I don’t like it, nor do I like Baby Blues or Garfield. Unfortunately (in this situation), I read so quickly that to pass over the strip is to read it. Imagine the effort it took not to claw my eyes out when my paper used to run Mary Worth.
I take extra trouble to skip over FBorW every day, because it’s stuck in the middle of my favorite comics site:
http://home.overzealous.com:8080/comics/index.html
http://www.comics.com
I read it daily for years, but as it started to get more soap operatic and preachy, I had to give it up… it had just got too lame for me. I can’t sustain an interest in a form of entertainment that makes me want to slap fictional characters upside the head for being morons.
I’m 45, Doonesbury reader since 1971. However much the artwork has improved over the years–and by that yardstick alone, it’s pretty good–the artwork was never its big draw. If you were to make a list of the top ten, hundred, 500 most beautifully-drawn comic strips of the last century, Doonesbury wouldn’t make any of them.
FBOFW would.
You’ve got to be kidding me. The characters in FBofW often look similar enough that I sometimes need a scorecard to tell them apart, and I’ve been reading it for years. I’m convinced that the only reason Anthony has a cheesy pornstar moustache is to make him look different from all of Elizabeth’s other male “friends.” She can’t draw a nose properly either Besides, even without that, it certainly deserves unseating for the “animated” strips on her website in which characters blink at you, among other things.
And the dumpy butts. And they’re always prominently on display.
WOW…it’s almost exactly as old as I am (born the day after)
Yeah, like that. I was saying to my partner last night that I keep being surprised in the three FBoFW threads running right now when people recount past storylines, because the characters are all so similar-looking that I can’t even remember which one was in what story arc.
Just my opinion, but I think the strip “jumped the shark” when Elly got pregnant with April.
Personally, I read it for its rare glimpse into the domestic life of that most exotic of foreign species, the Canadian! 
One time one of the strips mentioned Thanksgiving, and my newspaper inserted a line explaining that the strip was set in Canada where Thanksgiving takes place in October. I was just a wee bit insulted that they felt they had to explain that to me. 
Ah, but they weren’t explaining it to you! They were explaining it to Erma and Cletus down at the Shop ‘n’ Go.
I read the strip faithfully when I was a kid, and Mike and Liz were also kids. I thought it was a lot funnier back then. It started losing me around the time April was born, though. The other kids were growing or grown up, and the strip took on a more serious, issue-oriented, soap-opera-esque tone, and the adding of a new baby seemed forced to me. Until that point, the strip had been somewhat based on Lynn Johnston’s real family, but April was a complete fiction created to recapture the original child-rearing aspect of the strip, and I didn’t think it worked.
I used to love it, but now I think it’s meh. Anything pre-April, though, is still gold.