13 Comments:

Calvin & Hobbes

And there was a strip that pre-dates Calvin & Hobbes about a boy and his robot. That was good. It was essentially Calvin & Hobbes with a robot instead of a tiger.

By  Anonymous, at 9:55 AM  

Popular Problems? Was that the one with Mr. Vengeance? "Pardon me ma'am, but, HOLY COW!"

By  Jambo, at 10:37 AM  

Bloom County was great. Doonesbury, too. But Calvin and Hobbes was the greatest ever. Not even close.

By  Hammer, at 12:43 PM  

I can't remember the name of the strip that came after Bloom County, but I think it was called Outland. It was about a little black girl and in the first one she talked about how she hated the Wizard of Oz, that it was a story about a girl from a mud farm that went to a wonderful place that was in color and all she wanted to do was get back to the mud farm. Brilliant. but of course, Calvin and Hobbes rock the world. Even my mom cut those out. So I vote for Berkeley Breathed's various strips and Calvin and Hobbes is number one all time best daily and weekend comic... but don't forget Dilbert... the boondocks, bizzarro, non-sequitur, foxtrot, and a girl's guilty pleasure- for better or worse.

By  Anonymous, at 3:18 PM  

Hey, bloggers on opposite side of the aisle really can find common ground! And in the Strib no less. Oh the irony! I haven't mentioned Calvin and Hobbs or Bloom County before now because I assumed they would be the favorites of many and I didn't want to step on their posts. I'm sure Jerjo is preparing a doctoral dissertation on C&H as we speak. I was a huge Bloom County fan in its day and still read Opus tho it seems to be a shadow of the original. The Mrs. was trying to thin out the huge stack of stuffed animals we have accumulated since our girls were born and, horrors, thought that little stuffed penguin was one that could go, not realizing it predated not just our kids but our marriage as well. Needless to say he was spared. And for me it was a hard call to pick Doonesbury over C&H because almost nothing can make me as happy as rereading old Calvin strips. It really is the gold standard on comic strips in my book and visually I don't think it has been touched. BUT, Doonesbury is in a class by itself due to it's cultural impact, consistent quality, evolution and fantastic cast and story arcs. Mike had been remarried for about a year before I realized his wife Kim was actually the boat person baby that first appeared in the 70s. I love that level of depth. Two series that stick with me are Joannie's friend Andy dying of AIDS and Lacy Davenport's husband dying while bird watching with the Peterson's Warbler landing on his camera in the last of four silent panels, which can still choke me up. The former was in a time when realistic portrayals of gay character were pretty hard to come by. I understand Trudeau got raves from the gay community for it. I guess he has gotten similar kudos for his more recent series where BD loses his leg, even being asked to do a cover for Disabled American Veterans magazine.

I did see the Pearls Before Swine bit with the aged FC kids. Loved it. I have always wanted to do my own FC where dad is mowing the lawn, has a heart attack, and tells Billy to call 911. Billy then follows one of the standard dotted line paths of his going all over the neighborhood before finally reaching a phone by which time it is too late. Pure comedy gold there! BTW, I don't hate FC for any political reasons, just for immense lameness reasons. Good lord, how do they keep publishing a strip that is literally the same 5 jokes week in and week out? Who enjoys that crap?

I do enjoy Get Fuzzy as well. Bucky "pulling an all dayer" cracked me up last week. Didn't he and Pearls do the exact same stories and dialog for a week recently? Pretty clever stuff I thought. One that I really like that I don't know if anyone else does is Arlo and Janice. The Mrs. swears the strip is not about us but she is wrong. I'm also amazed at the amount of sexual innuendo they manage to sneak into a daily paper. Some more mainstream strips I find myself enjoying more than I should are One Big Happy (shut up!) and Heart of the City. Heart's friend Dean is one of the great sci fi geeks in modern literature!

By  Jambo, at 10:49 PM  

Life in Hell, by Matt Groening, was a good one.

