Worth noting, however, is that although the strip is still (at least sometimes) titled "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith," Barney Google almost never appears in it any more. Or, at least, didn't the last time I had access to it. Well, since this is a music forum.... (Not my transfer, and not the recording I have--that one is also by Jones and Hare, but on Brunswick. A transfer of that can be found on YouTube, too, but it sounds as if it was running fast and is in poor condition, or at least is being played with the wrong size stylus.)
We had "BG & SS" in the paper when I was a kid, and I never knew who the frick "Barney Google" was since the strip was 100% about SS at that point. My parents had to explain! Seemed weird the strip still included BG in the title since he was a no-show...
Oh, it really is. That's why "edgier" comics often have trouble getting traction: people want comfort food in the Comics section. I agree that "Peanuts" and "Doonesbury" are just sucking down space, though honestly, are most of the legacy strips that still produce new content any better? Actually, I'll say that "Blondie" has gotten marginally more amusing in recent years. It's not quite as stuck-in-the-past as the others. But "Beetle Bailey", "Family Circus", etc... same old same old for decades.
"Zits" and "Baby Blues" are good! "Pickles" is okay, though I plop it more in that "cute but not all that funny" category. The print "WaPo" doesn't run the others, but they're available via the site/app. Not a fan of the others. Only time I've laughed related to "Capp" in decades was when Homer read the strip and chuckled "oh Andy Capp, you wife-beating drunk!" "BC" and "Id" lost me years ago when they veered toward religious propaganda...
What sort of diseased mind came up with Sally Forth? Why would anyone want to write about that fictional world? Are we really going to be pining away nostalgically for some privileged white HR manager and her ******* boss? Sally Forth seems like something Enid from Ghost World would produce when she decides to not kill herself and sells out, with all of the repressed hostility and Stockholm Syndrome involved with that decision. Of course Sally Forth is 100% the product of men, and now on its third author. God, I am SO grateful THAT universe can continue beyond the realm of its original creator, if you call that creating. Every Sims character I ever created is more interesting than any Sally Forth character. Beyond vile.
My current favorite is Tundra. I first saw it in an Anchorage paper so i think the artist might be Alaskan. Our local Canadian paper picked it up a few years back and it's still the first thing I look for in the weekday or Sunday edition. http://www.tundracomics.com/pages/dailytoontemp.html
My mom once said that "Zits" isn't funny unless you've had a teenager of your own. She was right--I never cared for it until my daughter hit the teen years; now I think it's a gem. I used to find "Pickles" hilarious, too, but I think it's lost its way. Once in a while it still gives me a chuckle, but not all that often. I think, for me at least, the turning point was when the focus shifted to the grandson character. "Dilbert" and especially "Pearls Before Swine" are reliably high points. "Sally Forth"? I gave up reading that one years ago, not because it offends some innate sense of social justice, but because it went just plain old stale--and, like "Cathy" (all three jokes of it), the strip requires too much reading of speech balloons. What on earth has happened to "Hagar the Horrible"? Up until a year or two ago, it was what I'd class "mildly amusing," but since then I think it's really lost it. Somehow, it has a ham-handed feel I never noticed before (not that it was ever exactly "sophisticated" entertainment), it's become much more repetitive (and it was repetitive to begin with), and the artwork doesn't seem quite the same, either. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it's devolved into mostly "read out of habit." Oh, and while I never regularly read "Mark Trail," I really hate the new look of that strip. It's gone from "skip over it without paying attention" to "try to avoid seeing it as you jump past." When I was young, I used to like "Rip Kirby," but that one packed it in years ago, and by then no paper available to me had carried it since I left home for college. Ditto "The Phantom," another that I liked when I was young, but although I think it's still around it must be a real dinosaur--I can't imagine it's playing well to current sensibilities. I liked both "Wizard of Id" and "BC," but I haven't seen either in years and years.
This actually goes a lot deeper personally. My experience with HR managers is they think they are higher than God with all of the hiring and firing. I know from experience, I married one. We are divorced. This was after I learned about Sally Forth, so I'm the dope there. But yeah, she always thought everyone that got fired deserved it. How could I not see that coming? Again, dope move on my part, but at least I'm done. Her family reminds me of one couple from Amazing Race, Max and Katie. They admitted they didn't have many friends because they were both jerks. At least For Better Or For Worse and Cathy had some basis in autobiography. The Funky Winkerbean weepfest must be based on something. But like I said, Sally Forth isn't autobiographical. Who the hell invents this sort of world? It's like Dorothy going from Kansas to Schaumberg.
