One of the great features of classic Dragon Magazine was the wonderful serial comic strips it featured over the years. The standard, of course, is Dave Trampier’s Wormy. (Incidentally, here’s (almost) all the Wormy strips for your enjoyment.)
Which was your favorite? I’m not going to post a poll, because no matter how hard I wrack my brain, I’m going to forget some. Just join in and list and explain why.
Fineous Fingers.
I didnt care that much for Wormy since the artist simply disappeared and the series never resolved several plot lines.
Phil and Dixie was always fun. They kept trying to sneak in “Sex and D&D” before getting interrupted by editors and game hawkers.
What was the one where the two thieves were forced to work in Orcus’s kitchen?
What, no love for Nodwick?
I resisted the urge to make a list, because then what is there for anyone else to do in the thread? 
I do like Nodwick. Piffany’s my favorite!
One of my favorites was the very rare dramatic serial, Robinson’s War. Great art, great story, well told.
It’s a recent one and it wasn’t in the magazine all that long, but Knights of the Dinner Table. Anybody who’s ever been in a gaming group almost certainly relates to at least one of the characters.
I remember one comic strip that was just a one-off, but it was so typical of high level D&D. The DM kept trying to wow the players with new horrible dangers like landing in Odin’s soup, but they just yawned and said “When are you going to give us something challenging? I just flick my Elixir of Entropy at him.”
It’s weird to me how few gamers are conversant in Knights of the Dinner Table. It’s the apex of gamers poking fun at gamer culture. It got a lot more sophisticated after those gags in Dragon. It’s now a monthly comic/gaming magazine in its own right with intricate story arcs that call back to two decades worth of back story. All those web comics you see where there is a story going on at the table that mingles with the story going on in the lives of the players are preceded by this granddad of a comic that is still going on.
They’re also now printing new installments of Snarfquest, and the recently had an article about the bad blood between TSR and the recently deceased author of Wormy, to veer back to the topic on hand.
All this is true, but all of the “Knights” are losers, jerks, douchebags or assholes.
That was from “Fineous Fingers”. It was in The Fineous Treasury. I’m not sure if it ever appeared in the magazine itself.
Apparently available on Amazon:
It’s really strange when some part of your youth that you didn’t even know you’d known - or forgotten - pops up like this. Very cool
Wormy and Finieous are the two I remember best; Wormy I liked because it felt like it had a Ralph Bakshi vibe, but Finieous was funnier.
Alas, kinda true. But, then, so were the guys I used to play D&D with! The strip was ugly in that way, because it so accurately reflected the real world.
Wormy, of course, is my fave. Great art, and a very nice set of jokes, stretched out into an attempt at telling a story. It never actually gelled into a real plot. It was just a bunch of plot-lets trying to be coherent, and failing.
Still, that one splash scene where the wizard riding the shadowcat burst through the shell of reality and entered the meld between the bubble-universes – whoa! That was a scene for the ages!
“Haroog, Floyd, bring me a beer!”
Nodwick was also a lot of fun. I could die happy if I ever came up with a character name as clever as “Piffany.” She was the very embodiment of “Lawful Annoying.” The fact that she was completely blind to the shenanigans of Yeagar and Artax makes her seem a little hypocritical. But, ya know, What The Krutz.
Just to blow my own horn, I had a single-frame cartoon published in Dragon Magazine. It’s “The Charisma Role,” where the guy is thinking about movie stars – Donald Sutherland, Robert Redford, Peter O’Toole – and the dice are thinking, “Ernest Borgnine.”
(Yes, I know, Ernest Borgnine had tons of real charisma. In D&D, it’s a substitute for physical beauty, and that, the poor bloke had none whatever.)
(And, yes, I know, I’m not quoting the cartoon caption accurately. I don’t have a copy to hand, and it’s been a long time. Sheesh.)
I loved Dragon Magazine. I poured over every issue. I loved the articles and the art but I must admit I without exception skipped every one of the comics. Those pages were dead weight for me. Looks like I was the odd ball though
While we’re on the topic, how about White Dwarf magazine? It had Thrud and Gobbledigook, neither of which was all that great…
One of my favorite single-panel comics from Dragon: a faceless, robbed figure is standing at a fast-food counter, holding a part of his order dramatically up in the air while a confused cashier looks on. The caption: “Onion ring to rule them all, Onion ring to find them…”
For the long form stuff, SnarfQuest was always my thing.
I bought the SnarfQuest “graphic novel” compilation.
I is one lucky Zeetvah!
Hillarious losers, jerks, douchbags or assholes of exactly the types gamers meet all the time. But they are actually more sympathetic when the whole of the storyline comes into play. Except for Brian, who manages to sink to new lows. It hasn’t been the same storyline with players picking on an unprepared GM for a long time.