You know, seeing this thread again makes me wonder if we could use this collected information to create the worst-possible-comic-strip-even-in-theory.
Of course, you can’t make it the worst right off the bat- you have to keep it going for a few years after it (immediately) goes stale, so that it’s abundantly clear that you’re beating the dead one-trick pony. Maybe eventually switch to a born-again theme too, like B.C. (I have nothing against Christian artists, like Michaelangelo. But I do have a thing against fundamentalist glurgists.)
I think I’d start with the glurge-factor of “Gamin and Patches” and “Family Circus” (“Love Is”, anyone? Come to think of it, the only thing more horrifying than two naked, genital-less married six-year-olds is… well, think of it this way. “Love is… stretching your arms out this wide.” (Hazy picture of a cross in the background, beneath which the uncanny couple hold hands and gaze into the distance.) Pray you die before it happens!) Then somehow combine that with the grating-main-character factor of some of the other strips, like “The Lockhorns.” You’d have to make it go really slow, like Apt. 4G and Mary Worth. I’m thinking of a narrative strip where in a typical story arc the grumpy old bastard- call him Mr. Grundy- meets a cancerous waif and is slooooowly glurged into momentary enlightenment as the story unfolds over several weeks, with each day’s strip containing at most one new frame of information. It would end with the G.O.B. having his heart melted, only to start the next day with a “new” story arc in which he’s a crusty jerk once again. (“New” in the at most purely ironic sense of “a new Marmaduke comic,” for example.) Oh yeah, and the waif talks with a cutesy speech impediment. “Mista Gwundy?” No comic strip can truly meet its potential for horror without a speech impediment.
Of course, once we enter the born-again phase, you have to mix in the militant unfunniness of Mallard Fillmore in his “too angry to think of a joke today” mode. (We can’t include it in the early phase, because then there would be no point at which the reader could say, “Man, when this started out I had no idea it could get so much worse!”) Maybe we could include B.C.'s occasional clueless offensiveness, too.
And, best of all, we’d take a cue from Chicken Soup for the ________ Soul and not even create original story ideas- instead, we’d take overly recirculated glurge emails which all our readership has already seen, possibly even seen against their will, and just find a way to insert Mr. Grundy as a character, if only as a completely redundant spectator.
In the final (possibly senile) phase of the comic, the homogeneity of the glurge source material and the inexorably slow pace of the narrative will combine until the narrative simply gurgles to a complete stop. (We would, of course, have to jettison the militancy and the occasional offensiveness, in order to make the terrain as unremarkable and featureless as possible.) No one can remember what happened two days ago, no one knows where the narrative is going, and no one really notices, because the comic is so undemanding and totally devoid of anything but vaguely emotive content that you don’t need any sort of direction. A formless, homogeneous mush, like white bread soaked in warm milk- and yet, on some subconscious level, a Philip K. Dickian psychological labyrinth from which there can be no escape. You might have a vague feeling that something is amiss, but you’d chalk it up to the fact that the strip never makes much impression on you, so you just don’t remember what events led up to the current situation. (Can you remember the last Marmaduke you read? The last Family Circus? I have a vague memory of reading it the last time I looked at a paper… was it the one where Marmaduke sits on the guy in the armchair? Or was that the Marmaduke parody I read? Was yesterday’s comic the one with Jeffy eating a cookie he wasn’t supposed to eat? Or was that the one from last week?) Even if you collected the last several months worth of “Mr. Grundy” and laid them out in front of you, you wouldn’t quite be able to figure it out. The repetitious nature of the comic, with each week reviewing the last two panels of the week before, with each new frame only adding a miniscule amount of information about the plot, and with so little actual plot to describe, all would combine to make it difficult even to tease out a concise plot summary, or even to stay focussed long enough to decide whether there’s any plot at all.
Admit it- can’t you see it happening? Can you honestly say that it hasn’t happened already, and you just haven’t noticed yet?
-Ben