Labs, you have officially joined my list of "people whose aesthetic judgment is not to be trusted."
Perhaps you could explain your loathing a bit, so as to make it seem a bit less utterly irrational.
Labs was just jealous because he missed out on all the face-sucking.
I used to love it, but I was pretty young & pretty dumb. The blandness of Opus suggests that my judgment was pretty off-base.
Or maybe I'm just angry because Berke Breathed made a big stink and refused to let Opus be published online.
First of all, Labs, I just put up the Friday afternoon post. We need some fucking coordination around here. Second, what's Bloom County?
Ogged is complaining about a co-blogger posting too much?
Ogged needs to assert editorial prerogatives, as well as a variety of other types of prerogatives.
what's Bloom County?
Where Family Circus takes place, duh.
Bloom County was excellent in its earliest days, when Milo Bloom was the main character. As his role decreased and the role of Opus increased, Bloom County descended steadily into irrelevance.
I dunno, Adam, when he did that before it caused some trouble.
It seemed funny to me until up around this point. Haven't thought of it much since.
I am loathe to loathe with you, but I never did like that strip much.
Our high school mascot was the penguin (in AZ, meant to be ironic I suppose), and my incredibly obnoxious geometry teacher thought it was clever to post Opus-centric strips in the classroom. Turned me off Bloom County for life.
Ogged, I am sorry about the timing. Before I wrote this, I checked the old threads but I missed your post.
As for BC, I hate the drawing style but the real issue is what I see as a kind of forced zaniness combined with a taste for easy targets.
I don't think I ever got the jokes. Were there jokes?
Given that you don't like "forced zaniness," Labs, is there any actual comic strip that you like?
Or are you such an Insufferable Comic Strip Snob that you only admire certain merely possible comic strips?
Yes, I'd like to hear what comic strips Labs doesn't loathe.
A lot of comic strips are variations on the same few jokes over and over, but BC seemed to have fewer and less-funny jokes.
Also, Labs, you shouldn't use that abbreviation, lest you invite confusion with that steaming pile of comic strip excrescence written by Johnny Hart.
10 gets it exactly right. I liked the human characters, and the pop-culture parodies centered around Bill the Cat were hilarious. I identified with Michael Binkley quite a lot as a young teen. And Milo Bloom was clearly ripped off by "Fox Trot".
Opus strikes me as a non-lobotomized version of Ziggy.
I actually liked Bloom County.
Let the mocking begin.
I mean, "Deathtongue"? I like Doonesbury a lot, though I acknowledge its creakiness. My local comics page is pretty slim pickings, but I can live with Sally Forth and Funky Winkerbean. Dilbert is spoiled by knowing about Scott Adams' blog, but it has its moments. In another sort of paper, I love Tom the Dancing Bug ("GodMan: the superhero with OMNIPOTENT powers!"-- I mean, that rulz) and Red Meat can be great, though it's sort of hit or miss for me. Tom Tomorrow is often good. I usually liked Far Side though I admit that articulating a notion of forced zaniness that rules this in while ruling Bloom County out will be hard.
No one asked, but I will tell you anyway: the least favorite are Family Circus, Blondie, Cathy ("I'm a vicious stereotype of women! Let's eat chocolate!"), BC (the stone age one), Mallard Fillmore...huh. This really isn't the MSM's finest hour.
Shoehorn Technique is currently the best comic out there.
forced zaniness combined with a taste for easy targets
Sounds like this blog I hang out at a lot.
Early Bloom County -- excellent. Later Bloom County -- bland, but still occasionally good.
Later Bloom County -- bland, but still occasionally good.
Outland -- like later Bloom County, but more disgusting and misanthropic.
Cow and Boy isn't bad, and bears surprisingly little relation to Cat and Girl.
The Far Side
I've heard of that! But I wouldn't call it "zany." More like absurdist.
Cathy ("I'm a vicious stereotype of women! Let's eat chocolate!")
They just removed Cathy from the Raleigh News&Observer's comics page, which I figured would be met with a giant yawn, but there were pathetic, friendless women people who complained mightily about it. I had no idea there was still an audience.
