Family Circus: Good or Horrid

I'm surprised that so many of these ones metioned are the same ones that were active when I last cracked open a newspaper back in the mid-90's.

SpectreFate wrote:

I'm surprised that so many of these ones metioned are the same ones that were active when I last cracked open a newspaper back in the mid-90's.

The artist that creates Pearls Before Swine wrote something about that. Most of the comics from the 50's and 60's (or older) are no longer written or drawn by the original artists. When the creator retires or dies, the comic is ususally taken over, either by family members or other artists, who refuse to either give up the space in newspapers due to syndication rights, or just wont retire the comic outright. This in turn makes it very difficult for newer comics to find space in newspapers. I'm not sure of the exact details, but Garfield creator Jim Davis hasn't worked on that strip since like the mid-to-late 80's. Other artists have been doing that strip, but Jim obviously still gets paid becasue it's his creation and it's been sold into sydication.

I have allot of respect for the creator of Calvin & Hobbes. I miss that comic immensly, but the creator, Bill Waterson, went out on a high note, retiring himself and the characters and also never selling out the rights of the likeness of Calvin or Hobbes. Any t-shirts, mugs, or Calvin peeing stickers that are out there floating around are all unliscensed knock-offs. Only the book collections of re-printed comics are approved by Bill. And there's probably a few of them now that are only put out by a publisher, the same way record compaines put out the same re-hashed collections of greatest hits.

Well, I was gonna start a separate thread about newspaper comics but since this seems to have become the De Facto thread for it, I'll just stick this here.

As most of y'all know I work for a newspaper publisher. These are the comics that currently occupy its comic pages. I've commented on some of the ones I like/don't like (if there's no comment then that means I generally skip over it)

Beetle Bailey- a classic... simplistic but still funny on occasion

Adam @ Home - occasionally funny

Grand Avenue- mildly entertaining, I like the "evil Yorkies"

Mary Worth - Does anybody REALLY read Mary Worth anymore? Good Lord!

Baldo

Pickles

Get Fuzzy - my favorite strip of the "new" breed, i.e. stuff that's come out in the past ten years or so. The cat kills me.

Monty - used to be somewhat funny when it was the "RobotMan" strip and Monty was just a supporting character, now that he's the main character it's just retarded

Mother Goose & Grimm - occasionally worth a chuckle; was much better years ago when it first started

Housebroken - they got rid of "Over The Hedge" and replaced it with this urban-themed strip. It's not a bad strip but I preferred "O.T.H."

Crankshaft --a spinoff from the aforementioned "Funky Winkerbean," about as useful as its parent strip nowadays

Non Sequitur - Love this one

Dilbert - My job feels more like I'm living this strip every day

Peanuts Classics - God knows I love Schulz, but do we really need 30+ year old reruns taking up space that could go to a new strip?

For Better Or Worse - ditto

Sally Forth

Rose Is Rose - so cutesy and sugary it could possibly cause diabetes...ugh

Hi & Lois - still goin' strong and Lois is still a MILF.

Hagar The Horrible - Groo the Wanderer could totally take this guy.

Ziggy - Ugh! I have never understood the appeal of this strip. Ziggy looks like a mongoloid Hare Krishna.

Marmaduke - getting sloppier by the day... how old is the guy who does this strip anyway? The artwork looks like it is being drawn by someone having a stroke.

Six Chix - an interesting concept... six different women work on this one, each one does their own strip one day a week. It doesn't run on Sundays. Depending on who's writing/drawing it each day, it's occasionally funny, occasionally not.

Jump Start

Funky Winkerbean - See my comments earlier in this thread

Blondie - see my comments about Mary Worth

Garfield - it's actually funnier when they focus on what a dork Jon Arbuckle is without even involving Garfield

Zits - funny stuff! One of my newer favorites.

Family Circus -- stopped being cute by the late 70s. Now it's just annoying.

Close To Home - a piss poor "Far Side" wanna be. There are several of these in comic strip land now ("Flight Deck" is another one) and none of them come close to capturing Gary Larson's genius.

And my LEAST favorite comic strip of all time...
"Dinette Set" - I cannot even begin to explain how unfunny this single panel comic is. It focuses on a middle aged couple named "Burl" and "Verla" and their friends who live in a town called "Crustwood." It looks like it is drawn by someone holding a Sharpie marker in their teeth, and the "jokes" are flat and boring...this strip simply is NOT funny. The Dinette Set website tries to explain its outlook with some highbrow bullsh*t about the strip being "an inside look at the banality of life," or whatever, but if they're trying for a Seinfeld-esque "comic strip about nothing" vibe, they're failing miserably. I HATE THIS STRIP WITH A PASSION and wish it would just go away.

(pant... pant... whew) Yea, I know. I take my newspaper comics a little too seriously.

I feel your pain Freddy. At one time, I was considdering a career as a comic strip artist. I take this stuff way seriously.

