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I have to give a shout-out here to Smoky Stover, which is a fascinating read. The contrast between the relatively dull core jokes/writing and the immense visual ingenuity of the background gags and cartooning is really interesting! Tinkersons... I can't figure out if I like it, but it's kind of fascinating? It's weird to read the beats of a family gag strip where nobody's wisecracking. There's a weird flattened affect to the whole thing.
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Feb 19, 2024 01:57
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Pickles Hagar the Horrible  Zits 
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Feb 19, 2024 02:04
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Vargo posted:Breaking Cat News The Gocomics comments on this one are full of people agreeing that sriracha, buffalo sauce, and any hot sauce in general are terrible, and that ranch and honey mustard are the only acceptable sauces. In case you were wondering who the audience was for Rose Is Rose's "eating one jalapeño slice makes you a daring rebel" gags.
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Feb 19, 2024 02:14
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Powered Descent posted:Challenge: everybody pick a comic that you're glad is being posted even though it doesn't get mentioned much! (We ALL have some low-key favorites.) Professor Wayne posted:Pickles Pickles is consistently charming and a breath of fresh air from some of the bitter married relationships of other strips.
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Feb 19, 2024 02:32
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I love Hagar the Horrible, there I said it.
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Feb 19, 2024 02:43
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Hagar is weirdly good now! I was surprised too.
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Feb 19, 2024 02:47
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Powered Descent posted:Challenge: everybody pick a comic that you're glad is being posted even though it doesn't get mentioned much! (We ALL have some low-key favorites.) Sally Forth and old Flash Gordon
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Feb 19, 2024 02:50
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Pluggers is good. Consistent goofy art, relatively benign and wholesome, tries to tell a joke. If nothing else it's a benevolent average, handily beating the bad half of the thread. I also enjoy Haggar a lot, I too will say it. Modern Garfield occasionally tells a real joke and doesn't copy paste the art and I can't help but still associate fond nostalgia with it when it does. Mandrake is baffling at the best of times but still oozes peculiar charm and even solid gags. I'm not really a fan but I respect Sally Forth. Curtis is weird and a little bad often but it's good at heart and on-and-off genuinely good.
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Feb 19, 2024 02:59
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Schwarzwald posted:old Flash Gordon 
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Feb 19, 2024 03:04
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Most of my favorites get mentioned fairly often (Arlo & Janis, the new Flash, Slylock Fox), so I'll say that I enjoy Our Boarding House. I was largely unaware of the comic and its cultural impact before it showed up here, and it's an interesting artifact of the era. I also like the new Hagar strips, and I enjoy Tinkersons when it's about the sales directors being nuts or the son's teacher messing with him.
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Feb 19, 2024 03:06
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Anyone who's been part of the thread for a long enough time already knows my fondness for Pogo, so I'm glad we're getting another pass at it. Anyway, it's A Sketchy Life, and it's a very special number, because my hero Fred G Cooper did all the theme cartoons in this issue! So of course this is the one without a scan of the cover. This is the Vaudeville number, by the way. (February 16, 1928, and please respect my restraint that I stopped at nine of these.)         Don't applaud, just throw money. 
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Feb 19, 2024 03:31
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Crab Dad posted:100% comics first Ace. I bet someone could squeeze an entire master's thesis out of comparing and contrasting Jughead and Wimpy. They both fill the roll of half sidekick - half comic foil. Yet Wimpy has had affairs with everyone up to and including the Sea Hag in a really non-sexual comic, while Jughead flees from girls in the horniest comic of the 1940s.
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Feb 19, 2024 03:42
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I never skip Everyday Movies. It's such a fantastic glimpse into the 1930s - the fashion, the slang, how people's lives have changed, and how they've stayed the same.
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Feb 19, 2024 03:42
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I've said it a few times, but I always like Dark Side of the Horse. It's not super deep, but it's a bad pun comic that delivers on the bad pun every time and they always rate somewhere between a smirk and a guffaw.
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Feb 19, 2024 03:52
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Bruceski posted:I've said it a few times, but I always like Dark Side of the Horse. It's not super deep, but it's a bad pun comic that delivers on the bad pun every time and they always rate somewhere between a smirk and a guffaw. On a similar note, Andertoons is a fuckin delight whenever it's here, it has probably the highest hit percentage of all the single-panel strips and it's amazing how they keep comingup with new jokes for "guy looks at a graph" setup.