You had fucking better like Pogo, Labs.
Can't bring it to mind, teo. Cathy really grates on my nerves more as time goes by. That there are people committed to seeing it every day just makes me sad.
"We must protest fashion with our finger in the air!"
Fuck Cathy.
Funky Winkerbean? Sally Forth?
And you're casting aspersions on Bloom County?
Tom the Dancing Bug and (especially) Tom Tomorrow always leave me cold. Shrill soaks up funny like a foul-smelling sponge. And I really, really dislike cheap shots at religion (not because of any beliefs I personally hold, but it just seems so smug).
Foxtrot's pretty good. But the greatest comic I know of is the Perry Bible Fellowship (which blows Breathed's arguments about the web constraining the medium right out of the water).
Of course, Krazy Kat is the best comic strip ever.
zad, I anticipated that reaction. I think I'm ok with those because their sites are set a lot lower.
I remember reading something by some disillusioned newspaper person about how they had never got as many letters to the editor about any political issue as they got from people complaining when they stopped running Overboard.
Fucking Overboard! The comic strip set on a ship! (yes, that's its only distinguishing characteristic. I'm pretty sure the characters don't have names or personalities) Who are these people?
24: I mean, "Deathtongue"? It seemed fresher when people still gave a shit about spandex bands as something other than kitsch. The whole metal band arc had its moments, though ("Let's roll over Lionel Richie with a tank!").
But, Red Meat? Didn't that guy basically run out of ideas after the first fifty cartoons or so?
Okay, Perry Bible Fellowship may be better than Shoehorn Technique.
(It occurs to me: At some point I lost the habit of picking up the Reader. It's probably too late to go back now.)
Tom, TtDB does go into unfunny obvious territory from time to time, but the high points are pretty good. "GodMan" doesn't seem like an attack on religion to me at all-- it's a funny riff on the idea of omnipotence. GodMan vs. some lame-ass like Badger Man cracks me up, and the one with Dr Moral Relativism is hilarious for my line of work. Also, "Flowers for Trinitron" is a great piece, even if "boo for television" is not the most original line in the world. Also I kind of like Australopithicine Charlie and Comix for Old People.
44: red meat s/b garfield
fifty s/b five
Yeah, Red Meat I see rarely, so it doesn't get so tiresome. That one about white people all owning ventriloquist dummies is awesome, though.
I can't think of any comics I follow these days, web or otherwise. Sluggy Freelance, but I lost interest around 2002.
46: Well, I'll defer to your judgment. Since I stopped checking Salon regularly I haven't seen too much TtDB at all. I did usually enjoy the Super Fun Pack Comix strips.
Oh, one other webcomic recommendation: White Ninja. It's not always hilarious, but frequently is. I think of it as sort of the best-case-scenario college paper strip.
Which suddenly reminds me: Shallow Grave, a strip that originated at my school, was pretty good. I had a couple of classes with the author, who was a quiet and pleasantly weird guy.
Bloom County was great satire in the early 80's, but hasn't aged well. I retain an immense fondness for Berkeley Breathed, if only for this interview he did for the AV Club, in which he acknowledges:
O: People frequently compare you to [Calvin And Hobbes'] Bill Watterson, I think in part because both your strips centered on a sense of whimsy, but also because your work left them with few comparisons. Do you think there's a valid parallel?BB: No. He was the real thing. I was just scampering nude through the aisles before anybody could kick me out. Garry Trudeau was our greatest satirist in the second half of the century. Crazy ol' Bill Watterson created the purest comic strip, after Peanuts, probably. Or before Peanuts became a shadow. Bless him for quitting at the top. It's not easy.
But, Red Meat? Didn't that guy basically run out of ideas after the first fifty cartoons or so?
Probably. OTOH, he seems to be cool with the Red Meat Construction Set, so you can build your own and improve upon what he's done.
I don't know if A Softer World technically counts as a comic strip, but if so, nothing else competes.
47: Garfield is an excursion into despair.