Favorite comic strips:

1. Dilbert - I almost pass out cause I laugh so hard.
2. Garfield - Use to be my favorite, but not as funny as it use to be.
3. Sherman's Lagoon - Not in our paper anymore, but I'll ready it online every now and again.
4. The Far Side - Too bad it ended.
5. The Peanuts - Since I'm only 19, they seem new to me.
6. Pear's Before Swine - Great new comic.
7. Get Fuzzy - Hit and miss sometimes. But when they hit, they're hilarious.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

I feel your pain Freddy. At one time, I was considdering a career as a comic strip artist. I take this stuff way seriously.

Me too! I learned to draw as a kid by copying "Peanuts," "Hagar," "Beetle Bailey" and so forth outta the funny papers. I had a recurring daydream that one day Charles Schulz would want to retire and he'd hire me to take over the "Peanuts" strip for him. Then not only did the guy decide to practically die at his drawing board, but he decree'd that when he went, the strip went with him. Sheesh. Way to help me out there, Chuck.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Well, I was gonna start a separate thread about newspaper comics but since this seems to have become the De Facto thread for it, I'll just stick this here.

As most of y'all know I work for a newspaper publisher. These are the comics that currently occupy its comic pages. I've commented on some of the ones I like/don't like (if there's no comment then that means I generally skip over it)

Beetle Bailey- a classic... simplistic but still funny on occasion

Adam @ Home - occasionally funny

Grand Avenue- mildly entertaining, I like the "evil Yorkies"

Mary Worth - Does anybody REALLY read Mary Worth anymore? Good Lord!

Baldo

Pickles

Get Fuzzy - my favorite strip of the "new" breed, i.e. stuff that's come out in the past ten years or so. The cat kills me.

Monty - used to be somewhat funny when it was the "RobotMan" strip and Monty was just a supporting character, now that he's the main character it's just retarded

Mother Goose & Grimm - occasionally worth a chuckle; was much better years ago when it first started

Housebroken - they got rid of "Over The Hedge" and replaced it with this urban-themed strip. It's not a bad strip but I preferred "O.T.H."

Crankshaft --a spinoff from the aforementioned "Funky Winkerbean," about as useful as its parent strip nowadays

Non Sequitur - Love this one

Dilbert - My job feels more like I'm living this strip every day

Peanuts Classics - God knows I love Schulz, but do we really need 30+ year old reruns taking up space that could go to a new strip?

For Better Or Worse - ditto

Sally Forth

Rose Is Rose - so cutesy and sugary it could possibly cause diabetes...ugh

Hi & Lois - still goin' strong and Lois is still a MILF.

Hagar The Horrible - Groo the Wanderer could totally take this guy.

Ziggy - Ugh! I have never understood the appeal of this strip. Ziggy looks like a mongoloid Hare Krishna.

Marmaduke - getting sloppier by the day... how old is the guy who does this strip anyway? The artwork looks like it is being drawn by someone having a stroke.

Six Chix - an interesting concept... six different women work on this one, each one does their own strip one day a week. It doesn't run on Sundays. Depending on who's writing/drawing it each day, it's occasionally funny, occasionally not.

Jump Start

Funky Winkerbean - See my comments earlier in this thread

Blondie - see my comments about Mary Worth

Garfield - it's actually funnier when they focus on what a dork Jon Arbuckle is without even involving Garfield

Zits - funny stuff! One of my newer favorites.

Family Circus -- stopped being cute by the late 70s. Now it's just annoying.

Close To Home - a piss poor "Far Side" wanna be. There are several of these in comic strip land now ("Flight Deck" is another one) and none of them come close to capturing Gary Larson's genius.

And my LEAST favorite comic strip of all time...
"Dinette Set" - I cannot even begin to explain how unfunny this single panel comic is. It focuses on a middle aged couple named "Burl" and "Verla" and their friends who live in a town called "Crustwood." It looks like it is drawn by someone holding a Sharpie marker in their teeth, and the "jokes" are flat and boring...this strip simply is NOT funny. The Dinette Set website tries to explain its outlook with some highbrow bullsh*t about the strip being "an inside look at the banality of life," or whatever, but if they're trying for a Seinfeld-esque "comic strip about nothing" vibe, they're failing miserably. I HATE THIS STRIP WITH A PASSION and wish it would just go away.

(pant... pant... whew) Yea, I know. I take my newspaper comics a little too seriously.

No joke on Dilbert - since I;m in HR I laugh my a** off whne catbert shows up. The whole interviewing/internal transfer stuff this month has been great!

For Better Or FOr Worse never should have gone into version 2.0 - she should have ended it when she ended it. It had a good ending. The Washington Worker (aka washington post) stopped running it.

Fat Freddy wrote:

And my LEAST favorite comic strip of all time...
"Dinette Set" - I cannot even begin to explain how unfunny this single panel comic is. It focuses on a middle aged couple named "Burl" and "Verla" and their friends who live in a town called "Crustwood." It looks like it is drawn by someone holding a Sharpie marker in their teeth, and the "jokes" are flat and boring...this strip simply is NOT funny. The Dinette Set website tries to explain its outlook with some highbrow bullsh*t about the strip being "an inside look at the banality of life," or whatever, but if they're trying for a Seinfeld-esque "comic strip about nothing" vibe, they're failing miserably. I HATE THIS STRIP WITH A PASSION and wish it would just go away.

