I did daily for the better part of a decade, since the Washington Post had us right in their circulation zone and subscription wasn't too pricey
I'm 22 and when I was still in the dorms at college I had a daily subscription to the Chicago Tribune. But they screwed up my change of address, never delivered the papers anywhere, and then tried to bill me 25 bucks for a service they never provided. So I told them if they wanted my money, they could send me a copy of every paper they put out in the past 365 days, and canceled my subscription.
But my parents still get the Sunday paper, and I read the comics there regularly now that I've had to move back home. And I follow several "newspaper" strips online as well. The strips I read that are still being produced are as follows: Brewster Rockit: Space guy!, Retail, Pajama Diaries, Foxtrot Sundays, Baby Blues, Zits, Dog Eat Doug, Dilbert, Frazz and Pickles.
Of course, I adore Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes and Farside, own all the books and read them regularly. Family Circus and Dennis the Menace actually didn't suck when they first started, so I have a couple of their earlier books that I enjoy reading/rereading. Ink Pen was fantastic, but Phil Dunlap ended it a while ago. Get Fuzzy can be good sometimes, and was hysterical when it started out but I stopped reading it after the cartoonist started missing deadlines. Agnes used to be really good, and can be funny occasionally but the way it's drawn doesn't lend itself to online reading so I stopped following it when it was dropped by the Trib.
But then again, I've been obsessed with newspaper strips since I was two. My bedroom is filled with newspaper strip treasuries. In college I wallpapered my half of the dorm (and later a wall in my apartment) with comic strips I'd cut out of the newspaper and saved. (Every time I moved I carefully peeled them off the wall, and rolled them up in wax paper to use again.) So I'm probably not a good example of what's normal.
I read the Boondocks back when it was a newspaper comic (much more clean and watered down than the undiluted TV show, which came afterwards), and I'm pretty sure that influenced my political views more than I'd guess, now that I look back on it.
I also read so many old Bloom County anthologies when I was about 10 or 11 that I have a weird encyclopedic knowledge of the 80s and early 90s that many of my peers lack, especially because I had to essentially research half of the jokes
I also read so many old Bloom County anthologies when I was about 10 or 11 that I have a weird encyclopedic knowledge of the 80s and early 90s that many of my peers lack, especially because I had to essentially research half of the jokes
A surprising amount of my knowledge of 80's politics pretty much stems from trying to find out what a given joke was referring to.
I was at the Seattle anime convention yesterday and I saw a few webcomickers there, but sadly they weren't any of the ones I really like or read much. The Spiinerette people were there and seemed very nice, same with Teahouse, and Girl Genius.
Between webcomics, and newspaper strips published on online platforms like Daily Ink and Gocomics, I read about twenty five different comics. And that's on top of the treasuries, collections of DC & Image comics, and select Manga series I own and reread regularly. If I'm going to add to that, it either has to be something I really consistently enjoy, something that can teach me more about the medium of cartooning itself, or currently published in the Chicago Tribune Sunday pages.
I tried reading Pearls Before Swine about eight years ago, but that kind of dark humor applied to the cartoonist's particular style of writing didn't really appeal to me. So it's not something I continue to follow. Similarly, I have never found Bizzaro funny but right now I read it because it's published directly above Brewster Rockit in the Trib.
Apparently I'm the only person in the world who doesn't love Pearls Before Swine
I don't like any of the characters, most of the jokes seem really forced, and the art style is super lazy. I don't hate it, and I do appreciate the occasional overwrought pun strip, but for the most part it completely fades into the background for me
The real gem was always Foob. It's even better/more horrifying when you realize that the comic was just a passive-aggressive attack on the author's children by presenting her ideal alternate reality of their lives.
Oh my god, really?
It's been a while since I've heard talk on this, so take this with a grain of salt since it's hard to google any good info with such a generic title.