Humor doesn't age well and novelty counts for a lot. If you were reading Bloom County when it was new in the 80's, it was funny. If you are reading it now, it's not funny. All the comics you like now will be dumb/annoying to everyone reading them for the first time in ten years. You may still think they're funny, because you'll be traveling back to now when you read them. But they won't be funny then.
Wrong...I read all my parents' Bloom County collections in the early-mid 90's, and came to the consensus of the other people here. Also, they taught me a lot about politics. (although I kept wanting them to explain who these mysterious "Caspar Weinberger" and "Ed Meese" people were)
53: Also, one has to admire Breathed for the quote, "I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners."
59: True if the subject of the humor is transient, although I'll note that Trudeau's older works are still funny, insightful caricatures of their times. But Calvin & Hobbes is eternal.
Good points. A little research suggests that what I was remembering was the late Bloom County/Outland stuff, which is agreed to be less good than the early 80s material.
xkcd is a particular favorite of mine at the moment and today they even have a cock joke of sorts.
Ned's right; topical humor often doesn't age well, but it can if it's good. I think Pogo and Bloom County are hilarious, and I first encountered both in published collections. Same for older Doonesbury. Non-topical strips like Calvin and Hobbes and Krazy Kat are, of course, timeless.
("Let's roll over Lionel Richie with a tank!").
You have to quote the entire couplet:
"Middle of the road, man it stinks. / Let's run Lionel Richie over with a tank."
I still think there's something brilliant in that.
59: I don't think that's true. A good measure of how superficial humour is, is how badly it ages would be more like it. Pogo's political stuff is badly out of date, but doesn't seem stale like, say, bloom county.
Bloom County did suck. Cathy is on another level.
In general I am happy that the Internet that makes it easy to avoid comic strips.
Back when they made the complete Doonesbury available online, I read through something like five years of it, keeping a window open at all times over the course of several months. It seemed to me to have aged well.
The first Doonesbury collection is freakishly good.
It's shocking how many of the classic Doonesbury storylines are in that collection (From B.D. going to Vietnam and meeting Phred to Joan Caucus applying to Law School.).
Doonesbury's continuing storylines can be great. I think everything I know about 70s politics came from those collections. Remember when Joan and Rick Redfern hooked up? Good times.
Is there anyone still doubting that I was an awkward child?
I would have been a lot more pissed up there at comment 6 if I'd known you'd just posted about a fucking comic strip.
I'm glad that someone linked to A Softer World, because I was about to get up and do something. This is a good one.
57: Wow, that actually makes Garfield funny!
Is there anyone still doubting that I was an awkward child?
Should we have been previously?
I read Bloom County in 80's as well. It still sucked.
57 is great. I'm making some of my own, sadly enough.
76: oh, come on. Like mini-Cala had completely typical enthusiasms? The imagination reels.
73: You're right. From now on, only Althouse.
77: Those who claim that Bloom County sucked are obliged to name a comic strip that does not suck.
Calvin and Hobbes doesn't count, as this is too easy an answer.
I like Lio. Nobody else? Here's one especially for ogged.
81: nice! I miss the dysfunctional family circus.
Pogo is not funny. Clever, classic, insightful, and still worth reading, yes. Haha funny, no. I've read some of the early Doonesbury and really liked it. Didn't laugh, though.
Comic arts of whatever sort can be classic because they contain timeless elements, but teh funny isn't one of them. Haha funny has to contain an element of the unexpected, novel, or paradoxical. Any novel humorous element, if successful, will become unfunny precisely because it'll be normalized and lose its novelty.
All of y'all who think Calvin and Hobbes is timeless, be sure, in 20 years, to find your hippest, smartest, most open-minded young friend or relative and show him or her your favorite strips. When your youthful friend fails to laugh, find me online and tell me how totally right I was.
57: You know, it took me a while to figure out what was different.
79: I'm not saying that house isn't glass, just that I'm throwing stones. Mini-cala was a complete dork. Hell, non-mini-Cala is a complete dork. P.S. the clue was the profession.
I miss the dysfunctional family circus.
See, now 87 is funny. But you won't find that in your local paper.
