True.
I’m only familiar with Krazy Kat from reading the 10th Anniversary collection of C&H, in which Watterson said it was his favorite growing up. There was even a Sunday strip where Calvin was transforming into a T-Rex in an art museum while his parents looked at a Krazy Kat landscape.
But I love C&H. It’s timeless, unique, and brilliant. I’m thinking of spending some of my “my money” budget this month on the three volume collection, since nobody bought it for me for Christmas. 
I’d give the edge to **Calvin ** over **Peanuts, ** mainly because I remember reading Peanuts when I was a kid, and thinking, “Eh, it’s okay.” Granted that wasn’t his best work, but I’ve never gotten as much out of any of the strips as everyone else seems to. Calvin I used to look forward to, though, every morning.
Dilbert’s relevency stops strictly at the cubical…er, well, they don’t have doors, but you know what I mean. For people who don’t work in paper farms, they come off as being modestly amusing, at best. Scott Adams is funny in the way that the typical Comedy Central stand-up comedian is funny–he points out something from real life that is absurd, and you laugh and say, <homer>“It’s funny because it’s true!”</homer> Thirty seconds later, you’ve forgotten the whole joke, and indeed, the name of the comedian who told it.
Dilbert is fast food. Calvin & Hobbes (and Peanuts, and various others herein mentioned) are haute cuisine in comparison.
Someone mentioned Doonesbury; I remember getting some consistent laughs of it back in the Eighties but (although I don’t follow it regularly) I can’t remember a single good laugh or memorable frame since then; Trudeau relies on the same gags and criticism over and over without bringing anything new to it. Mr. Butts burned out and grew stale long ago, Gary. Heck, it’s almost become as annoying and cliched as Family Circus. In any case, it’s nowhere close to Calvin & Hobbes.
Stranger
Personally, for sheer depth of understanding of the human condition, I prefer Peanuts to Krazy Kat. That said, Kat is the better strip. Pogo comes second after either, then C+H, over Little Nemo in Slumberland.
Bloom County was wonderful, but… it’s aged. Badly.
I want to echo Stranger’s sentiments. If Watterson had continued to grind it out for another dozen years, maybe our overall opinion of him wouldn’t be so high. But a lot of the cartoonists mentioned here definitely had a period of glory followed by a terrible descent into mediocrity – certainly Scott Adams and Trudeau, and I guess the Foxtrot guy as well, though I never was a huge fan of that strip. Schulz is the remarkable long-term exception.
It depends on the time frame.
Of the post-1980 comic strips: True.
Of all time: False.
RealityChuck: I have read a large representative sample of Little Nemo. It’s drawn very impressively, but I found it to be contentually tedious, thought that could be because I read a book of them in a couple of hours.
Little Nemo in Slumberland was the best comic strip ever.
Well, what did you think I was going to pick?
:eek:
No votes for Dondi?
<ducks and runs>
I vote for Calvin–and I grew up with Peanuts–heck, it helped me learn to read.
I chose Calvin because of the way Watterson revealed Calvin’s inner self. Charlie Brown sees himself as a loser–the place kicker who can never even touch the ball. The rest of Peanuts see him that way,too (except maybe Linus–I always thought that Linus had enough compassion for everyone).
Calvin is a different kid altogether–he has grandiose dreams and Machievellan schemes, but he is brought back, drop kicked, and forced back to Earth via his parents, his teacher and Hobbes (and the babysitter!). Poor Calvin! He wants so much and he is indomitable. Charlie Brown just seems to suffer stoically. Blech.
Both are timeless.
My parents loved Pogo–except for his Christmas carols, and the appearance of the drawings, I didn’t care for it. I should probably read it as an adult.
I like Foxtrot-but it’s not in the same league as C&H and Peanuts. Neither is Dilbert, really.
Doonesbury is boring! It was great in the '70’s, but now? Meh.
If we are to judge panels–we need to bring in most of the New Yorker cartoonists-some could give TFS a run for its money.