Basically some events, like the son being a famous author or the daughter marrying that hometown nerd, are things that didn't happen to the real-life people they're based on, but apparently were things that could have happened but ultimately didn't happen because that's how life worked out. I've heard all sorts of shit like that one or both of the author's kids don't talk to her much as a result of it, but it's hard to say because I know some people developed an outrageous amount of hatred toward something that was largely un-offensively bad, and it wouldn't surprise me if people were making shit up wholesale.
On the other hand, the way the story reads out does seem like the kind of milquetoast ending a WASP would eat up.
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Apparently I'm the only person in the world who doesn't love Pearls Before Swine
I don't like any of the characters, most of the jokes seem really forced, and the art style is super lazy. I don't hate it, and I do appreciate the occasional overwrought pun strip, but for the most part it completely fades into the background for me
The overwrought pun ones are the only actual good pearls before swine
Apparently I'm the only person in the world who doesn't love Pearls Before Swine
I don't like any of the characters, most of the jokes seem really forced, and the art style is super lazy. I don't hate it, and I do appreciate the occasional overwrought pun strip, but for the most part it completely fades into the background for me
Apparently I'm the only person in the world who doesn't love Pearls Before Swine
I don't like any of the characters, most of the jokes seem really forced, and the art style is super lazy. I don't hate it, and I do appreciate the occasional overwrought pun strip, but for the most part it completely fades into the background for me
The simplistic art doesn't bug me too much because that's not what comics are about now. But the way he does his line art hurts my eyes and honestly the humor is really negative and far too formulaic for me. It's like somebody took everything I hate about Dilbert and put it in Pearls.
I also dislike Garfield, Hagar the Horrible, Shoe, Blondie, Witch Hilda, The Lockhorns, Luann, Dogs of C Kennel, Cul de Sac, B.C., The Wizard of Id, Pluggers, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr, Lio, Life in Hell, and I only found two Opus Sundays funny. (The motion-sensitive toilet and "hind-lick maneuver" ones.) I understand how and why those strips are considered good, and I respect them for being as successful as they are. But I do not enjoy reading any of them.
I feel you, Creagan. The negative outlook is another thing that turned me off, and you articulated that better than I could have (in the post that I clearly did not read before I posted my little complaint, heh).
I used to adore Garfield as a kid, and looking back Davis had a really good run in the 90's where he was doing some super creative things with his artwork and putting in a lot of detail. Later he scaled that back. Not that I can blame him... dude was always pretty clear that he was doing the strip to make money, and I can't really fault him for it.
I used to adore Garfield as a kid, and looking back Davis had a really good run in the 90's where he was doing some super creative things with his artwork and putting in a lot of detail. Later he scaled that back. Not that I can blame him... dude was always pretty clear that he was doing the strip to make money, and I can't really fault him for it.
Yeah, I've never owned a cat so I never really liked Garfield even in the early years when it didn't completely suck. But Jim Davis merchandising the crap out of his strip doesn't bother me too much either. The guy is trying to make money off of something he claims to love doing, and he does that very well.
The production behind Garfield pisses me off though. Jim Davis literally doesn't do anything except scribble in some ideas and hand the work off to a team of other artists. The guy doesn't even do the pencil work. I probably wouldn't feel so strongly if he'd just hire somebody to do the artwork for him and give the person credit, like the way Kirkman and Scott do Baby Blues. But cartooning for a syndicate is my dream job. (Or supporting myself entirely through webcomics.) He has that job, and doesn't do it himself.
Also I should add that I haven't actually read Bloom County yet. I didn't like Opus because the strip was more focused on drama then humor. The two times I found it funny, they were the funniest things I'd read in the paper for weeks.
Oh, Baby Blues! There's a strip that I used to love! They had some really sweet and funny stuff in their first 10 years or so, which is a very respectable run. The latest stuff doesn't seem to be that good, and I didn't know that they had handed over the art to other people these days. But in their early years I thought they were some of the best in the business.
I still like to go through their earlier anthologies, to be honest.