84: I'm not that familiar with older comic strips, but what about old Merry Melodies cartoons as a counterargument? They've aged pretty well.
Even better than the Dysfunctional Family Circus is the mini-comic "You're Short, Bald, and Ugly, Charlie Brown!" (Created anonymously by Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Seth.)
Dysfunctional Family Circus
Ever actually listen to the lyrics about Rudolph the differently nosed? That's a dysfunctional family!
The most offensive holiday special ever.
89: Hm, I dunno if I'd go haha over Merry Melodies, but I have recently laughed at some Chuck Jones era Warner Brothers toons. Since I prefer not to concede that you have a point, now I'm going to have to take a moment to come up with a rationalization for that that protects my thesis.
Please stand by.
86: Hey, it was a very happy Christmas when I got Doonesbury Dossier: The Reagan Years. There are dorkier things, but not many.
90: Holy shit -- I need to find a copy of that.
93: Looney Tunes has indeed remained funny.
I read Doonesbury and Bloom County decades after they first came out...both aged well. Doonesbury had a very slow graceful decline--I'm not sure exqactly when it began. And it's still not bad. Bloom County was MUCH faster, but the early ones really are hilarious (or at least they were 5-8 years ago when I read them).
I am weirdly addicted to the Savage chickens.
(the captions aren't even funny 3/4 of the time. I just love the drawings of the chickens for some reason.)
You know, the early Charlie Brown strips were really good, so the haters can suck it.
A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible is really good at times.
My miniscule Indian bike rider cock.
follow up survey: `Indian men found to be unusually honest in surveys' ?
36 is totally a joke, right? "Churchy LaFemme" is like the best name for a comic strip character evar. The only "Bloom County" I can remember is one from about 1983 or so when gas prices bottomed out, and there was a crazy guy who wanted to use gas in place of any other liquid, such as the cat's milk. That was a funny strip. I for one am happy to see that no one has seen fit to mention the biggest comic strip excrescence ever.
I was very fond of Bloom County, but I like the silly (or, I suppose, 'forced zaniness').
No one's mentioned The Fusco Brothers, perhaps the greatest comic strip of its time? ("Newark, city of lights, city of magic. City of small friendly animals.")
Churchy LaFemme was not in Cathy.
The Fusco Brothers? You mean this thing? De gustibus and all that, I guess.
De gustibus and all that, I guess.
Very restrained of you. I, on the other hand feel free to say that you have no soul.
I note that Jeanne Kirkpatrick just became morally equivalent to...many things.
Let's just celebrate our agreement about Bloom County and leave it at that.
The Fusco Brothers always seemed pretty generic to me. Frank and Ernest, however, is often genius.
I've always thought of The Fusco Brothers as being like Ernie except not funny. Maybe it's the artwork.
Non Sequitur has its moments, LB.
That's it, The Fusco Brothers is like Frank and Ernest except not funny.
As for Ernie...I completely forgot that used to be the name of The Piranha Club. Get with the times, grandpa. Next you'll be saying Mutts is like Krazy Kat except not funny. Wait, that's true too.
Teo, I always thought the same thing. I liked the art in Fusco, but it rarely seemed all that funny. Ernie is underrated.
Ernie is underrated.
May I repeat, Get with the times, Grandpa.
I agree, it's underrated, though.
Also, Baldo is like Zits, but not funny.
Mutts is okay as long as you're not comparing it to Krazy Kat, but yeah, it's not particularly funny.
Also, Baldo is like Zits, but not funny.
This, absolutely. Baldo is terrible.
I think Mutts is drawn to look like Krazy Kat, and the characters have bizarre speech impediments like those in Krazy Kat too. Except the characters don't actually do anything.
okay--all pogo fans, I've got a query.
What are the two Pogo compilations/ books that I should buy for my kids?
I read all of the pogo books when I was a kid, and loved them. But my kids have never read them. And as I recall, Kelly got kind of tired and cranky towards the end, so not all pogo is good pogo.
what's the best?
It was called Ernie the last time I read it semi-regularly (it was never in our local paper, so this was only on vacations and such).
