I’m gonna defend FBOFW because Lynn Johnson drew what I think is one of the most courageous sequences in modern comics history: Lawrence’s coming out story. It got the strip cancelled in several papers, and Lynn said she got a stack of hate mail - but the stack of kudos was several times higher.
Here’s a link to the whole sequence:
http://www.skepsis.com/kevyn/PLACES/NAMERICA/CANADA/FBOFW/fbofw93gay.html
My newspaper has chosen to continue printing “Classic Peanuts,” which I think is a damn good idea. There isn’t any comic strip being made today that deserves the space more than Peanuts does. As for Foxtrot, wow, that’s unexpected. What was the context?
sniff
…man, I will always remember this particular story thread…I’m sure anyone who’s ever lost a pet (read: family) was touched when they read this strip.
Funny pages indeed.
OH my God. Thanks for reminding me of ANOTHER one I love to skip every day. 7 to 10 days harping on the same topic… when the joke is gone after the first day… It’s almost as bed as never ending soap strips.
‘The Lockhorns’ - Could they just print the same strips every Sunday, and get away with it? Let’s see: 1. Husband ogles beautiful woman, Wife belittles him. 2. Wife burns dinner, Husband belittles her. Isn’t that about it?
I couldn’t agree more about the FBOFW series on Lawrence coming out. THAT took guts. Kudos, Lynn!
I’m really glad they’re keeping “Peanuts” in the funnies. They got rid of all the other good ones–most notably “The Far Side” and “Calvin & Hobbes”.
No, you forgot 3. wife gets haircut, husband belittles her.
I don’t like FBOFW, but then again it isn’t trying to be primarily funny. But what’s all those strips that have abosolutely no periods? Ever single sentence ends in either a question mark, an exclamation mark or ellipses! Very annoying…
One that has been missed as one of the most absurd, annoying, POS comics is “Apartment 4c”. Or is it 4d-or 4f…whatever it is, it sucks.
I believe it’s the Washington Post that runs not two, not four, not six, but…uh, a whole LOT of soap-opera strips. How do you guys tell them all apart? And the art is worse from one to the next!
Mark Trail, though, I would LOVE to have Mark Trail in New York. That strip is SO fucking bizarre. I’d love to read it every day for the Dada value.
Yes, B.C. was quite funny back in, oh, 1960 or '61. I’ve owned paperback collections that proved it.
I hate to dump on Gasoline Alley, even though it irks me 99% of the time. I have warm memories of the episode a year or so ago where Delicia, the curly-haired Italian cab-driver chick, appeared naked. Is the cartoonist ever going to let anyone in that strip die? Some of those characters are now over one hundred years old.
Garfield - Ran out of material sometime during the Bush administration. So mindlessly repetitive and unfunny, it’s almost a pain to read. The second strip I’ve stopped reading entirely.
Dennis the Menace - The first. A completely joyless morass.
Beetle Bailey/Blondie - Not only mindlessly repetitive, but decades behind the times.
Get Fuzzy - Oh, here’s great idea: Take one of the WORST cartoon developments ever, i.e. centering everything around the most obnoxious, irritating, self-centered waste of flesh in the cast and let him (always a him) get away with murder, and build a comic strip around it.
Dilbert - Not funny, satirical, or even remotely realistic, just pointless, interminable mean-spiritedness. I get enough of that from my family.
Marvin - An extremely poor man’s Baby Blues. Nearly as unbearable as Get Fuzzy.
BC - Never before have I seen such a sustained (and heavy-handed) propaganda attack on a comic readership. It’s astonishing. And really annoying.
Mallard Fillmore - Far too little substance for a strip that’s supposed to have political viewpoints. Pointing fingers and laughing does not constitute sound analysis (or even humor, for that matter).
Comments on some others: Cathy has its dull moments, but at least it stays current (computers, working at home, sports trends, etc.). Sally Forth is pleasant and charming in its own way; in the age of South Park, I like that. Non Sequitur is hit (“Anything that might be convenient for you is prohibited.”) and miss (homophobia). Luann and Doonesbury are only shooting for their niches, so I’m not complaining. Hagar the Horrible is still passable, although starting to get tired.
