This topic (about Luann) got me thinking… I used to love Luann and I read it every day as a kid and teen. From 1989 (when I was 9) to about 2000 (when I was 20), I read it damn near every day.
But then I moved out of the house, got my own place, and never ordered the newspaper nor did I ever keep up with the strip online. Ever since then I’ve only read it once in a blue moon, maybe a couple strips a year.
I know it’s on gocomics.com, though, and that it has quite the long archive there, so I may take a long weekend off sometime and catch up on two or three years worth.
Anyway, what comic strips (found in newspapers, not webcomics) do you follow and what were some of your favorite arcs and story lines of those that have continuation?
I’ve read (and still read) almost all the comics in all the newspapers that I’ve read for the last 50 years. It would be easier to tell you the ones I just gave up on completely.
Prince Valiant.
9 Chickweed Lane. (?) Something like that.
Everything else I’ve followed with some degree of interest. Even Mary Worth!
Mind you, stuff like Peanuts, Bloom County, The Far Side, and Pearls Before Swine pegs the interest meter, while Mary Worth just nudges it, but still. . .
Oh, and the one about high school kids having tragedies that has morphed into adults having tragedies. I hate that one!
I always read every comic in my newspaper, which is the San Francisco Chronicle. It helps that they run humor strips only, no soap opera stuff, which I probably would skip over. They did run Prince Valiant on Sundays years ago, and I did skip that.
I like the same ones Guinastasia mentioned and I also like Pickles a lot, and Zits. I do read all the ones that are in the Austin paper, though; I’m OCD that way.
I read a wide variety, mostly on GoComics with a handful on Arcamax because Go doesn’t have them. My favorites, in no particular order (except for the first)
Pearls Before Swine
Adam @Home
Zits
Non-Sequitur
Foxtrot (including the daily repeats)
Working Daze
Overboard
I’ve read every Peanuts multiple times, but no longer follow the repeats.
Bizarro, Rhymes With Orange, Pearls, and - god help me - Garfield. The local paper stuck some godawful strip about a unicorn in place of In The Bleachers, so I’m down one on Sundays.
I read almost everything in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, though I usually skip over Judge Parker and Mary Worth. There are some that I wouldn’t bother reading, except that reading them is just as quick as skipping over them: Notably, Mutts (which has one joke a week repeated six times, and which is only occasionally funny even once) and Prickly City, (starring a liberal who thinks she’s conservative and an idiot who thinks he’s liberal, by an author whom I’m still not convinced isn’t Poe’s Lawing us).
The aforementioned Luann
Non Sequiter
Dilbert
The Phantom (don’t know why, it’s a slow-paced, stupid comic, but…)
Get Fuzzy
Funky Winkerbean
For Better or For Worse (just to get back to where I started reading it…)
Currently, the only newspaper comics I follow (online) are *Luann *and Frazz.
I used to read *Sally Forth *and Rose is Rose, but I kinda got out of the habit and never got back.
I also used to read *Dilbert *until I found out what a misogynist twit Scott Adams is.
I like *Bloom County 2015 *and read that regularly, but it’s no longer a newspaper comic.
(Makes me feel good that I’m not the only one who admits to liking Luann. (I’ve met Greg Evans a couple of times at Comic Con, BTW–he’s a nice guy.))
I still get an actual dead-tree newspaper, and I regularly read some of the comics contained therein:
Zits
Pearls Before Swine
Pickles
Dilbert
Blondie
Luann
Fox Trot (on Sundays)
Willy ‘n’ Ethel (Sundays)
Bizarro
Baby Blues
and sometimes, if I have time and my eye happens to fall on them:
The Family Circus
Beetle Bailey
Hi and Lois
Dennis the Menace
Get Fuzzy
The Born Loser
…but I wouldn’t mourn the loss of any of these.
I work as a page designer at a newspaper, so I kind of have to look at the comics page. None of them really interest me all that much anymore, but there are a couple that I suppose you could say that I hate-read. The Born Loser mystifies me with its continued existence. Snuffy Smith is another one that appears to linger thanks only to the inertia that plagues most comics pages, endlessly spinning the same, tired jokes like clockwork.