4-16-20 What's so Funnies?
10Picking up for a previous thread…
I’m that guy that still has the paper (all 6-8 sheets of it lately) delivered in his yard.When I read the paper, I always save the comics for last. It is the ‘dessert’ for wading thru the news and op/ed pieces.
Thinking about POGO reminded me of a few other strips/cartoonists that I used to love.
Back in the day, our local newspaper had 3 pages of comics (one in color) every day. Now we are down to one page, and most of those are not nearly as edgy/funny as some of the old classics used to be. For instance:
Calvin and Hobbes (my kids still think I was the role model for the dad…)
Bloom County
Far side
Boondocks
and of course, Gahan Wilson (often found in Playboy)
So today’s pressing questions are:
Do you still get a newspaper?
Do you read any comics?
What strips do you miss the most?
- 10 comments, 11 replies
- Comment
No.
I would if I did (it would be the only thing in the paper I read).
Baby Blues
I miss “Peanuts”
@yodascurse “Peanuts” was a great and innovative strip. At some point in the 80’s the quality dipped a bit and it got pretty repetitive, but Schulz had a renaissance near the end ('95 or so) and put out some good strips. I may be a little off on my timeline, but there was an almost 10 year lull where it wasn’t as good. There are a lot of comic fans who are “meh” about Peanuts because they were only exposed to it during that era.
GoComics has a section called “Peanuts Begins” that focuses on those strips from the 1950’s. Pretty interesting to see when Snoopy was a regular dog, Violet was a bigger character than Lucy, Linus was a toddler who couldn’t talk yet, and Charlie got in his verbal jabs almost as much as he was the target of them.
@DrWorm I agree totally. I had some “Peanuts” books when I was a kid that were early productions and I loved them. Would read and re-read over and over. Thanks for the note about GoComics, I will certainly check it out…
Big Dilbert fan (it’s funny because it’s sooo close to the reality). Wally is my role model as an employee.
“There is a fine line between participation and mockery.”
@macromeh I always read the Sunday funnies an the order that allows me to keep Dilbert for last…
I was one of the last holdouts I knew that still got a physical paper and I stopped about 6 months ago.
I still check all my comics every day at gocomics.com .
I read quite a few, but my very favorites are Foxtrot, Arlo N Janis, and Pearls Before Swine.
Gary Larson has finally relented on his long standing opposition to republishing comics electronically and recently launched https://www.thefarside.com/ that posts a handful of classic panels a day.
@DrWorm I had not seen this - thanks for the Far Side link!
Among newspaper comics, The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were my favs, and were, to me, in the British phrasing, “yards the best”.
Once, many decades ago, I got a sort of tour of some of the “non-patient” and “non-public” portions of the endless basements (mostly interconnected) of UT Southwestern Medical School (which is a kinda city-unto-itself, and is basement- and corridor-linked to Parkland Hospital) from someone who worked there at the time.
(This was in distant, far more security-relaxed, days long gone by. And, even back then, the various doors were locked and alarmed.)
What I remember best about the miles of UTSW basements:
every door, and every hallway, had several different Far Side cartoons cut from the newspaper and taped up. Even 2 minutes of walking down a hallway took us past dozens of them.
If you like Calvin and Hobbes, you will adore Phoebe and Her Unicorn.
I still stubbornly subscribe to the local paper in its physical version, even though it’s a pathetic shadow of its former self, full of car ads and way more expensive than it should be! I also feel like the comics are “the good part” and I read every one even though I don’t like all of them. I guess I like Frazz and Mutts best; Monty and Pickles, Zits, Dilbert and Rhymes with Orange all make me laugh sometimes; and I still like Prince Valiant in the Sunday section. It’s become very “woke” these days but the artwork is still great. I miss Calvin & Hobbes the most!!! Also Blondie and Peanuts, but those more for nostalgic reasons.
@Kyeh
As a kid I always coveted Dick Tracy’s radio wristwatch.
@f00l Oh, yeah - and now there ARE watches like that! Dick Tracy got pretty strange - do you remember the Moon Maiden? That was Dick Tracy, wasn’t it?
@Kyeh
I don’t remember the moon maiden. But I was less into the cartoon, much more into the watch.
I remember when I first saw one of those Radio Shack calculator watches. I thought “Dick Tracey didn’t have this.
: )
/image calculator watch radio shack
@f00l Did you get one of those? Do you have an Apple watch now?
@Kyeh
A friend had one of the RS calc watches way back when. 1970’s or 1980’s.
I do have a 4th gen Apple Watch. It’s good, but the short battery life annoys me deeply, and I don’t use almost all the Apple watch possibilities.
The things I use most: controlling alarms and managing the play (on phone) of music, podcasts, audiobooks from the watch.
I tend to put the Apple Watch on a charger and then forget to put it back in my wrist.
I rely far more on a Garmin 235. Battery lasts many days.
@Kyeh
Yep. Mine comes with a max of two to two and a half sheets (8-10 pages) for the front page section and the same for the sports section. On Wed we get 3 grocery ads (Winn-Dixie, Publix, and now Aldi)
Sunday we get a bit more, but still not nearly the ink that we got even a few years back.
Car ads are few and far between, and the classified section is virtually devoid of ads. Those used to be my ‘de facto’ method of keeping up with general prices of cars (new and used) etc.
Moon Maid
XKCD dot com is my current favorite. Full of inside physics, math, and engineering jokes. Farside for nerds.
Be sure to right click for a sarcastic comment.
@gary87zx
I think most people on meh love that one. It’s totally brilliant, and once in a while we have topics full of XKCD.
But since the topic opener post specifically mentioned newspaper comix, that’s where most of the discussion has gone.
Anyone else wanna list fav internet comix?
Apart from XKCD, I seem to remember sometimes enjoying a comic (less “logically elliptical” than XKCD) called I think User Friendly, tho I never made a point of following it.