Yeah, BC used to be really funny, but then I started noticing the christian overtones, and stopped reading, not because I’m averse to religion, but because I loathe anachronisms 
I hate those comic strips that you had to have started reading back in 1970 to figure out: The Phantom, Brenda Starr…what the hell is this? They run three panel strips that make no sense by themselves, so they must fit into some grand mosaic pattern that I can’t see. That must be it. I’m sure noone is trying to fnord subvert our logical thought in the newspapers.
Curtis is also very bad. It’s aimed at african american youths, but its really just Fox Trot in the city. They can’t fool me.
When is ** Beetle Bailey ** going to shoot someone?
The Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes were the best of all time.
How many time can Lucy trick Charlie Brown into missing that football, really?
Nahhhhh. The best of all time were The Squirrel Cage and Count Screwloose of Tooloose.
Those sound like late night cable access shows…
Here is some dirt, I swear is true, although I cannot reveal my source. Johnny Hart, who used to draw BC, was the laziest cartoonist in the history of comic art. He invented the “two guys leaning on the boulder” gags so he wouldn’t have to draw bodies. That wasn’t easy enough. He got a set of “heads” printed up on stickers. Now he just draws the boulder (a semi-circle) and a horizon (straight line) and sticks on two heads. Four frames, add the balloons, and send the gag line to his assistant for lettering. This takes him all of ten minutes. He doesn’t even have to ink it, since the heads are preprinted in ink, and he can do the two lines in ink without any preparation. (So could anyone, of course.) The gags come to him in the mail. He works at home, so breakfast is done just about the time his workday is over.
Tris
I remember once when a new “episode” of The Phantom started in the paper, so I made a point of following it all the way through. It was actually kind of cool, and I enjoyed it, although I will admit that a motivating factor behind reading it was that one of the characters was a gorgeous woman in a bikini. sigh I was young. I’ll be damned if I can remember a single shred of the plot, though.
No one’s mentioned Andy Capp???
We had the GOd-awful Rugrats strip in the Columbus Dispatch for about 4 weeks. Then they started opening all the letters about how much it sucked. The final straw, IMHO, is they actually read the strip. Now it has been replaced by the leagues-funnier Zits
[Homer Simpson]
What you two need is a little comic called “love is.”
It’s about two naked 8-year-olds, who are married.
[/Homer Simpson]
Two comics I forgot. I actually really enjoy Prince Valliant. It’s pretty entertaining. Another good one that was cancelled, is…is… Damn I forgot the name.
Does anyone remember. It had a ferret named Angus, it frequently had Dennis Rodman, Bill Gates, and Kid Rock guest star? really funny stuff. I especially liked the one where Bill gates tried to assisnate one of the lead characters.
No mention of Ernie Pook’s Comeek?
This was (probably still is) a comic strip that was about (as best I could tell) seriously disabled outcast kids. It was incredibly depressing, and drawn so bizarrely/stylistically/badly that it was often hard to figure out just what, exactly, was going on. As I remember, a typical strip would have a picture of a girl with buck teeth, coke-bottle glasses, braces, and disfiguring acne saying “Eddie is a black boy in our class with spina bifida, chronic colitis, Tourette’s syndrome, a plate in his head, a glass eye, and allergies so bad that the only thing he can eat is cream of wheat. His dad molests him. One day some kids in our class held him down and squirted milk up his nose. He got so scared he had an attack of diarrhea.” I had a limited tolerance for reading any of these comics, but from my limited experience it seemed almost like pornography for people who get off on miserable, piteous wretches with no hope- there really seemed to be no other point to it.
Our local paper finally ditched this abonination in favor of Tom the Dancing Bug, which I think is brilliant. Of course, they then got a lot of letters from outraged readers saying that Tom the Dancing Bug is puerile pablum, and that they are shocked that a fine strip like Ernie Pook’s Comeek should be replaced with it.
I think I would have to say that Ernie Pook is the worst comic strip of all time. Family Circus is bad, it’s bland, it’s insipid, but at least that is, in a sense, a sin of omission.
-Ben
I can’t believe no one has brought up ‘Marmaduke’ and that anal leakage in print, ‘Sally Forth’. Infact, I read Sally Forth religiously just in the hopes I will someday find one that IS funny.
Ernie Pook’s Comeek is by–if I’m not mistaken-- funk queen of the Universe Lynda Barry. Her more recent work and Tom the Dancing Bug, along with the brilliant Story Minute by Carol Lay, Tom Tomorrow (which used to be a lot better than it is now), and The K Chronicles can all be found at http://www.salon.com .
-Myron