timid Deer Lane”, and it had a cast of interesting characters who interacted with each other–Huey, the activist; Riley, the thug-in-training; their grandfather; their biracial neighbor Jazmine; Jazmine’s parents; their teachers, etc. Unfortunately, this cast has seemingly narrowed, and just about every strip these days features Huey and his friend Caesar sitting in lawn chairs and spouting off about Michael Bolton, Michael Jackson, or G. W. Bush. A few Sundays ago, I had thought that Magruder had found his muse again and gone back to the more varied cast and storylines, but those strips turned out to actually be reruns. Sad, really.
Yep, the reason why those old strips never die is that they are read by older readers who actually have time to write letters to the newspaper when their favorite strips disappear. Even when the cartoonists die, the syndicate hires new cartoonists to continue the strips! My local paper has tried to get rid of Judge Parker several times with little success. Unfortunately, this means that every time they want to change the comics page, they have to get rid of a newer strip that never got a chance to get such an entrenched audience.
Then, you’ve also got some people who read more ironic meanings into those lame old strips, such as the “Trailheads” who read Mark Trail or those Dysfunctional Family Circus folks. There are probably millions of people who read B.C. every day and wonder what sort of Christian fundamentalist propaganda Hart can come up with next!
They could always just make the rest of the strips a little larger. In the Washington Post, “Classic Peanuts” is extremely small, much smaller than the rest of the strips.
I, for one, can’t understand why any newspaper continues to run Peanuts. Schulz is dead people! The strip is over. Buy a friggin book if you still need a Snoopy fix!
Here’s why that is. Back in the 1970’s when those strips were originally run, comic strips in newspapers were a lot bigger, and must have also been a bit different proportionally (longer compared to the height). When they started putting the Peanuts reruns in my local paper, they tried to use computers to stretch and squish the original strip into Peanuts’ old slot. This made the characters look funny (they didn’t think people would notice that the “round-headed kid” had suddenly become oblong?) and people complained. The solution was to run Peanuts in its original proportions. However, since, in this paper, the length of a strip is limited, this makes Peanuts shorter in height than all the other strips. Think of it as “letterboxed” Peanuts.
Is Doonesbury larger than all the other strips in your paper? It’s not because the paper has a liberal bent. Garry Trudeau has specified in his contract that papers run his strip full-size. That’s how big all the comic strips were many years ago!
If Judge Parker were shrunk any more, those old people who are such fans about it wouldn’t be able to read it, and they’d get out their stationery to complain, so, no–that’s not a good solution.
Doonesbury appears to be the same size, but it’s not on the same pages as the rest of the strips - it appears on page 3 of the Style section, whereas the other strips appear at the end of the section.
Last year my local paper let the readers pick which strips to get rid of to make room for new stuff. Cathy and Snuffy Smith were axed. A small victory, but I’ll take it.
Besides Family Circus, I’d love to see Prince Valiant get the ax.
I’m just glad that I can still find Liberty Meadows…but now it’s $3 every other month for the comic…damn touchy editors…
(btw, that’s what I was doing when I heard the news last year…writing an e-mail to the Austin-American Statesman to get LM back…)
If I could ax three coics from my local, they would be:
1.) Family Circle: we’ve already covered that
2.) Cathy: Cathy Guisewitte needs to realize that shoe, chocolate, and fat-in-a-swimsuit jokes will work maybe twice do not get any runnier no matter how many times you recycle them
3.) For Better or Worse: This one I absolutely loathe. It is supposed to be a “funny” comic (as opposed to a serial such as Mary Worth or Judge Parker), but it rarely has much of a punchline and nearly every strip should be preceded by “now, a very special episode of For Better or Worse.” It’s the After School Special of the comics page.
My three favorites:
1.) Get Fuzzy: not the best comic ever, but it has flashes of brilliance. Satchel (the dog) going trick-or-treating as a vacuum cleaner because “it was the scariest thing I could think of” is a classic.
2.) Boondocks: I agree with Tamex that MacGruder has gone downhill by focusing exclusively on Huey and Caesar, but I hope he can pull it out.
3.) One Big Happy: A “wholesome family strip” that actually manages to be funny without being preachy. The diametric opposite of For Better or Worse
However wouldn’t mind if they just axed every them all and replaced the standard setup with a page each of Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes reruns.
What makes you think that it’s “supposed” to be funny? It seems to me that it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be: A realistic look at a realistic family. Sometimes funny things happen. Sometimes serious things happen. Sometimes serious things happen that are funny anyway, because you can identify with it perfectly (remember the time toddler Elizabeth accidentally locked herself into the bathroom? I do, because I did the same thing at that age). It works.