Well, you can't blame Baldo, it's the token Hispanic strip.
On that note, can anyone tell Curtis and Jump Start apart?
Get Fuzzy is hit and miss, but when it hits...
"Listen, cracker, it's proportionate to my size, yo."
Teo and I will take this thread to 200 double-handedly.
122: The ones from the 50s are generally funnier and less didactic than the later ones.
127--
right, that's when I enjoyed them.
But I was hoping one of you would have the titles of current compilations. Unless amazon has a title 'pogo from the '50s'?
alright, dammit, I'll go look on amazon and see what I find.
Ugh, my dad would know. He has them all; when I want to read one I just page through it to make sure it doesn't include any boring multi-month-long parodies of the McCarthy hearings or student activists.
Are you thinking of getting original Pogo books, or more recent collections?
This is the only one I can remember being mostly great. It's a big book and contains some non-Pogo-strip material too. (mostly nonsense poems with illustrations featuring the Pogo characters)
Any collection that includes Albert's turn as a jingle-writer, or Porky Pine's joke-telling, will stand you in good stead.
I think all my collections are still in socal.
okay--from a quick spin through amazon, it looks like the originals are out of print, and the reprints are out of print, and the only thing that's out there are used copies, and they are **very** expensive (e.g. over $50.00 for an old trade paperback. we're not talking the first folio here, folks).
so I ordered a copy of Pogo 2 for $10.00, cause it's available and it's from the early period. but otherwise the pickings is slim.
(somebody pointed out to me--maybe my brother?--that fafblog sometimes has a pogo feel to it--the loosely-textured dialogue. have I mentioned that I miss fafblog?)
I love Get Fuzzy. Also Boondocks, though I'm kind of pissed that they've apparently just put it on a loop.
131--
yeah, thanks Crypned, but did you see they want $48.00 for it? For a used paperback in 'good' condition?
sorry, but us unemployed academics don't have that kind of money. certainly not to spend on our children, or on books, or on books for our children.
yeah, thanks Crypned, but did you see they want $48.00 for it? For a used paperback in 'good' condition?
Those Amazon affiliated sellers are crazy.
Buy It Now for $14.99 plus $4 shipping.
134: I think Aaron McGruder's on a six-month hiatus. It seems the show took a lot out of him, and I read somewhere that he wasn't even drawing the comics near the end. Can't find linkage, though...
134: Aaron McGruder stopped writing Boondocks.
certainly not to spend on our children
I dress my children entirely in burlap.
"Get Fuzzy" definitely has its moments of brilliance. Like the one that just shows the dog looking at a sody pop bottle cap, and a close-up of the cap which reads "You are not a winner", and then the dog looking dejected. When I saw that, it was like the flashback sequence in Velvet Goldmine where the reporter is watching TV with his parents and he envisions himself jumping up and yelling "Tha's me da', tha's meee!"
99 -- The old peanuts are very good. I've read through 1954 in the Fantagraphics reprints, and I'm already not sure I want to keep reading further -- even by 1954 the art style was becoming more set, and the himor less original.
But at least the first 4 years were great.
Someone else should tell me whether I should keep reading or stop there.
The Boondocks animated series took a lot out of me, too, and I only watched a couple of episodes of it. It's one of the most mean-spirited, unsubtle, unfunny cartoons I've ever seen. I was on the fence about McGruder before it, but that show made me write him off entirely. If he had anything to do with it creatively, he ought to be ashamed.
Sorry to be so strident, but I found the show to be completely hateful.
Yeah, the problem with Pogo collections is that they're all out of print and can get very expensive.
Say, we were just wondering, apropos of nothing, do Clownae and apo have some kind of wetware link up to the 'tubes, which allows them to comment on every third comment on every post?
136--
many, many thanks--I snagged that copy pronto.
139--
jesus--you can afford burlap?
I remember talking once with my (wealthy) sister-in-law about the LLBean catalogue. She was getting rapturous about how every year when she was a wee child they would order new winter boots, and how she remembered the ritual of standing on a piece of cardboard, drawing an outline of her foot, and sending that in to get the right size boot.
