I miss The Far Side…
Whippersnapper.
See the “B.C.” strips from the early 1960s. I’d try to link some if I had time.
[sub]“Wizard of Id,” on the other hand, was NEVER funny.[/sub]
Wrongo, oh vaunted one.
I can’t find the strip on-line(it would have been from before 1967), but here goes:
The King is on the throne, Rodney and another knight drag a poor peasant wretch up to him. Rodney says : “This peasant stole a loaf of bread.” The King says “Cut off his head.”
The peasant says, “Have mercy. I have no job, a wife and 6 kids, and it’s Valentines day.”
The King thinks…then says, “You’re right. Cut out his heart!”
…[sub]gets me every time[/sub]
As a huge “Calvin & Hobbes” fan I’m glad Watterson quit the comic when he did. I would have rather seen C&H go out when it was still wonderful than for it to turn into shit like BC or Garfield because of lack of ideas or because he didn’t like writing comics anymore. That would be even more depressing than having it gone completely, I think.
A thread about horrible comic strips and no one mentions “Family Circus”??? B.C. is pure gold compared to that crap! I recall hearing a few years ago that Bil Keane and his son ADMITTED that the strip (or should I say circle") isn’t funny, and yet there it is, every day.
"In Endicott, New York, four men sit surrounded by empty beer cans, laughing uproariously into two tape recorders…
…Most syndicates like their artists to maintain a six-week lead on the publication date. But if you ask Johnny Hart how far ahead he is, he looks at his watch. When he runs low on ideas he assembles his staff for a “think and drink” brainstorm marathon. There are two tape recorders, one to record the general hubbub, the other to tie down anything usable. In a si 6-pack session everything usually ends up being funny."
– Mort Walker, Backstage at the Strips, 1975 pp. 1-2
Somehow, I can’t imagine him doing this anymore.
Prickly City is actually cute when it’s not political. Just a little girl and a coyote strolling around the desert. The attempts at political humor are pathetic: mostly just ridiculous strawmen and simple-minded bashing of Democrats.
Wizard of Id was funny when I was growing up. (And there’s no point in arguing about that; “funny” is entirely subjective.) My favorite from Id wasn’t even a script, just a single panel on the cover of a paperback collection, showing Sir Rodney timidly laying his sword in front of a YIELD sign.
I once laughed a Wizard of Id strip I saw many years ago and would have no idea how to search for:
There is a peasant standing in an arena in front of two doors. The king is sitting in the royal seat and says to the peasant, “Behind one of those doors is a beautiful maiden. Behind the other door is a ferocious tiger who will devour you alive. Which door do you choose?”
And the peasant says, “The one with the beautiful maiden.”
I do believe those of you who say that *The Wizard Of Id * and B.C. were actually funny once upon a time. I’m only in my early 30s, so I’ve really only been able to read these strips when they sucked. If anyone can conjure a link to some of these funny treasures, that’d be cool.
I can think of two funny **B.C.**s right off the bat, both Sunday strips.
In the first one, Peter (the blond guy) finds a treasure map with a dotted line leading to a black circle with a red X in it. He follows the map, digs eagerly at the designated spot…and unearths a black disk with a red X on it. Which he tosses aside in disgust.
In the second one, Peter and another guy are sitting on the beach watching the sunset. The first guy remarks on all the colors. Peter reminds him that he left out ultraviolet. “I don’t see ultraviolet.”
“It is consipicuous in its absence,” says Peter, and walks off.
Blond woman walks up and asks first guy what he’s doing. “I am enjoying the conspicuity of Peter’s company.”
There was also a Sunday strip that was basically a rehashing of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch—“We didn’t even HAVE honey; we chewed the bees!” “YOU had bees? We—” Fat Broad bellows “PUT A LID ON IT!!” But as I say, that’s been done.
That’s OK. Those of us old enough to have seen the truly hilarious strips can understand how those of you who are ignorant of them do not believe us.
*BC, standing on the TRVTH pillar announces to the assembled cave men: “I have found something inside us that gives us life.”
Peter or Thor asks “What do you call it?”
BC replies, “The Hart,” to which Curls calls out “Bootlicker.”*
The whimsy of water balls.
Thor’s frequent inventions.
“Clams got legs.”
Clumsy Carp’s eternal pursuit of the Dorsalectus illusivii."
The origin of SWAK.
