Okay, let me try out on you something that the writer of “Mutts” considers funny:
Panel 1: an alley filled with lidded garbage cans
Panel 2: one gabrage can’s lid is slightly off, with Mooch’s eyes and ears visible under the lid.
Panel 3: same as panel 1.
Now every cartoonist has his off-days, but Mutts had an entire week of variations on this “joke.” Funny?
Chaim Mattis Keller
Y’know, the “Lockhorns” guy DIED close to ten years ago. Why is it still running? Did he have THAT much of a backlog of material? Then again, they could be re-running stuff, and nobody’d notice.
Good points about crappy strips keeping new possibilities off the comics page, and about death being the only way to get rid of some of these people. Clearly, in the case of “B.C.,” even the fact of the cartoonist descending into gibbering insanity will not oust his work from the papers.
Years ago I had copies of the VERY early “B.C.” strips, in book form, circa 1960 or '61. They were quite amusing, and the different characters had different personalities, something Hart hasn’t bothered with for about thirty-five years now.
In many cases a cartoonist’s contract gives the syndicate the right to hire other artists to “fill in” after the death of the original cartoonist. This is the case with “Blondie” and several other strips which have outlived their creators. In the case of Bill Hoest, creator of “The Lockhorns”, his wife Bunny took the reins after his death in 1988.
Any creative energy that went into “B.C.” probably fizzled out years ago. Imagine drawing the same strip every day for 30 years! Nobody can go that long without running out of ideas — or going insane.
Speaking of Gil Thorp, and bearing in mind Mojo’s comment about all the exclamation! marks! in! bad! comics!:
The Sports Illustrated humor columnist, Rick Reilly, once wrote a column on Gil Thorp that was pretty funny. In fact, I tore it out of my brother’s SI.
Did you know that Gil Thorpe is written by the same Jerry Jenkins that writes the Left Behind series of books.
SterlingNorth
Things that make you go hmmmm…
Well, as sorry as I am that Jeff MacNelly died (mainly because I enjoyed his political cartoons as opposed to Shoe), I do hope they pull Shoe soon. Between Shoe and Peanuts, the comics page of the Chicago Tribune is starting to look like a charnel house.
Try as I might, there is a cartoon called Get Fuzzy that totally slips under my humor radar. Apparently, the entire thing is some guy sitting on his couch with a fat cat and a fat dog and watching as the cat insults the dog. It looks like it’s trying to be some sort of new college-alternative type piece, but really it’s about as I described.
In the back of one of the Foxtrot collections, Bill Amend makes some interesting comments about comics today. He says that although many people (including cartoonists) would love to see more cutting-edge material, the papers don’t like risking pissing off those who might be offended and start protesting, etc. He also points out that, sadly enough, cartoonists are loathe to complain to the papers since they only get paid about $5 per week per paper (actually, the paper pays $10, but the syndicate takes half and larger papers may pay more) for dailies and double that (i.e. $10/week) if the paper picks up a color Sunday strip as well. In other words, they don’t make enough cash to risk pissing off the papers. I suppose once you get famous enough to live off licensing agreements on calenders and stuffed toys you can complain things, but the average struggling cartoonist simply doesn’t have the option to be edgy and potentially insulting.
Good lord…am I the only one who can’t stand Wee Pals? Or is it so far off everybody else’s radar screen that you don’t even mention it?
Doonesbury can drop Duke’s little guy in the head.
Also, get rid of the “icon” characters, the cigarette, the leaf, the waffle, the cowboy hat. Learn to draw the candidates, already. Like the cartoonist on the Letters page.
Actually, I really USED to like Wizard of ID, Garfield, and
Overboard, but they all are nearly worthless now. Robotman, when it focused on the title char, was & still is funny, but there are too many “loser single male” male comix for monty to be funny. The Duplex is terrible, perhaps the most sexist strip out there. Let’s get rid of all the “dead” strips, despite the fact that some Peanuts were great.
And I think Boondocks is just plain mean & unfunny.
Wee Pals?
I heard of it, but in a historical* book about comics over the last hundred or so years. Wasn’t it an attempt to make a multi-cultural Peanuts? Damn I wish I could find that book.
I thought the strip was killed sometime in the 70s.
Ironically, enough I was preforming a search for [url=“http://www.creators.com/comics/wee”]that strip. And I found it. And judging from the strip they published June 7th, I don’t blame you ricepad
Schultz was not a mediocre cartoonist!! He was the reason for the triad of Breathed, Watterson and Larson. He even tackled modern topics until he retired, such as diapilated schools, and children’s disinterest in education. what other cartoonist is tackling those topics today?
Well, Schultz sure ain’t tackling it any more.
I was less shocked to find that “Wee Pals” was still around than to see that “Tiger” was. That strip made me queasy as a child thirty years ago; why in god’s name is it still being printed?
I know that I’m being a pendant but I need to make a successful link, dammit!
Wee Pals, the strip that never dies!
SterlingNorth
[sub]just think of this as a post-count pad[/sub]
Well Lincoln Peirce is doing it rather unsucessfully with his Big Nate (disinterest in education). The Boondcks (which I like) may tackle it in the future. Though anyway I do like good ol’ Charlie Brown.
With that being said, it’d be nice for it to give up its space for a new strip. Give a cartoonist a break.
You mean that they are NOT rerunning old “Lockhorns,” “Beetle Bailey,” and “Cathy” comics like they are the old “Peanuts?” I thought that each artist produced one month’s worth of cartoons fifty years ago and the papers just keep rerunning them.
Two haven’t been mentioned. “Love is…” is amazingly awful, but not exactly aimed at us, is it? On the other hand, I have seen “The Simpsons” a couple of times and was grossly disappointed. Whoever is doing it has produced the palest, most pathetic, imitation of the series! Do they even watch the show? Like so many of the primetime cartoons the networks threw together to capitalize on the success of the original, the people who do it don’t get it at all. It is so totally dumbed down that, if I were Groening, I’d be embarassed.