I explained to her that in my household, we stood on a piece of cardboard, drew an outline around our foot, and then that *was* our new boot for the rest of the winter.
she didn't laugh.
you can afford burlap?
He works in the private sector, of course.
142: I couldn't agree more. That show was terrible and terribly unfunny.
I give you:
http://www.thatsbraw.co.uk/Oor%20Wullie/Oor_Wullie-jings_and_crivvens.htm
I can now say that Tiger is like Oor Wullie except not funny.
I used to live near the house that Brethed used as a model for the boarding house and liked the other Iowa City references in the strip. But for the most part it was pretty bland.
145: Wi twa' tha' lie thegither, in tha same hoose, likesay.
149: Just evidence of my craven cynicism that I had a hard time determining whether this was an authentic artifact of subaltern proletarian consciousness or an extremely clever mock-up of such. Ahh, postmodern irony -- is there any other kind?
The episode where Granddad was dating a prostitute was pretty funny.
154: I didn't see that one. But I do distinctly remember an episode that managed to simultaneously belittle fat people, women and drug addicts through a single horrendous metaphor. And then there was the episode with the moral that sometimes it's okay to beat the homeless to death.
The episode where Granddad was dating a prostitute was pretty funny.
I know there's no granddad in Pogo, so are you talking about Bloom County, The Boondocks, or Oor Wullie?
Well, Boondocks the strip was pretty unfunny for a while itself -- like Tom Tomorrow with less pep. I'm told in its earlier days it actually had character interaction, but my paper didn't carry it then.
Oh, and if loving Scary Go Round makes me a big fat webcomics geek, then so be it.
Katzenjammer Kids. One of the oldest comix. German ethnic humor, now very rare. Split into two almost indistinguishable series by different artists which ran parallel for decades. Still in existence, I think.
No apparent cult. Not necessarily terribly funny, but hey.
The episode where Granddad was dating a prostitute was pretty funny.
Yes, it was.
122 -- I really like the G. O. Fizzicle Pogo, though I guess a lot of the jokes in it would be easier to catch if you had some familiarity with Ten Ever-Lovin Blue-Eyed Years to start with. It is bound together with Positively Pogo which is quite nice itself.
154, 159: Really? I found it kind of awkward. But hey, different strokes, etc.
Also -- have I mentioned to you guys how fabulous the new book of Moomin cartoons is? Really inexpensive too, it's something like $9 for hardback through Amazon. It is a collection of the comic strips Jansson published in Britain during the 50's or so. Not her native language so the dialog is a little flat sometimes but the storylines are Jansson in top form, and the art is a thing to conjure with.
re: 153
It's completely real. Our Wullie was a huge thing in Scotland. Published in a major newspaper and the yearly Our Wullie Annual was given to most kids as a Christmas present.
It was, however, parodied in an 80s/early-90s comic strip called, iirc, The Bams.
That strip linked above is the real thing though.
If you subscribe to the Boondock's e-mail updates, they're running the early strips now. I've been subscribed for a couple years, so at this point I think I have them memorized, but I couldn't dream of starting my day without catching up on the wisecracking radical black nationalist.
Back in 2001, or whenever the Calahometownpaper started carrying The Boondocks, I liked it, not only because it was funny, but because it made all the lilywhite suburbanites nervous.
The stan mac govern cartoons in this book are very clever; but the internets don't know about him.
Huh. No one's mentioned Medium Large? The early comics were really great, but I'm ambivalent about later ones.
166 -- Is Stan Mac[k?] the one who published in The Village Voice cartoons with overheard conversation throughout the 1970's and 80's? He was good and I'm surprised if he is not on the Internets. ...There is this. But maybe you're talking about somebody named Stan Mac who is not the same as who I am talking about.
In the Fantagraphics reprints, Pogo volumes 6 to 12 or so are (to my taste) the cream of the crop, alert, satirical, but still full of pure whimsy and a kindly outlook toward humanity at large. That's late '40s and early '50s stuff.
