. . . without genitals.
Doesn’t anyone remember the Dysfunctional Family Circus? It existed in various forms, but the classic was Spinnwebe’s version that ran for 500 cartoons, had a board of editors and a system for sorting user-submitted captions into groups (including ones that others could improve upon.)
It was damn funny.
That too. Spinn was Chicago based, and there was a get-together in Evanston.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Jack Chick and the Chick tracts yet. Or are they considered comic books?
dorvann, I realize this is going to make me very unpopular on this board, but I can think of two good things to say about Jack Chick’s work:
1.) He draws smokin’ hot women.
2.) Sometimes his pamphlets are a hoot. As a dungeon master, I get a big laugh out of “Dark Dungeons.” He wrote one about a Christian rock band and the degeneration of its members – I can’t remember the title and am too lazy to go to his web site – that had the line “… and Bobby’s become a vampire.”
Yeah I can understand that a lot of people would find his comics entertaining in a “so bad its humorous” way that would disqualify them from being the worst comic ever.
Jeez, three pages and no mention of For Better or Worse. Shittiest strip ever.
sorry
The rebooted FBoFW, certainly. It wasn’t always that bad.
Let us also remember the Nietzsche Family Circus, which paired random Family Circus cartoons with random Nietzsche quotes.
Who can forget Billy lecturing Jeffy, saying to him “One is most dishonest to one’s god: he is not allowed to sin.”
If they put out a Kindle version of the collected Prince Valiant at a decent price, I would seriously consider buying it and reading it. It’s one of those strips I’ve never really read for the same reason I don’t do comic books. That is, because I feel like I need to do 50+ years of reading to have any idea what is going on. It is always very pretty to look at.
There are story arcs that would last over a couple of weeks, but you don’t need to read every one of them to appreciate the strip. It’s sufficient to know that Val is a Prince of Thule and a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table. (Of course, it’s always helpful to spend some time reading the earliest strips, just to orient yourself.)
The period spans roughly 500 years, so there’s a lot of variety (and anachronisms).*
*I remember Val’s obituary in MAD Magazine: “Prince Valiant, a crusading knight, died today of natural causes. He was 946.”
What ‘rebooted’ strip? It’s all reruns now. For a brief time, Lynn Johnston would re-draw a strip or two to make it more relevant, and she may have produced a new Sunday strip (??) for a while. But she hasn’t done that in years, she’s into other projects now like designing textiles, and she is elderly and has health problems.
It wasn’t exactly rebooted. It was restarted. Lynn Johnston had planned to retire in 2007, then changed her mind. She made some changes at this point: the characters stopped aging and she started reusing old artwork. The “final” strip ran on August 31, 2008, after which she restarted the strip from the beginning, returning the characters to the ages they were when the strip began. Johnston called the format “new-runs.” About half the strips were really new, and the other half were actual re-runs. After a couple of years of this, she switched to nearly 100% re-runs, with occasional small changes to modernize the strip.
I think For Better or For Worse tilted toward worse when it became more of a soap opera strip than a humor strip. This happened gradually over the years. I don’t think it ever descended to the level of most of the other strips mentioned in this thread. Mallard Fillmore is an insult to the intelligence, Marvin is disgusting, and Close to Home is close to incompetent. For Better or For Worse was never as awful as these.
If I met a Rex Morgan in real life I would commit the act of mur-der. (said like those hand-rubbing, early 70’s exploitation flick announcers. Or Orson Welles.)
This is kind of off topic but it does relate to my earlier post about Chick tracts.
I was getting out of the store today and walking my groceries back to my car. I noticed a booklet on the ground and bent over to pickup it up. I then noticed it said Chick Publications on it and opened it up and read it. This actually was the first time I saw one of The Chick Tracts in printed form. (I’ve been only been familiar with them from what I read online previously.) I live in a kind of rural area so it strikes me as a weird coincidence after two days about writing about them I end coming across one.
Cathy.
Cathy.
Cathy.
Cathy.
+1
+1
+1
+1
Also, since this is past or present, there was a gawd-awful strip, I think that ran originally in the 50s & 60s about a baby in utero, and yes, it was a fully developed baby, with, IIRC, no umbilical cord or placenta present, and a very oddly drawn uterus. It was called Eggbert. It was full of jokes about the baby having a hangover after the mother had overindulged, and jokes where a girl twin was sometimes present, and they were shown doing what I can only describe as courting. I first read it when I was only 8 or so, and I knew it was squicky. I also knew without any knowledge of FAS, which I’m not even sure was identified until I was about 24, that baby hangover jokes were inappropriate.
Anyway, Eggbert will forever be my worst comic, and also a tribute to one of the things that was depressingly wrong with that time in history, and a strong reminder of why I’m glad that even though I was born in the sixties, it was at the tail-end, and my memories don’t really start until the 70s. (In fact, I have only two specific memories of the sixties-- my great-grandfather’s funeral, and episode 1 of Sesame Street.)