OK, that one actually manages to match Bushmiller’s style of humour without aping a specific joke.
Ironically, it’s the same basic formula as Jaimes’s first strip, which you’ve claimed is not Bushmillery, or this Bushmiller strip - character commenting about something going on off-panel, then revealing what they seemed to be talking about wasn’t what they were talking about - the difference being in the Gilchrist, Nancy’s as in the dark about what’s really going on as the audience, whereas in the Bushmiller and the Jaimes’, Joe and Nancy’s teacher know what’s going on.
At the time, I don’t think ANYone expected it to be “funny as hell”? It was an underground comic, meant to be an anti-comic strip. It was meant to subvert the boring strips of the time. That’d be like asking “Why wasn’t Eraserhead funny like the other movies I’ve seen?”
I agree, but Peanuts was fairly unusual in that Schulz kept doing it all himself up to the end. Many long-running strips have had other people doing all or part of the work long before the original creator’s death.
It’s been a few years since I regularly read the comics, and when I do once in a while read through a newspaper’s comic section, my reactions have mostly been cringes, winces, shrugs, and “People actually like this stuff?” And I react that way at least as much to the newer, more unfamiliar strips and to the old legacy/zombie strips.
Zippy was always about absurdity and non sequitur. I can see how people could not understand the point, but it was a pretty good strip if you understood what was going on.
Worst right now is Thatababy. It isn’t even on the same planet as funny.
I adored *Peanuts *from childhood on. But, by the last few years of the strip, it seemed, to me, like it had gotten strange, and Schulz’s sense of humor wasn’t as sharp as it once had been. (To be fair, he’d suffered some health issues.)
At that time, part of me wished that Schulz would have realized that the strip was a shadow of what it had once been, and retire it. And, of course, once he did announce his retirement, due to health issues, he died just weeks later.
One of my favorite books of 2017 was How to Read Nancy by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden. This book features, among other things, an 80+ page analysis of a single Nancy strip. Highly recommended for anyone interested in comics.
Due to the ALL CAPS nature of comic book lettering (which of course was all *hand-*lettering until a while ago), I remember reading (back in the Silver Age) that Marvel and DC had outlawed the word “FLlCK”.
This is my vote as well. Several years ago, I even started a thread about it:
The gist of the thread was that the Chicago Tribune added *Reply All *on a trial basis for three months. It then lost an online poll convincingly to Dogs of C Kennel, 94% to 6%, and was therefore eliminated from the paper. I was so obsessed with the poll, I actually had a nightmare that Reply All had crept up to 7% at one point!
I’d find “Baby Blues” a lot funnier if they got rid of Wanda, who is a stereotypical spineless housewife with no outside interests, or at least changed her into a more modern woman.
“Zack Hill” is ridiculous too. I liked the strip when it was about the kid and his mom and friends, but now it’s all about their housemates (he lives in a huge house with his widowed mother, who rents out their extra bedrooms).