It might also be said that, for all its brilliance, Calvin and Hobbes never really evolved the way Peanuts did. Watterson started with a simple premise — an imaginative boy, his tiger, and his exasperated parents — and subtly peeled away any details that distracted from the purity of that dynamic; Calvin and Hobbes was pretty much the same on the day it ended as on the day it began, though the gulf between the “warm fuzzy” strips and the bitter strips was more noticeable. The strip ended because the premise wouldn’t allow Watterson to go any further (without descending into hack formula, that is).
Schulz’s approach was the opposite: while Peanuts’ visual design became simpler, the cast became much more complex, with new characters adding not just opportunities for gags, but new subject matter and new styles of humor (contrast Snoopy’s warm, innocent interactions with Woodstock versus his largely contemptuous dealings with the kids). If Calvin and Hobbes embodies a kind of comic Zen simplicity, Peanuts is a surrealist epic, voraciously ranging far and wide to incorporate as many modes and styles of humor as possible into its sad-but-determined worldview.
I can see why people respond to the purity of Watterson’s vision, and to the integrity with which he stuck to it. I just don’t think his achievement ultimately compares to Schulz’s.
While I’m on the subject, people in these threads often tend to praise Watterson for quitting “while he was ahead,” while damning Schulz for failing to do the same. I think this is misguided and fails to fairly take into account the artists and the specific characteristics of their work. Watterson was an idealist, and anyone even a little familiar with the man knows about the intense arguments he had with his syndicate over licensing, newspaper space, sabbaticals, etc., all so he could produce the best comic strip he possibly could. Calvin and Hobbes is shot through with that idealism; the strip’s lamentations over the world’s greed, laziness, shallowness and stupidity are plain to see. In that context, it makes sense that Watterson would quit if he felt he couldn’t do the very best work he was capable of; that, to him, is the ultimate act of integrity.
Schulz was completely different. Just as Charlie Brown never forfeited a game no matter how many runs he gave up or how many times he was knocked off the mound, so Schulz couldn’t quit, even if his hands shook or if it became increasingly harder to find humor in his characters’ harsh world. (It took the onset of blindness to make him finally put down his pen.) Schulz thought Gary Trudeau “unprofessional” for taking sabbaticals and forcing newspapers to buy strips they had already run; when he went in for bypass surgery, Schulz made sure he had enough new material built up to allow himself time off to recover. (I dont’ know if Schulz criticized Watterson specifically, but I can’t imagine he had much sympathy for Watterson’s conflicts with editors and the syndicate.) Drawing a comic strip was Schulz’s dream, the only thing he had ever really wanted to do in life; to quit because he didn’t feel he was consistently producing A+ work would’ve been a betrayal of the commitment he had made to himself and to his art form.
How about this: What is the best comic strip still actively being produced? None of C&H, The Far Side, or Peanuts fit this bill, and you can even argue that Garfield and (shudder) The Family Circus have been on autopilot for so long they do not qualify, either.
I propose Get Fuzzy. It can routinely raise a genuine laugh out of me, sometimes even a good belly-laugh, and I am not a person who really laughs out loud that easily.
I agree with the impressive art (Windsor McKay may have been the greatest of all comic strip artists), but haven’t been able to get into the stories, since I only see them one strip at a time.
However, Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend works on all levels: the most psychologically sophisticated strip ever (he even influenced Freud, who reprinted a German ripoff of Dreams in Wit and the Relation to the Unconscious). It’s a strip about all the basic human fears – death, embarassment, sexual anxiety, hell, speaking in public – and is funny in the process.
Best current strip is probably Dilbert, with Get Fuzzy coming up on the inside.
If we’re talking about strips that are still published, then I say Monty. I loved this strip even in its Robotman days. Naming a hairless cat Fleshy may have been the funniest thing in a comic strip, ever.
I’m inclined to give the nod to Peanuts over Calvin & Hobbes, for reasons already mentioned. I give Schulz extra points for his longevity, his groundbreakingness, and his cast of characters (C & H didn’t really give us any truly memorable characters except the title two).