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Feb 19, 2024 03:55
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Vargo posted:On a similar note, Andertoons is a fuckin delight whenever it's here, it has probably the highest hit percentage of all the single-panel strips and it's amazing how they keep comingup with new jokes for "guy looks at a graph" setup. Yeah, I like most of the single-panel gag strips, but Andertoons is the most consistent (and also the least derivative of the Far Side, which some of the others are very visibly so).
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Feb 19, 2024 04:09
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Of the stuff that I've been enjoying that I haven't mentioned recently (and that I can actually remember right now, because there's certainly far more than just the following); I like Dark Side of the Horse trying as hard as it does when it doesn't really need to; Footrot Flats is a well-drawn window into a very unfamiliar place to me; Modern Prince Val is something I like at least as much as the original because the art's still quite good, the writing's nice, and I'm 500% less likely to see something Very Fifties happen; and I don't read Our Boarding House every time but when I do I'm inevitably baffled by SOMETHING someone's said that I'm sure no living human being could've come up with off their cuff. Finally, I really do like this second shot at Pogo you've gifted me - the pacing is different from my grandpa's terribly abused old paperbacks; not only are there some strips that seem to have been skipped in the books, now and then a beat lands differently because he outright drew new material for the collections to make things flow smoother. Also I'm utterly bemused that Archie apparently created the B.S.C./Baby Sitter's Club in 1949... six years before Ann M. Martin was born. Deeply suspicious.
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Feb 19, 2024 04:10
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Andertoons, Dark Side of the Horse and Take it from the Tinkersons for me. Corto Maltese    Blueberry   
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Feb 19, 2024 05:46
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Weembles posted:I bet someone could squeeze an entire master's thesis out of comparing and contrasting Jughead and Wimpy. They both fill the roll of half sidekick - half comic foil. Yet Wimpy has had affairs with everyone up to and including the Sea Hag in a really non-sexual comic, while Jughead flees from girls in the horniest comic of the 1940s. Thimble Theatre is mostly what I expected "comic Popeye" to be but I was completely caught of guard by how much of an anime harem protagonist Wimpy is. He's had a monster girl at every other port!
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Feb 19, 2024 06:09
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I like most of the single-panel gag strips, but Andertoons is the most consistent (and also the least derivative of the Far Side, which some of the others are very visibly so). On the other hand, when F-Minus hits, it hits hard. I think that's the comic that I wind up reposting to my social media the most.
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Feb 19, 2024 06:40
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I greatly appreciate this thread's strip-a-day pacing as a way to finally see why Krazy Kat has been so highly praised by artists. I also notice that Little Nemo is out of the period where every strip needs to be spoiler-tagged. I had been skipping it, because it is kind of a high-effort read, but I've resumed now and I like what I've returned to. Modern Hägar the Horrible is way better than I would have expected it to be. Just like a real comics page, I don't read everything that's here, but I'm grateful to everyone who posts strips.
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Feb 19, 2024 06:45
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Scary Go Round (June 24-28, 2005)  
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Feb 19, 2024 07:02
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1981 comics      Dick Tracy  Footrot Flats  The Lockhorns  Computoon: Origins  Mexikid Stories  99% of my lifetime fabric store visits were getting dragged along with mom as a kid. I never got waffle cones out of it.  Powered Descent posted:Challenge: everybody pick a comic that you're glad is being posted even though it doesn't get mentioned much! (We ALL have some low-key favorites.) -Toonerville. I like the window into a bygone era that's also consistently pretty funny(ignoring the unfortunate existance of Aunt Eppie), and I appreciate that the adults are often more than happy to sit back and let the kids get up to hijinks. Maybe someday we'll figure out what happened to the trolley. -Pickles is low-key, but generally funny and not as boomer-pandering as you'd expect a Comic About Old People to be. -I wouldn't say Get Fuzzy is consistently gold, but I'm glad it's getting posted all the same.
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Feb 19, 2024 07:11
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Like I said before, the Wandering Culinarian didn't grab me as Demons did... but I didn't skip a single comic. And while I'm at it, adding my love for We Are Reproducing. Like a fellow poster said, the lack of prudishness is refreshing, and it's very earnest. Confession of worrying laziness: I wish Stephen Collins' comics were more suited to the vertical phonereading format. I know they're really good, but I often skip over them because I don't feel like turning my phone.