I'm baffled at people's dislike for Bloom County's formative years. Yes, it got way trite and stilted, partly because Breathed signed ill-advised merchandising contracts that bound him to so many appearances per week of this character and that. But Opus watching Mr. Rogers, "'Tain't corn, it's dope", "Death to fascist warmonkeys", "I'm goin' home to dominate the wife!", and a whole lot more were just glorious.
Among current webcomics, in addition to A Softer World, I'm deeply fond of Sinfest (which has everything from nookie-hunting jokes to calligraphy lessons, along with God performing puppet shows from behind the clouds to annoy the Devil) and Two Lumps, which is cat jokes.
With regards to internet comic strips: I love a couple of them, like mainly PartiallyClips, and like several more; but somehow I enjoy them much more fully when I read them by following somebody's links to specific strips in blog comments or posts, rather than by following them daily or weekly. The same holds for that amazing fiction blog which is occasionally linked over at Making Light and which I am not forgetting the name of -- It blows my mind when somebody links to it and I go read one of the stories; but when I try to follow it and go there on my own every day it does not do as much for me.
And, "what Bruce Baugh said" with respect to Bloom County.
How do I search the comments? I want to link to my funny story about my letter to the editor about the Boondocks, but I can't find it.
Searching's easy! Start here, and begin reading forward until you find the comment you're looking for.
Googling is getting more useful -- have you tried just doing the google search box?
174: That's what I did. It gave me a couple comments, but not the relevant one.
Yahoo still has a more complete index. I only see three hits for Kotsko and Boondocks.
141: On the off chance you check back for an answer, '54 or so is the cutoff for really brilliant, jarring, minimalist Peanuts. But it remained reliably cynical and funny through at least '62. Obviously, YMMV, but I grew up reading my dad's old Fawcett paperbacks from the late 50s/early 60s, and there's some pretty intense stuff in there (Charlie Brown: "A person shouldn't have to lose all his dignity when he's 6 years old."
I only have the first Fantagraphics book, but there's a lot of great stuff in there.
I don't think the best Peanuts strips are the most depressing. I like the ones with a high Snoopy/Woodstock/World War I content, and the interplay of Peppermint Patty and Marcie..
However, the best Garfield strips are the most depressing.
I think my favorite Peanut is the one in which one of the girls gestures towards a sapling, explaining to C.B. that it will one day be a might oak, and he goes and gets a hatchet and watches it with ominous intent.
OR the one in which he gets challenged to a game of baseball and he turns it down, saying that he'd only end up losing and hate himself and want to die, but thanks for the offer.
What, 180 comments and no love yet for Ernie Bushmiller? Also: Gasoline Alley is a lot of fun in its early years, like in the 30's and 40's. And Beetle Bailey, if you like the absense of fun.
The WaPo ran a strip in the middle to late '70s featuring two hapless schlubs. I think one was named Tucker. It only ran a year or so.
I can't find *any* damn evidence of its existence on the web. And the web forgets *nussink*, *nussink*!
Just odd that it has disappeared.
that amazing fiction blog which is occasionally linked over at Making Light and which I am not forgetting the name of
Hitherby Dragons is the name of it.
a strip in the middle to late '70s featuring two hapless schlubs
Narrow it down a little, please! That's like saying "I remember a rock band featuring two electric guitars".
For now I will assume you mean this.
A-and speaking as I was of PartiallyClips, everybody go look at this strip and laugh for a while. (But who is that guy playing cello?)
184--
not the one I had in mind, but thanks for trying.
I can't believe you know that rock band, too! What was it's name? And that tune they did, the one where the bass player played fewer notes than the lead guitars did, and then there was that part where the two guitars go duh duh duh? Yeah, god that was really good. If only I could remember the name of it.
Really the ideal thing would be a listing of "WaPo syndicated strips by year".
183: This is still one of my favorite short stories of all time.
177,178 -- thanks
I will probably end up getting later books at some point, but the early strips are so good.
And the art is really amazing in the early strips. When I see reprints from later strips I am struck by how much more stylized and cartoonish (for lack of a better word) the art is.