Ruben Bolling,aka Ken Fisher, has a new Tom The Dancing Bug every Friday. Thursdays he taps into the vault ,many time at request of a member of his Inner Hive fan group. The latest Tom,4/8, takes the QAnon morons to task via his spot on Peanuts artwork and decidedly mean spirited criticism. These dangerous folk have their pants pulled like the days of old hippie comics. Bolling also has a daily,Super-FunComic Pak, which has a decidedly out of his mind,using common strip tropes. Garfield melts into Darth Vader,as Darthfield. James Caan,or the ghost of James Caan, and Phil Collins show up for no reason. Uncle Cap't's Puzzle Pontoon usually would get kiddie readers in jail,while the frequent "How To Draw Doug" lessons are flat out weird,in a great way. Marital Mirth takes the tired jokes of the Lockhorns to a realistic look at a sad marriage.
Tough to get anything in a printed paper. Less choices and smaller art while the stuff left to view is in color. I helped on a newspaper survey decades ago when an eight cent paper was worth at least a nickel. The funny pages were a big part of the paper. Front page,above the fold,sports pages,"women's pages" on days when the grocery ads appeared. The funnies-and that was about it. All wrapped up in classified ads,which paid for it. Tabloids had a higher rate for reading,but what was there to read was souless.
Wiley got in a lot of trouble a couple of years ago for possibly unintended insult to Trump,which wasn't erased when sent to publication. Or not. Wiley lost some papers. And was never sorry for he content. Wiley,like Walt Kelly,uses the Sunday strip for kids of all ages. The dailies,when away from the Adventures of Danae,a female child wearing a Punisher t-shirt,uses tropes similar to the New Yorker and I visit daily. Wiley Bears,the pearly gates,guys in a bar-he really is great!
I abandoned the printed paper when it abandoned me and visit gocomics.com for my daily dose. I visit Luann,No Sequiter,Pearls Before Swine, Perry Bible Fellowship,Pibgorn,9 Chickweed Lane and the classic 9 Chickweed Lane. Lio is an unheralded strip with overtones of Charles Addams, Bill Waterson(check out one of Lio's collections to find a spooky coda to Calvin & Hobbes,while using no words. The kid is alright. Gary Larson shows repeats of The Far Side-a good thing. Foxtrot,now a Sunday strip for new material,is sublime. The current version of Nancy is not a go-to for me,but there is good stuff there. New Adventures of Queen Victoria gets a lot of mileage out of clip art. Sarah Scribbles-a fine modern strip. GoComics also has a boatload of political cartoons to offend all sides. I suggest just watching the new ones listed,no matter what side it is on,just to support a great idea decades in the making. Brian Carroll's Two Party Opera may be coming back-he loves the comment section as much as the strip. Editorial cartoon guy,Tom Toles,left just when we needed him once again. A modern genius. King Features,which has many strips of past glory,seems to have few worth reading-Rhymes With Orange comes to mind. Online site carries Mallord Filmore but makes no mention of a new artist. Still as unfunny as an episode of Gutfeld! and lazy artwork. Zippy the Pinhead is still there-a good thing. Years ago,Zippy visited Allentown based Yacco's Hot Dogs(founded by Lee Iacocca cousins) and surprised folks in the area with spot- on artwork. I love daily/Sunday comics. They taught all three of my kids how to read-Snoopy especially. I have fond memories of sitting in my old man's lap on Sunday while he read Dick Tracy,Little Iodine,There Ought To Be A Law, and Rick O'Shay.
Have you guys read "Sally Forth" over the last... decade or so? It stopped having much to do with Sally's job a loooong time ago. She hasn't worked with jerky boss Ralph - now married to Sally's sister - in many years, and Sally's been in various other jobs. It's basically just about the family now, and it's become much more surreal. For instance, the strip recently celebrated its 40th anniversary and did a long run in which 1982 Sally met 2022 Sally. Way outside the lines of the original concept. Not saying people gotta like it, of course, but I don't see how the "modern" strip seems stale given how weird it's become. "SF" does use wordy speech balloons, though - and the strip has mocked itself for that at times!