On the other hand, Watterson is a better artist than Schulz and at least 90% of the other cartoonists on the comics page today, and his drawing skills contributed to the appeal and humor of the strip. And C&H was consistently good: if you put the weakest, say, 25% or 50% of the C&H strips up against the weakest 25% or 50% of any other strip, C&H would come out on top.
Most days, Get Fuzzy leaves me cold. I’d rather read Foxtrot, Zits, or Baby Blues. Dilbert used to be quite good (though not all that well-drawn), but now it’s way past its prime. FWIW I find Blondie to be the best of the ancient, should-have-been-retired-years-ago strips.
I think there’s merit to each position: Watterson’s idealism and resistence to marketing, and Schultz’s passion to keep doing the work that he loved as long as he could. I don’t think either can be used as a criteria for judging the oeurve of each artist. I’d rather sit down and thumb through the whole of Calvin & Hobbes, though, than through Peanuts; part of that may just be that I was in my teens and twenties when Watterson hit his stride, whereas Schultz probably hit his high point before I was born and kept going long after I’d lost interest in following daily strips, so I remember some of his more tiresome periods and forget or missed his better work. In any case, it’s clear that Watterson owes no small debt of influence to Peanuts. But I’d rather read Calvin & Hobbes.
I have to agree with that, to the point that it is the only strip I follow regularly. (I catch This Modern World when I remember to pick up the LA free paper, but I habitually look up Get Fuzzy online nearly every day.) I like the fact that his pets aren’t humans in animal form, like those in Dilbert; they’re just a cat and dog who happen to speak, but in all other ways behave like their respective species. And while it’s not in quite the same class as Calvin & Hobbes (though some strips get close; I have a couple of Sunday colour panels on my office door that dip into existential absurdity) it certainly earns its laughs, especially that Bucky Kat and his self-impressed faux-wit.
Stranger
Are we limited to newspaper comics for this discussion? Because there are some truly outstanding weekly and daily comics being produced and presented in an online format. Perry Bible Fellowship and The Parking Lot is full are strips in the Far Side mold that can be every bit as good as anything Larson came up with-and occasionally better as the artists are not limited by the mores of the family newspaper. Something Positive and Sinfest are daily strips in the traditional mold that consistently acheive a high level of quality. I’m not saying that any of these strips are better than C&H or Peanuts or any of the others mentioned in this thread-but the field has exploded rapidly in the last decade and some of the very best work never makes it past a Syndicate’s front door.
My vote is for Calvin & Hobbes. Who else gave us tyannosaurs…in F-14s! It doesn’t get any better than that.
Personally, I’m impressed by Watterson’s desire to improve his artwork over time. He actually took a sabbatical to study dinosaurs so that he could draw them more accurately. Compare the dino in the aformentioned “Calvin morphing in the museum” strip to those who donned flight suits.
I rank Herman the tops for pure humor in its simplest form and C&H for its addictive comedy that takes a couple frames to set up. Calvin and Hobbes each had their own definite character and personality, whereas Herman was different every time, yet always hysterical.
If we go online, then Penny Arcade kicks everyone’s ass. Even Far Side, for me.
Oh man, so true. I LOVE Lil’ Abner. I’ve been going nuts trying to find all the “dalies” books in order, but thus far only have read number one. Gah. They are really hard to find, it seems.
And Foxtrot has to be, without a doubt, my favorite comic strip ever. I eat, sleep, and breathe Foxtrot. I have every book out so far…
…however even though it’s my favorite, I still couldn’t say it was best of all time or even in the top three tier. Still gotta hold out for C&H. Like some said in here, re-reading them as an adult only made them better, IMHO.
That’s easy. It’s clearly url=“Popular Comics - GoComics”]Pearls Before Swine. Mediocre artwork, but the wordplay and jokes are genuinely and consistently clever and delightfully twisted.