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Feb 19, 2024 07:29
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Bongo Bill posted:I also notice that Little Nemo is out of the period where every strip needs to be spoiler-tagged. I had been skipping it, because it is kind of a high-effort read, but I've resumed now and I like what I've returned to. Unfortunately, this is just a brief period. Little Nemo will go through periods without the Imp character, but it remains throughout the series. We still have a couple more strip before it goes back. The big tragedy of the whole thing is that the character adds absolutely nothing to the strip. The art is great, I just wish McCay dropped the character.
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Feb 19, 2024 07:41
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Daddy Daze Take It From The Tinkersons  Macanudo  Dark Side Of The Horse 
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Feb 19, 2024 07:44
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I can't believe no one has said Ballard Street is their favorite! What has this thread come to?
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Feb 19, 2024 08:18
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Heathcliff Compu-toon  Garfield  Overboard  Monty  For Better or For Worse  Classic Arlo and Janis (March 18, 2002)  On The Fastrack  Safe Havens  Zippy The Pinhead  Rae The Doe, which you can support by pledging to the author's Patreon  i like Dark Side of the Horse 
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Feb 19, 2024 08:35
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riderchop posted:On The Fastrack You're not fooling anybody, Dethany.
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Feb 19, 2024 09:05
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I really like Take It With the Tinkersons. It's got a good sense of timing to when to switch up the jokes that poo poo never gets old. And the drama whenever the dad's company gets a new sales director is just  1970s Spidey is also really good. It's interesting in that there's this sense of tension that Peter's life is always on the brink of some disaster that modern Newspaper Spidey has moved away from. And I can't forget to mention Hagar the Horrible. It's been a pleasant surprise how much Hagar loves his wife and kids especially when you look at his comic contemporaries.
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Feb 19, 2024 09:06
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I never ever scroll past Everyday Movies. The art is excellent, and the gags are good, plus it's much more a window into its particular context than many other historical comics are. Similarly with Our Boarding House, and while the patter feels a lot more artificial, it's artificial in a Marx Brothers kind of way which I dig.
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Feb 19, 2024 09:13
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Haifisch posted:Computoon: Origins I have been watching these 'Computoon: Origins' posts with keen interest, hoping to see how it got from a bad but comprehensible gag panel strip to the incoherent digital palimpsest that drives men mad we know and love today. Over the most recently posted few strips, I've been sensing that we might be at the beginning of that transition. Today's is actually a little less disconcerting — although, what is "a flat view of the world", exactly? And this book, Internet World Travels: what is that? What does Boyce imagine its contents to be? But there's a joke there, just a joke that depends on non-existent idioms, books, and activities to work. It can be hard to tell if Boyce is losing his grip on reality, since even at his most intelligible, he never understood the subject of his work to begin with. (And was never a great artist.) But again: a few times recently I've been getting hints of that "Are you OK, Charles?" feeling. Not all the time, but I feel like he has begun to faintly hear the scratching in the walls, now and then. Is it just me? I mean, on the one hand, there was this one: Haifisch posted:Computoon: Origins That's actually funny! You have to imagine a world in which there are 'Electronic Christmas Trees' pop-up shops, and what they call an electronic Christmas tree is a complete desktop computer that happens to be displaying a picture of a Christmas tree at the moment. And yes, these computers are scattered randomly across the open ground, as if growing there in a little grove of computers. But they are computers nonetheless and not to be felled with axes! We understand all this and sympathise with the weary, middle-aged electronic Christmas tree seller who's seen it all before. But on the other hand... Haifisch posted:Computoon: Origins OK, so... OK. Maybe the joke is, "Those guys at the front office! So full of hot air! And we get faxes from them sometimes during our meetings. And we can tell that they changed from hot air — literal hot air, now, not figurative, that's the joke — to helium, because their helium-filled faxes are making our fax machine float!" Except: hot air also floats. That is indeed why helium might be substituted for it. So... didn't the fax machine always float? If so, why the surprise? Can this guy really tell the difference between floating caused by hot air and floating caused by helium?? Also: surely Boyce is thinking of 'head office' — those know-nothing fat cats upstairs — not 'the front office', as the obvious target for this kind of gag. Also, and worse: if that fax machine is 'For Front Office Use Only', why is it here, in the meeting room where clearly Front Office isn't? Unless this is Front Office, in which case, why is the guy saying "the front office" and not "we"? Unless he is visiting Front Office for this meeting with them — but if this is Front Office, the joke ("Ho ho, those guys are so full of hot air!") doesn't work at all. Why would they receive a fax from themselves? Unless they're sending a fax, in which case we are to understand that either literal hot air or literal helium is used somehow by this fax machine when in operation, and figurative 'hot air' has nothing to do with the situation, in which case there is no joke, and this is just mad nonsense, but mad nonsense that deceptively resembles a joke. You see what I mean? There is the sense of a joke in this one, but it simply disintegrates if you try to 'get' it. And then there's... Haifisch posted:Computoon: Origins What? What??? I know better than to try to unravel this one. This is an early glimpse, I believe, of the Compu-Toon Abyss; the sanity-destroying, Lovecraftian madness that is to come.