I’m reading a friend’s humongous three-volume tome, The Complete Far Side and there is a great story about how Mr. Larson fretted because they tried to convince him to do a strip cartoon inside his iconic single-cell collection.
I just love cartoons and for that matter humour based comics so here's a few favourites: Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, Winker Watson Brassneck The Perishers Dennis The Menace (UK)
The best thing in Dick Tracy , besides that it nailed future of technology surprisingly often (see, for example, the "2-way wrist TV"!), was its comic-within-a-comic, drawn by one of the characters, "The Invisible Tribe." Totally blank panels with speech balloons. I found, and find, that concept hilarious. Well, I did say, But thanks for the update. Maybe the old dog has learned some new spots, or whatever the saying is, and I should give it another look.
Sorry - I missed the "stopped reading years ago" part! Current writer Francesco Marciuliano has been with the strip since late 1997, but I think it took him a while to find a groove. As he's noted, he'd never even read "Sally Forth" when he agreed to the gig, so I guess he didn't feel able to really let his freak flag fly for quite some time. Wish there were compilation books of "SF" so I could better track the characters' evolution. Doesn't have to be all 40 years, but a "best of" for the whole span would be cool, as that would allow for a good taste of how the strip changed. I have a big hardcover for "Big Nate" that functions in this way. That strip went from being safe-as-milk kiddie fare to... well, not something daring or edgy, but weirder and more clever, at least. Anyway, I have no idea if you'll read it now and think it's good or you'll read it now and judge me to be a ***** - welcome to the club! But I like it, and I think it's become way more interesting over the years. The strip still nominally exists as something about a working mom and her family, but it's a lot more "out there" than it was!
One thing worth noting: when the strip started, having a female HR director as the center of a comic strip was--"cutting edge" may not be the right word, but a fairly advanced choice for the day. At that time, the typical female comics character tended to be a housewife or "soap opera" type like Mary Worth. "Blondie" is another strip that has evolved over the years, with the title character and her friend (OK, not entirely) abandoning the "housewife foil at home" role to go into business--cleverly, in a way that ties right into the strip's iconic trope, the "Dagwood sandwich."
Yeah, "SF" was very much a "fresh" strip when it started in 1982, as the notion of a successful working mother wasn't common. "Cathy" featured a working woman but it felt like the strip was more about her romantic woes and her battle with diets. Maybe other strips circa the early 80s handled territory like that of "SF", but I can't remember if that was the case. All I do know is that it's changed a lot over the years and gotten much weirder. The website says it has 8588 "archived comics" for "SF", which = about 23.5 years of strips - ie, pretty much the Internet era but nothing earlier, I would guess. You have to pay to access the archives so I can't tell if it literally only goes back to 1998 or if there are earlier strips as well. Yeah, I mentioned earlier that modern-day "Blondie" has evolved somewhat and works better than most of the ancient legacy strips. It's not exactly cutting edge, but the current writers find quirks that didn't exist there for decades. The same doesn't hold true for stuff like "Dennis the Menace" or "Hagar" or "Beetle Bailey". The latter tries to adapt with the times, but that just means token non-white characters and that dude who's supposed to be a tech wiz - he must've stiffed since he barely appears. Even with all that, "BB" is still mainly Sarge and Beetle as they taunt/fight each other. "Family Circus" is still safe as milk but has shown tiny sparks of creativity on occasion. It's still pretty terrible for anyone over the age of 4, but it occasionally offers a wee sign of life.
For anyone who likes Ernie Bushmiller's original Nancy, that comic strip has entered a new golden age in the last three years thanks to the current cartoonist creating it, Olivia Jaimes (a pen name - the artist's real identity is unknown, to the public, anyway). Jaimes really hits a sweet spot of honoring Bushmiller's surreal visual humor and creating her own fine style. Great stuff.
How could I have failed to mention my favorite comic in my youth, and still one whose passing I lament regularly? VIP's "Big George" was "Far Side-surreal" years before there was a "Far Side." I'm glad I came along in time to enjoy it, but deeply sorry my time with it wasn't longer. [Edit] Oh, yes, and "Big George" had "I hate Mondays" long before "Garfield" was dreamed of. [further Edit] "Big George" was primarily a single-panel strip, but it went to multi-panel on Sundays. Just found this one, and it seemed apropos for a music forum (not to mention to the propensities of this posting guy):
