True.
If you disagree, that’s fine. Just make sure to include which one would take that title in your opinion.
If this is better suited for IMHO, feel free to move it.
True.
If you disagree, that’s fine. Just make sure to include which one would take that title in your opinion.
If this is better suited for IMHO, feel free to move it.
False: that would be Bloom County and its permutations.
True. I suppose. If only this were a simple question that isn’t likely to spawn a 4-page thread. (If it dies after less than a page, I fail at prediction, I guess.)
True, I just saw some strips about Calvin building snowmen and was laughing my ass off again.
Calvin & Hobbes on top, followed closely by The Far Side
Calvin & Hobbes was great – but the edge goes to Bloom County by a wee margin.
I dunno, Foxtrot is excellent, although that may be just the nerd in me enjoying the obscure references and accurate technobabble. That said, Calvin and Hobbes is definately one of the all-time greats.
Bloom County was great, but topical; it already seems pretty dated and will get more obsolete as time goes by.
Calvin and Hobbes, on the other hand, is absolutely timeless. It’ll be as relevent when we’re all dead and buried as it is today. Calvin’s existintial musings as he and Hobbes go sledding down a hill will never be dated. And his snowmen…oh, the snowmen! And Hobbes explaining “higher math.” Brilliant.
Calvin and Hobbes takes Dagwood and beats him over the head with Andy Capp while slamming the door on Brenda Starr and punching that intrusive busybody Mary Worth into next week. I can’t even describe what he does to Billy and the gang at Family Circus, but as far as Cathy goes, let’s just say she’s not going to be having any children.
Stranger
True if you stipulate the limitations of the strip, about a boy and his tiger who appears to be inanimate to everyone else but alive to the boy. The biggest limitationis that Calvin did not often interact with anyone other than Hobbes beyond his being an asshole to them. Terrorizing the babysitter, chucking snowballs at Suzie, driving Ms. Wormwood and the principal todistraction and giving his parents ulcers. Lots of strips did show his feelings but these were not the rule.
Once true, but it has long since Garfielded.
I was a huge, huge Bloom County fan, an absolute fanatic, but even I’m surprised anyone would rank it ahead of “Calvin and Hobbes.”
As has been pointed out, Bloom County was very topical and so a lot of its bits now seem dated and silly, and
It simply wasn’t as consistently funny, and even at its best moments was never as funny as Calvin and Hobbes could be, and plus
Watterson stopped Calvin and Hobbes before it got old; Bloom County, sadly, morphed into the atrocious Outland/Opus spinoff crap that sullies everything that preceded it.
Calvin & Hobbes! The most philosophical and deep comic strip I’ve ever seen.
Dunno if I’d say the best, but it’s certainly in the top three, maybe the top two. I’m struggling whether or not I can rank C&H above Peanuts.
Ding! Correct answer!
I’ll put in another timid nomination for The Far Side.
It’s kinda hard for me to say, actually, since I haven’t read Calvin and Hobbes in so many years. Reading it now through adult eyes would probably make a difference…
Allow me to be the first pedantic bastid to point out that The Far Side isn’t a comic strip.
Calvin and Hobbes gets the crown, followed by The Far Side. Both comics were brilliant from start to finish, something that very few long-running popular art productions of ANY type can claim.
You know, you’d think so, but speaking as a adult that just reread one of the collection books I think they actually are better now. So much of what I found hilarious as a lad is still hilarious and things that went over my head then now register as some of my favorite aspects.
Yup, I think Calvin and Hobbes is the best comic strip ever. Original, funny, timeless, smart, and multifaceted. A work of art.
I never was a Bloom County fan, but I’ve seen archives and retrospectives and I’ve largely enjoyed what I’ve seen. The modern Opus cartoon is pretty funny, but nothing very special IMHO.
In my mind, this is a two-way race between Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. In some ways it really isn’t fair: TFS never had the ability to do anything at all complex because all it ever had was one panel. It focused on the spit-take, the tableaux, and the (occasinally existentialist) one-liner. C&H, on the other hand, did big full-color Sunday strips (always lavishly illustrated and richly colored), multi-strip plot arcs, and generally complex wierdness that played around with the limits of what you could accomplish with a full multi-panel strip. Larson and Watterson really weren’t playing the same game, and they were both standouts in their respective fields.
All that said, I think I still have to hand it to C&H. It was more consistently funny, whereas TFS sometimes tried and failed.
(If we’re allowed to excise a portion of a strip’s run, early Peanuts might give both C&H and TFS a run for their money. But I don’t know early Peanuts that well, so I’m not in a position to rank it relative to anything. Except Cathy. Cathy sucks.)
Whaddaya mean?
Yeah, that’s what I suspected.