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Feb 19, 2024 10:16
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Charles Boyce's comics are like transcribed dreams, hastily penned sleep brain nonsense caught on a notepad on the nightstand, and then drawn in the day without a second of re-examination. I like your attempts to rationalize them, though. Reminds me of that podcast with Seanbaby guesting to try and understand Compu-toon. edit: god drat it, they're such earworms. Bionic glasses?! Not only are they not a thing, them being bionic has nothing to do with the presumably intended joke of a man not having his glasses on and thinking he sees the dog on the couch. And the caption says "Herbert" but it's clearly the wife who is gesticulating for him to get off the furniture, which is a chair, not a couch. AAARGH! If you must have a tortured tech reference because you're apparently terrified the passionate Compu-toon fans will burn you in effigy otherwise, might as well just call them Computer Glasses or Internet Glasses. Hell, do a stupid joke about a man's Google Glass or Apple VR Goggles being left in the living room, and the dog's master chiding the dog from the other room, because with a little willful misunderstanding of the tech, you can pretend they act as surveillance equipment. I love Compu-toon davidspackage fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Feb 19, 2024 |
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Feb 19, 2024 10:36
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Breadmaster posted:I can't believe no one has said Ballard Street is their favorite! What has this thread come to? I protest! I almost always champion it.
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Feb 19, 2024 11:08
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There are many strips ITT I've been enjoying over the last few months I have been checking out these threads. In no specific order of preference: Prince Valiant Modesty Blaise New Flash Gordon Old Flash Gordon Wallace the Brave Phoebe and her Unicorn Corto Maltese Blueberry Thimble Theatre (original) Little Nemo Sometimes even other strips like Mutts (my heart grew three sizes when Guard Dog and the little girl were finally together), Hagar the Horrible, Invisible Scarlet, Brenda Starr, and Mexikid catch my attention. Thank you all those involved for keeping it going! Saoshyant fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Feb 19, 2024 |
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Feb 19, 2024 12:23
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Dandi Rhymes with Orange  Get Fuzzy 2/18/04  Brenda Starr 8/31/52  Smokey Stover 11/15/59  Everyday Movies 4/5/37  "I'm not a Communist but I do love Russian food." Invisible Scarlet O'Neil 2/28/43  Scarlet, I don't think anyone would blame you if you just let this guy die. Closer Than We Think! 11/15/59  "Gamma knife" surgery is still a thing, although it's mostly used for brain and spine surgery where it's too risky to cut in; it certainly hasn't replaced regular surgery. Bonus Ad! The International Harvester Corporation takes out a nearly full-page ad to let you know how much they hate their workers! 
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Feb 19, 2024 13:16
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davidspackage posted:AAARGH! I warned you about compu-toon bro!
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Feb 19, 2024 13:23
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Julet Esqu posted:Luann I... don't really hate this? Say what you want about Bernice, but at least she isn't hanging all over him and trying to tell him goofy jokes or drag him on some adventure he clearly isn't interested in. Also, it's totally weird and creepy that the Evanses seem to be trying to make Luann and his cousin vie for his affections. Does Piro have any kind of actual backstory that we know of? Or are we just supposed to take it at face value that he's had a troubled life because he's broody and wears all black and has a star shaved into his head (which I guess in Luann means he's a "tortured artiste")?
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Feb 19, 2024 13:28
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Zamboni Rodeo posted:I... don't really hate this? no! stop! this is luann! you have to hate this!
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Feb 19, 2024 14:05
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Tinkersons is OK. I personally think that the teacher coming up with creative ways to get Tillman (?) to do his work was cute at first but has gotten one note. The art is....eh.
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Feb 19, 2024 14:18
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