Because having your own ox gored isn’t funny…to you?
And that doesn’t explain why the execrable Mallard Fillmore still shows up on my hometown paper’s Sunday funnies…
Uh, no. Because it’s more political commentary than a comic. And we don’t get Mallard Fillmore. Try again.
One of my favorite Far Side cartoons had two of Gary Larson’s typical husband/wife characters answering their door to find some very differently drawn characters.
The husband says something like, “Oh, you’re looking for Apartment 3-G, or one of those other SERIOUS cartoons.”
That’s more or less what has happened a few times over they years at the Vancouver Sun. They run a few new trial comic strips and hold voting on which of the new strips people like and which old ones should get pulled to make room for the new ones. It would appear that most of the people who vote in these things are younger, because every single time, people have voted overwhelmingly to put Rex Morgan out of its misery, so it got pulled. Then the complaints started. Rex Morgan came back, and I think that most people have now accepted that it isn’t ever going away.
No danger of that - they’re out of there by 9am and headed to the mall for a walk.
blowero:
It’s been dramatic for longer than that - wasn’t Lisa’s unplanned pregnancy at least fifteen years ago?
And by the same token, it’s still funny, too. Today’s (12/13/2004) strip got a big laugh out of me.
I like the strips that do the gag-a-day in the context of a continuing story and occasionally eschew the gag to move the story along seriously. In addition to For Better and For Worse and Funky Winkerbean, Luann (which is becoming one of my favorites, though he’s not doing a great job of juggling his sub-plots) and Jump Start fit into this category.
IIRC the Far Side couple had the obligatory cow reference in their living room, in the form of a picture on the wall.
What differentiates good serious comics from bad for me is the pace. For Better or Worse has several plot lines, and things move along. Mary Worthless or Rex Morgan have one. One conversation in Mary Worth took upwards of a month to complete. Unless, of course, moving fast is unrealistic - then they do it. See the last continuity, when woman’s no-good son sits himself on a bench and sells bad drugs to first idiot who comes along, right in the open. Who takes them right there and collapses.
I guess being targeted to old people means that the writers can get away with being totally clueless. I remember an Apartment 3-G panel from not that long, with a computer screen showing
“Email from the Internet.”
I wonder what the Internet’s addy is?
I had to double-check my local paper just now to see if “Judge Parker” is still there–it’s that invisible to me. Yup, still there. They only recently got rid of “Mark Trail”.
Blowero:
Oh, he’s got an angle all right, fundamentalist religion and conservative politics (albeit not every day). This from a guy whose 2 female characters are named “Cute Chick” and “Fat Broad” (as pointed out on The Daily Show). Actually, IMO B.C. occasionally manages to be funny, unlike the majority of strips these days.
Sunday’s BC strip got a chuckle out of me.
That doesn’t make any sense. Why would a fundamentalist be drawing a comic strip about cave-men? How do you know about his religious beliefs? 
Because he trumpets them.
I like Mark Trail - it rules.
What I don’t like about the Funky Winkerbean/Luann-when-it’s-“Serious” strips is how seriously they take themselves. For Better or For Worse is cool, but Funky Winkerbean is so self-consciously heavy that I want to slap somebody. It’s like a late season MAS*H, and that’s about as injurious a charge as I can level.
Because sometimes we accidentally read his strips.
[linkety](http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pag ename=article&node=&contentId=A99035-1999Apr4)
Because the strip has been going since 1958 and he only took up Fundamentalism within the past few years.