I do wish that it were more the norm to stop doing a strip after a certain amount of time... maybe move on to a new concept. Most strips don't have more than 2-5 years worth of solid ideas in them, I find (looking at you, Get Fuzzy)
I think that if Watterson hadn't totally burned out after his fights with the syndicate, he might have had 15 good years in him instead of 10. Although there are some plot lines in It's a Magical World which I think showed a definite decline in content. (The second alien story was pretty bad.)
Baby Blues has months where it's still genuinely funny. But I've noticed that Baby Blues and Zits tend to switch off in terms of writing quality. They're written by the same guy, so it makes sense.
Zits always seemed to knock it out of the park on a handful of strips (especially the Sunday ones) but otherwise just kinda rotated the same 30-odd jokes in a monthly rotation
That's one of the things that made Calvin and Hobbes special. It did use some of the same themes, like Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man and Calvin Ball, but the jokes were consistently original and funny.
Peanuts got really repetitive and depressing in the 70's and 80's. Once Rerun became a fixture and the humor returned to how it had been when the strip started it got funny again. Farside never stopped being hilarious.
But most comic strips seem to significantly decline in quality after about 10-20 years. And then there are strips that were never funny because they were designed to appeal to old people with corny senses of humor, like Hagar.
My friend informed me that reading Wizard of Id as though it's a bunch of people at a Renaissance Fair trying to play characters makes it a lot more amusing.
The Far Side remained hilarious because it only ran for about a decade, but Larson had the good sense to quit while ahead.
That Peanuts could become funny again after X number of decades is really impressive, to be honest, but Schulz wasn't a hack like some of these people.
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Well, they probably used to be. But who under the age of 50 reads a newpaper regularly anymore?
But my parents still get the Sunday paper, and I read the comics there regularly now that I've had to move back home. And I follow several "newspaper" strips online as well. The strips I read that are still being produced are as follows: Brewster Rockit: Space guy!, Retail, Pajama Diaries, Foxtrot Sundays, Baby Blues, Zits, Dog Eat Doug, Dilbert, Frazz and Pickles.
Of course, I adore Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes and Farside, own all the books and read them regularly. Family Circus and Dennis the Menace actually didn't suck when they first started, so I have a couple of their earlier books that I enjoy reading/rereading. Ink Pen was fantastic, but Phil Dunlap ended it a while ago. Get Fuzzy can be good sometimes, and was hysterical when it started out but I stopped reading it after the cartoonist started missing deadlines. Agnes used to be really good, and can be funny occasionally but the way it's drawn doesn't lend itself to online reading so I stopped following it when it was dropped by the Trib.
But then again, I've been obsessed with newspaper strips since I was two. My bedroom is filled with newspaper strip treasuries. In college I wallpapered my half of the dorm (and later a wall in my apartment) with comic strips I'd cut out of the newspaper and saved. (Every time I moved I carefully peeled them off the wall, and rolled them up in wax paper to use again.) So I'm probably not a good example of what's normal.
Same day that Ava's Demon comes back! Monday!
I picked it up, and the first comic I saw had the dialogue "whoo-ee! The mayor won't be happy when he finds out his prostate has a pacebook page!"
I put down the paper, knowing that no other sunday comics page could reach such heights. I have not read a newspaper comics section since.
https://www.facebook.com/mayordalton?fref=nf
I also read so many old Bloom County anthologies when I was about 10 or 11 that I have a weird encyclopedic knowledge of the 80s and early 90s that many of my peers lack, especially because I had to essentially research half of the jokes
If you look at it now it resembles something out of my ethics textbook
A surprising amount of my knowledge of 80's politics pretty much stems from trying to find out what a given joke was referring to.
I tried reading Pearls Before Swine about eight years ago, but that kind of dark humor applied to the cartoonist's particular style of writing didn't really appeal to me. So it's not something I continue to follow. Similarly, I have never found Bizzaro funny but right now I read it because it's published directly above Brewster Rockit in the Trib.
oh god it's real
am I in a newspaper comic?
am I no more than newspaper ink?
that comic strip was printed 4 years ago
what is happening
I don't like any of the characters, most of the jokes seem really forced, and the art style is super lazy. I don't hate it, and I do appreciate the occasional overwrought pun strip, but for the most part it completely fades into the background for me
Basically some events, like the son being a famous author or the daughter marrying that hometown nerd, are things that didn't happen to the real-life people they're based on, but apparently were things that could have happened but ultimately didn't happen because that's how life worked out. I've heard all sorts of shit like that one or both of the author's kids don't talk to her much as a result of it, but it's hard to say because I know some people developed an outrageous amount of hatred toward something that was largely un-offensively bad, and it wouldn't surprise me if people were making shit up wholesale.