At least 20 years of really good humor, lost to us now. (Well, not lost to me: I have the complete set of BC books, barring the very first which I have only in an abridged version.)
My favorite B.C. strip:
The Anteater is sitting forlorn and hungry in a barren landscape. An ant walks by. “What was that?” the Anteater asks himself excitedly. “Oh, it was only a hymenopterus formicidae.” Boredom ensues again, for one panel. Then, suddenly, as denlightenment strikes, it starts up, its ears raised to the skies in surprise," That’s an ant!!!"
Last panel, dejected again," You get too educated; you starve to death."
My favorite Wizard of Id strips:
King (to shopkeeper): Do you discount Royalty?
Shopkeeper: No, they serve their purpose.
The King and Sir Rodney are atop the Castle Walls, when they hear a cry: “Help”
Sir Rodney: Sire! someone’s in the moat!
King: Quick! Throw him a line!
Sir Rodney: Knock, knock!
Person in moat: Who’s there?
The last panel shows Sir Rodney alongside the person in the moat, both of them shouting “Help!” as the king stomps off.
By the way, I didn’t realize it until I moved down to Binghamton, N,.Y. and went to work (briefly) for General Electric, but “B.C.” stands for Broome County, the county in which Binghamton and Endicott sit. The “B.C. Open” golf tournament is named for the county, not the comic strip (although they use the B.C. characters to promote it). And some of the characters in the strip (such as “Thor”) were based on people who worked at G.E. (as Johnny Hart once did), and were still working there when I was there.
I’ve long suspected that Berkeley Breathed based “Bloom County” on “Broome County”.
The Wizard of Id that gets me every time is one where the King and Rodney see a water tower with the graffito “Elmwood [heart] Shirley!”
King: Get that cleaned off!
Rodney: There’s only one man for a job like this!
King: Who?
Rodney: Elmwood.
Or the one where the lawyer drops a bunch of his papers down the drain.
Passerby: What you need is a briefcase.
Lawyer: I just dropped half my client’s docket down the sewer! What could be briefer than that?
Another classic was the one where someone finds Bung, the perpetually-drunk jester, lying crumpled in the street.
Passerby: Drunk again!
Bung: No! I fell off an actual wagon!
It’s not Sartre, but this was consistently good stuff, once upon a time.
–Cliffy
Need I remind you both that I am actually OLDER than you? I mean, I’m so old that I can remember when Li’l Abner was (sometimes) mildly amusing (okay, I just looked at Daisy Mae). Before Dick Tracy’s wrist radio became a wrist TV, before Junior met the Moon Maiden, before Charlie Brown met the Little Red-Haired Girl, and before anybody was creeped out that Andy Capp was a wife-beating drunk–hell, before Andy Capp was even brought over here. I remember Snuffy Smith, Moon Mullins, Out Our Way, and Major Hoople. Don’t go calling ME a whippersnapper, you punk kids!
And in all that time, Wizard of Id and BC ranked right there with Born Loser in the laff riot rankings.
Back in the day, the standard for being judged a whippersnapper was whether or not you could remember Blondie’s wedding. How standards have fallen since that time.
I thought Andy was beat by Flo, not the other way around. She wielded the rolling pin, he was impervious to pain due to liberal application of ale.
February 17, 1933? :rolleyes:
They’ve got a saying: “If you can remember the Thirties, you weren’t there.”
They might have to amend that - we’re going to be hitting the Thirties soon.
It’s been a while since I read any comics, but another horrible time-waste of a comic was “Marmaduke”.
I used to ignore whatever words were written below the comic and substitute my own words. They went something like this “My, he’s so big.”, or “Goodness, isn’t he big?” or “Wow, what a big dog.”
Zzzz.
Oh, Family Circus. They had the funniest cartoon I’ve ever remembered reading. Mostly because my friends and I were a bit drunk at the time and spent a good two hours trying to figure out what it was about. Let me describe it a bit:
Only one panel. Mother and Father were entertaining friends in the living room with Father sitting and Mother serve snacks off of a tray. All four adults look shocked/startled as Billy is running into the room crying. The text below said “But Dad, I don’t wanna sit on my thumb!”
Was sitting on one’s thumb considered punishment? We couldn’t figure this out for the life of us.
As for the OP’s cartoon in question, what would a cartoon character know about Christianity (or Darwin for that matter) considering the title of the strip is B.C. Unless B.C. stands for bull crap.