Ugh. If I didn’t know already that this was a benighted and navel-gazing town the funnies would clue me in.
My local paper, The Marietta Times, runs these on a daily basis:
Beetle Bailey
Over the Hedge
Fox Trot
Hi & Lois
Peanuts
Hagar the Horrible
Dennis the Menace
Trudy
Garfield
Family Circus
Doonesbury
Snuffy Smith
Shoe
For Better or For Worse
Cathy
Blondie
Now, give them credit for Doonesbury, FBoFW and Foxtrot.
But could the rest be a more heinous group of ne’er-do-wells?
Yech. If USA Today ever started running comics, this would be their lineup.
Well, they’d probably skip Doonesbury, FBoFW and Foxtrot.
All you are missing is Marmaduke, and the unholy Wizard of Id/BC combo.
Someone is still drawing Snuffy Smith? No shit? Wow, where’s Gasoline Alley and Dondi?
I didn’t know someone had taken over Shoe. Didn’t that guy die?
Over the Hedge, while not great, shouldn’t be in the same pantheon as Cathy et al.
And while Garfield is totally pathetic nineteen times out of twenty, that twentieth can be so good sometimes it makes you think “What happened to this guy?”
Abandon the dreary things.
Try Webcomics!
Begin with these–
http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/
from our own Doper jimwicked
http://crap.jinwicked.com/
Thank you muchly sir, but I’m jiN; I have girly-parts.
I don’t get the paper at home but I read a few syndicated comics online. I used to like Foxtrot (though I’ve gotten bored of it lately); I regularly read Get Fuzzy, and 9 Chickweed Lane.
I also like the political comics that are all syndicated on this page:
http://cagle.slate.msn.com/politicalcartoons/
It’s updated every few days as the artists submit new cartoons.
Sorry, jin.
I did know that is your name, but my fingers are deft as bananas at typing.
:o
Sounds a lot like our local paper: Peanuts, Sally Forth, Nest Heads*, Shoe, The Middletons, Agnes**, Judge Parker, Gasoline Alley, Rex Morgan, Grand Avenue, and Luann.
The only thing that’s really worth reading is Dilbert, Fox Trot, Speed Bump, and Rose is Rose. Some of the others are occasionally amusing, but generally not.
The paper used to have some good strips, but whenever they chose a new one, they went with a “family friendly” comic that was blander than white bread soaked in milk.
But at least the got rid of Cats with Hands. :eek:
*Perhaps the least funny “humorous” comic strip ever.
**Runner up.
No list of comic-strip banality is complete without Mallard Fillmore, Prickly City, and B.C.
No links; I refuse to be responsible for another’s suffering.
Moving this from IMHO to Cafe Society.
You need “Get Fuzzy” in your local paper.
Today’s strip cracked me up. “So you’re saying monkeys are fruit… hmmm. Yeah, that is expensive for fruit.”
I have to defend B.C. When it’s not prattling on about some Christian thing it can be really funny.
And Wizard of Id is almost always funny.
Heathens… 
I recognize the words in that sentence, yet it doesn’t make any sense. 
Talk about an art form in the sewer. It is to our credit that though we are barraged daily with the likes of **In the Bleachers, Mother Goose and Grimm, BC, Mallard Fillmore, Crock, Heart of the City, Momma ** and La Cucaracha, we somehow resist the impulse to step in front of a deli van.
There are still a handful of decent comics out there–Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert, Pickles and Fox Trot all come to mind–but for the most part, it’s all crap or comics that used to be good 10+ years ago.
Webcomics are where it’s at these days. You aren’t restricted to content that’s guaranteed not to offend anyone and you can stop reading anything you don’t like.
I’m finding Prickly City to be showing promise. I’m never going to find it as consistently funny as Doonesbury because I don’t lean that way, but it can be sharp. With any luck it will wipe the black hole known as Mallard Fillmore out of existence. That one’s never been funny.
Don’t you get it? Everything in the comics sections of the paper is supposed to be bland and uncontroversial.
As far as comics go, Boondocks is wickedly funny, and, disappointed liberal that I am, I always get a laugh out of Tom Tommorow’s This Modern World. Also, I’m terribly addicted to Sluggy Freelance.
That is all.
Our local paper just tried out some new comics but they didn’t touch their hardcore lineup of blandness. We are still stuck with Blondie, Hi and Lois, Wizard of Id, Hagar the Horrible, and other pieces of drek turned out by hired gag writers rather than the original visionaries.
The worst insult is Peanuts. It’s nothing but repeats! If I cared I could go buy a book of every stinking strip thats going to run but our newspaper feels the need to waste the space rather than give a new cartoonist with a fresh voice a chance. The readers voted two to one to dump that dated piece of drivel so our paper took that as a sign to keep it! I haven’t yet figured out how they came to that conclusion but it’s no wonder newspapers aren’t attracting younger readers with decisions like this.
I recently sent an e-mail to the artist who draws Pearls Before Swine regarding a spelling error, and he sent a very nice reply!
What, no mention of that master of scintillating wit, Fred Basset? :rolleyes:
Every time I see a comics page I go straight to the “Cathy” strip. I noticed a long time ago how 99.9% of those strips has at least one character yelling with gallons of sweat flying from his/her head by the third panel. I’ve seen only ONE time this didn’t happen. I wish I had saved it, it felt like finding a four-leaf clover.
Using the mouse preview it looked like you were going to bash Foxtrot and I couldn’t let anyone bash on my Denise. 
At least you don’t get Marvin. When I was a kid I got Marvin was hilarous. Now (15+ years later) its awful. Has it always sucked or has it just gone downhill?