Also, I can’t believe this thread is onto its second page without one reference to Crock..
Shitty when it began in the 1970s, shitty straight through to today, and now the creators are dead and it is still running for some reason, shitty as always.
Oh, why did I click that link in post #38?
Coming in to second Crock. Other legacy strips that people complain about, like Hi & Lois, Beetle Bailey, B.C., Blondie, and so on, were at least funny, popular, novel, and sometimes groundbreaking in their heyday. Not so for Crock.
Back in the '70s, I had a hardcover collection of PV strips going back to its origin. I read that book from cover to cover practically nonstop.
No way I would ever call PV a “bad” comic strip. It’s brilliant.*
*Despite its historical inaccuracies, which I’m more than happy to overlook.
I read it. Brilliant artwork.
In defense of the new Nancy: It’s quite clever on its own terms. It’s not the iconic strip Ernie Bushmiller drew, but Man I hated the Gilchrist years. Mawkish humor, incompetent art, desecrating a classic. Jaimes is several steps up. I miss the sexy exhibitionist that was Fritzi Ritz, but she’s gone and it’s time to move on. (I told a beautiful American singer here in Korea that she should front a band called “Fritzi Ritz and the Nancy Boys,” but I don’t think it will happen. The resemblance is uncanny!)
I think Rose is Rose is pretty to look at. And sure, it is smarmy, lovey-dovey pap but it is miles better than the ugly drawn Kathy with her low self-esteem and stereotypical ‘women’ problems. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was drawn by a sausage-fingered 12 year old boy mansplaining girls to his buddies.
Both of those strips are drawn by the same person, Brooke McEldowney. I saw that he’s also a professional violist who attended Juilliard but not that he’s a Lutheran minister. Or is the minister a character in “Pibgorn”?
IMHO, Olivia Jaimes is the worst thing to happen to Nancy since Jerry Scott. Maybe her artwork will improve over time; I hope it does but that is one strip currently off my “must read” list. OTOH, if she starts shifting toward his “modern” style, I’m done for good.
I hate the far side and bizarro. Mallard Fillmore is is from another universe where humor is endangered.
I think we’re talking about Hal Foster, (Someone else laterly) and he don’t belong here at all.
As far as I can tell this is the first time those words have been put in that order.
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose, but I agree that I don’t remember ever running into someone who hated The Far Side. Note the past tense: Gary Larson retired the comic 23 years ago, when he left the field (though, it looks like reruns are still in syndication).
It did inspire a number of similar one-panel strips, of varying levels of quality, including several that have been named in this thread (e.g., Bizarro, Argyle Sweater, and Close To Home).
I have noticed that I’m alone here in that, so far anyway. I came at the far side from a perspective of a mad mag kid, and a national lampoon/ SNL teenager, and I have been very critical of it, and the advent of bizarro drove me over the edge so that I grouped them all as kind of lame lampoon type deals that were spreading middlebrow irony all over. It seemed like to me it was always was aliens, ameoba, or animals in a human situation, ha ha. I am a big fan of the Dennis the menace one panels. Those were funny as hell.
We just know that if we admitted it, you would beat us up behind the school and steal our lunch money.
Difficult to comprehend that the comic atrocity that is Close To Home has been running for over 25 years. 25 minutes should have been too long.
Strange artwork.
What about “Love is…” as the worst comic? That’s the one I came in to mention, full of unending and disturbing glurge as expressed by a naked boy and girl. Is it still published?
So, the impression I get is “The Far Side” wasn’t edgy enough for you?
That’s fair. It wasn’t far enough for me.