For those of you who have yet to experience "Dinette Set" here's some examples:







Um.... yeeeeeeaaaah....OK. And it goes ON and ON and pointlessly ON like this, day after day... This stupid strip has been running in our paper for YEARS. Why??

Wow, that was terrible. The strips that are in the dailies are extra terrible as I remember it.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Metal Misfit wrote:

Amazing Spider-Man

I love Spidey as much as the next guy but the newspaper strip was pretty lame compared to the monthly comics. I realize there's only so much story development you can do in three panels a day and six on Sundays, but the stories in the newspaper strip moved at an absolutely glacial pace. It took FOREVER for anything to happen in that strip!! During the late 70s/early 80s, there was a short lived "Star Wars" newspaper strip that ran for a couple of years that had the same problem.

I fully agree, even as a kid, I knew it wasn't very good, but just because it was Spider-Man, I always read it. I think the Sunday strip was supposed to be the finale of the previous week's worth of strip, so I never knew what was going on.

What is the name of the comic that took the place of The Far Side? I can't remember the name, but it's horrible. Not funny in the slightest. And I think I mentioned the guy that does In The Bleachers before. He rules. He's usually in the sports section, though, since most of his stuff revolves around sports. But he's like the Gary Larson of sports-oriented comics. Hilarious stuff.



http://www.gocomics.com/inthebleachers

I used to do one-panel comics. I think I'm going to start a new one for Shock Totem. I have a ton of ideas that I never actually drew. Hundreds of stickies with ideas on them, like this:



Wish I knew what most of them meant, but some make no sense to me anymore. Like this one:

Now show us the chair with the poop stain on it.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Close To Home - a piss poor "Far Side" wanna be. There are several of these in comic strip land now ("Flight Deck" is another one) and none of them come close to capturing Gary Larson's genius.

That's the one! God-awful!

You should really check out In The Bleachers. That guy really does nail what made Larson so great.

Oh, forgot one!

Born Loser

It is the root of all that is evil!!!


Seriously, I am not kidding!

thejokeriv wrote:

Fat Freddy wrote:

It's one of those comic strips that, on the odd occasion that I do still read it, think to myself "Why is this strip still going?"

Funny you bring this up, I was thinking about starting a thread around here about newspaper comic strips. Maybe later when I'm not feeling quite so lazy.

LMAO!!!!!!! I MISS The Far Side, Bloom County (the original, not outland or opus), Calvin & Hobbes, - all the classics!

As far as family strips, I miss Fox Trot being a daily strip. I've known to read for better or for worse (before it ended and they gave it a "reboot")

For current strips, Dilbert rules!!!!!!! Since I have young kids, Baby Blues is funny.

Family Circus, not torture, just BORING - I can't beleive it's still going!!!!!

And I HATE doonsbury - dumb a** strip

I am currently going through my Foxtrot books (while missed as a daily strip, it was much funnier the first 10 years). I love Dilbert though sometimes the strips don't make sense (according to Scott Adams, it sometimes doesn't make sense to him either). The best current strip has to be Pearls Before Swine which is downright hilarious. As far as older ones I love and have many books of Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, Mother Goose & Grimm, and Garfield (the last two have lost me in recent years but in the day they were very funny. Other favorite strips is Piranha Club (used to be called Ernie), Drabble, Bizarro, the occasional Pickles, Get Fuzzy, and Sherman's Lagoon.

Fat Freddy wrote:

MetalGuy71 wrote:

I feel your pain Freddy. At one time, I was considdering a career as a comic strip artist. I take this stuff way seriously.

Me too! I learned to draw as a kid by copying "Peanuts," "Hagar," "Beetle Bailey" and so forth outta the funny papers. I had a recurring daydream that one day Charles Schulz would want to retire and he'd hire me to take over the "Peanuts" strip for him. Then not only did the guy decide to practically die at his drawing board, but he decree'd that when he went, the strip went with him. Sheesh. Way to help me out there, Chuck.

Charles Schultz is the reason I print letters the way I do; when I was a kid I would obsessively copy his lettering style. Peanuts rules, even the strips I don't actually find funny.

Does anyone remember a strip from the 80s called Arnold? I loved it because it was so bizarre.

http://www.platypuscomix.net/otherpeople2/arnold.html

Oh, and who likes The Family Circus? Not Me!

Louder wrote:

Oh, and who likes The Family Circus? Not Me!

There is a Pearls Before Swine cartoon where Pig asks who broke something (I can't remember what at the top of my head) and Rat replies, "Not me you idiot." Just then a character like that walks by with 'Not Me You Idiot' on it. There is a pause and Rat says, "Friend of yours?"