By  Anonymous, at 3:16 PM  

I don't have anything to add, but I'll put in a couple of me-toos.

It's a tough call, but I'd put Peanuts on top. It declined a great deal, but in its prime, it was amazingly good.

I have a stack of the early Doonesbury compilations. It's a close second to Peanuts. The Far Side and Bloom County (obviously derivative of Doonesbury) were terrific, too.

Of the current strips, I think only Dilbert stands out for me.

Life In Hell is pretty good.

About Jambo's compulsion to read them all, even the bad ones: I have that too. The most painful for me were Family Circle, Ziggy, and For Better Or For Worse. The FBOFW addiction was finally broken years ago when it was actually funny for once. For some reason, I no longer had to read it after that.

Of course the old standbys, Beetle Baily, Hi & Lois, etc. are all pretty bad, too.

By  Joseph Thvedt, at 6:49 AM  

I had forgotten about Life in Hell, which I used to read in the City Pages and loved.

I find Dilbert pretty funny most of the time, especially having once worked in a cube. My big problem with it is the art. Good lord, how long has Scott Adams been drawing it and he still can't figure out how to fill up a panel? Things like Beetle Baily are almost as bad. That's been running for decades and the art has not improved an inch. Has the man even seen a picture of a tank? They look like something a third grader would come up with.

Contrast that with Doonesbury. The early stuff is pretty poor but 30 years of practice has actually had an effect! The strips now are very well drawn with lots of changes of perspective, complicated backgrounds, and great composition. For sheer comics beauty tho, I certainly miss Calvin.

By  Jambo, at 10:50 AM  

My big problem with [Dilbert] is the art.

Yeah, that's true. I don't mind it all that much, but neither do I admire it -- except for the pointy-haired boss. His look cracks me up.

Have you read the Dilbert blog? It's often very funny.

Another strip with pretty good writing and terrible art is Foxtrot.

Contrast that with Doonesbury. The early stuff is pretty poor but 30 years of practice has actually had an effect!

I had an apparently false memory of reading that Trudeau doesn't draw the strip anymore. According to the Doonesbury FAQ, he does, though somebody else inks it. He (or somebody on his staff) uses Photoshop to color the Sunday strips.

Speaking of color, what's the deal with colorized daily strips? Are the individual artists doing it, or the papers, or the syndicates?

By  Joseph Thvedt, at 11:54 PM  

In no particular order:

Bloom County (made me laugh out loud more than any other strip)
Peanuts (in the 60s and early 70s, Schultz was God)
Calvin & Hobbes (the last great strip, the combination of superb art and deft writing still leave me breathless)
Far Side (I defy you to find another strip that was this popular and this DARK)
Foxtrot (with it's worship of all things Apple, it's a wonder Jambo doesn't worship this every day)
PVP Online (started as a strip about the computer gaming community but it has matured beyond all expectations)
Frazz (so good there was a rumor that the artist was Bill Waterson writing a new strip under an alias)
Perry Bible Fellowship (it's so wrong!)
Doonesbury (hard to believe how long this has been around. I remember a Republican friend hating it on instinct, even before Trudeau started going after Nixon. The story arc of BD losing his leg has again elevated this strip into the stratosphere)

I won't go into comic books or graphic novels, because to listen to Jambo on the subject is like listening to a nun talk about sex.

By  Anonymous, at 9:25 AM  

Reading comic books will make you go blind!

By  Jambo, at 10:34 AM  

I don't want to be left out of the C & H love-fest. Here's one of my favorites (sorry, haven't figured out how to to do a proper image link in a comment):

http://x8d.xanga.com/408d94455823545567638/z11483199.png

By  Joseph Thvedt, at 11:09 AM  

Elmo- though not at all a comic- was something I read daily once upon a time... It had characters, it had theme, it made me laugh,and it confused me sometimes. It had more relevance than Marmaduke, so I think it should count. Didn't it have a graphic of a cloud blowing hard? So then it's like Red Meat. I vote for Elmo.

By  Anonymous, at 9:03 PM  

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