On the other hand, the way the story reads out does seem like the kind of milquetoast ending a WASP would eat up.
The overwrought pun ones are the only actual good pearls before swine
you are not the only person who doesn't love it!
The simplistic art doesn't bug me too much because that's not what comics are about now. But the way he does his line art hurts my eyes and honestly the humor is really negative and far too formulaic for me. It's like somebody took everything I hate about Dilbert and put it in Pearls.
I also dislike Garfield, Hagar the Horrible, Shoe, Blondie, Witch Hilda, The Lockhorns, Luann, Dogs of C Kennel, Cul de Sac, B.C., The Wizard of Id, Pluggers, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr, Lio, Life in Hell, and I only found two Opus Sundays funny. (The motion-sensitive toilet and "hind-lick maneuver" ones.) I understand how and why those strips are considered good, and I respect them for being as successful as they are. But I do not enjoy reading any of them.
I used to adore Garfield as a kid, and looking back Davis had a really good run in the 90's where he was doing some super creative things with his artwork and putting in a lot of detail. Later he scaled that back. Not that I can blame him... dude was always pretty clear that he was doing the strip to make money, and I can't really fault him for it.
but the rest of those comics Creagan listed are pretty mediocre day to day
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Yeah, I've never owned a cat so I never really liked Garfield even in the early years when it didn't completely suck. But Jim Davis merchandising the crap out of his strip doesn't bother me too much either. The guy is trying to make money off of something he claims to love doing, and he does that very well.
The production behind Garfield pisses me off though. Jim Davis literally doesn't do anything except scribble in some ideas and hand the work off to a team of other artists. The guy doesn't even do the pencil work. I probably wouldn't feel so strongly if he'd just hire somebody to do the artwork for him and give the person credit, like the way Kirkman and Scott do Baby Blues. But cartooning for a syndicate is my dream job. (Or supporting myself entirely through webcomics.) He has that job, and doesn't do it himself.
Also I should add that I haven't actually read Bloom County yet. I didn't like Opus because the strip was more focused on drama then humor. The two times I found it funny, they were the funniest things I'd read in the paper for weeks.
I still like to go through their earlier anthologies, to be honest.
I do wish that it were more the norm to stop doing a strip after a certain amount of time... maybe move on to a new concept. Most strips don't have more than 2-5 years worth of solid ideas in them, I find (looking at you, Get Fuzzy)
Baby Blues has months where it's still genuinely funny. But I've noticed that Baby Blues and Zits tend to switch off in terms of writing quality. They're written by the same guy, so it makes sense.
Dude you just blew my mind, I had no idea the two strips had the same writer. Especially because I've kind of always hated Zits
Zits can be funny, but it didn't start out as good as Baby Blues and it was never as consistently funny.
Most newspaper comics just do the latter, really
Peanuts got really repetitive and depressing in the 70's and 80's. Once Rerun became a fixture and the humor returned to how it had been when the strip started it got funny again. Farside never stopped being hilarious.
But most comic strips seem to significantly decline in quality after about 10-20 years. And then there are strips that were never funny because they were designed to appeal to old people with corny senses of humor, like Hagar.
Hell, Zippy the Pinhead coined the phrase "Are we havin' fun yet?"
Back in the twenties Blondie was scandalous.
Cathy was groundbreaking when it began.
I'm sure Hagar the Horrible is important for some reason too, but I wouldn't know why.
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@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
And he's right.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
That Peanuts could become funny again after X number of decades is really impressive, to be honest, but Schulz wasn't a hack like some of these people.