“Beetle” was a spin-off of “Hi and Lois”. He’s Lois’ brother.
My mother-in-law loved this strip and used to send clippings to my wife. Given that they got divorced in real life we can read it for the subtle digs.
The list of comic strips that wore out their welcome and became horribly repetitive and unfunny includes Overboard, Garfield, Get Fuzzy and Sherman’s Lagoon.
Blondie is one of the few strips I will glance at, because it’s still at least mildly amusing at times.
Of all the ongoing strips, the biggest WTF goes to Funky Winkerbean, home of the truly pointless.
I thought it was the other way around, that we first met Hi and Lois when Beetle visited them on leave.
And seriously, complaining about Hagar but then holding up Dilbert as an example of a funny strip? Dilbert was funny once, but it used up all of its material over a decade ago. Hagar might be a bit stale, but it’s at least better than Dilbert is, now.
Garfield actually managed to successfully jump the shark some years ago, when Liz finally started going out with Jon: It added new potential to the strip. I think they’ve now managed to run that well dry, though, too.
And I think the worst offender for not-funny strips is Mutts. It’s got at most one joke a week, that gets repeated six times, and it’s usually not even a very good joke.
Zombie strips, they’re called. The walking dead.
Young artists try occasionally to bring new blood to the dead tree funny pages, but they never catch on with the (old) readership, and they eventually give up and either do web-comics or get a job at the gas station.
This is why I spend more time over at the Comics Curmudgeon than here anymore. Those people know what’s really important in life. Sneering at Judge Parker and Mary Worth and Beetle Bailey.
Ah, Andy Capp, you wife-beating drunk.
Mallard Fillmore is so unfunny that it’s pathetic. Do any of the Dope’s resident conservatives actually think it is funny?
Doonsbury was funny for a long time, but not anymore.
I miss “Brewster Rocket, Space Guy”.
Our local paper actually dropped Mallard Fillmore a while back. They’d added it as a kind of “counterbalance” to the radically socialist, anti-American rantings of Doonesbury, but when Trudeau stopped making new daily strips, the paper dropped them both.
Until about a month ago. The old, crusty, half-senile Fox News watchers demanded that Mallard be returned to the “funny” pages, so back he came.
As mentioned above, it’s really tough to get any new strips added to newspapers. Our paper has had several votes and surveys about strips to keep or new strips to add, and the readers keep asking to keep the same old Blondie, Hagar, Wizard of Id, Familt Circus, Garfield, etc., etc. Heck, they’re running old Peanuts strips now, for Snoopy’s sake.
Mallard Fillmorehas been a national disgrace for years. The artist is a wife-beating alcoholic, which I would say could explain the consistent anger, execrable art, and awful writing, but I have a feeling that a lot of comic strip creators were probably wife-beating alcoholics back in the days when wife-beating alcoholics were not frowned upon socially, and THEY managed to turn out good comics.
That’s the main thing. I’m 54 and people more than a few years younger than me just don’t read newspapers, period. Newspaper readers skew old. And Grandma likes her old favorites.
My local paper also carries “Pearls Before Swine”, and I would wager a bet that lots of Dopers would enjoy this one.
No, I’m not being snarky.
I would imagine a lot of us also like “Get Fuzzy” even if we aren’t owned by pets.
When I was in my early 30s, “Rhymes With Orange” went nationwide, and I was in a book club with mostly women who were a generation older than me. One evening, one of them said, “I do not get ‘Rhymes With Orange’” and the others agreed, and I piped up that I loved it, because it was by, for, and about my generation.
I’ve seen it more recently, and it was meh. 
Get Fuzzy is still better than average, but it’s definitely going downhill.
I think my current favorites are Frazz, Zits, and Non Sequitur.
Did anyone notice that the artwork and lettering in Hagar the Horrible look different today than usual? There must be a substitute artist.
I like “Frazz” too.
Anyone else think Caulfield is an unidentified G&T?
Until I saw that second line I was sure you were being snarky. My newspaper (which I no longer read) added it a few years ago. I saw very little funny about it, and got really tired of the succession of strips that boiled down to “elaborate setup for not very funny or interesting pun followed by the breaking of the fourth wall via threats to the cartoonist”…once would have been more than sufficient!
Hold on, I did remember when I was little that it looked that Andy was the one getting the funny beatings from his wife.
Ah, I found the reason, it was early that Andy was the abuser, but the wife gradually got the upper hand.
This sounds about right. It used to make me laugh out loud; now, it gets a grudging smirk.
It’s been ages since I’ve read a comic strip.
It’s been ages since I’ve read a real newspaper.
Plus I don’t go wandering around online trying to find a specific strip. In the greater scheme of things they’re not important. Besides, I have all the Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes books 
It may not seem like much now, but when it first came out, Hagar the Horrible was a comics phenomenon – at least within the industry. Its circulation grew at an astounding rate, faster than any other strip at the time.
That may not mean much – it could be that Dik Browne’s strip appealed to comics page editors more than other strips did. Certainly the strip was never the megahit with the public that “Peanuts” was.
I agree that it was better when Browne was doing it, but it was never one of my favorites.
By the way, the strip started after the originally beardless Browne grew facial hair. He really did look like Hagar when he was drawing it: