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Why do you read this thread anyway? This poll is closed. |
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|---|---|---|---|
| I enjoy reading contemporary newspaper comics. |
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64 | 26.02% |
| I hate reading contemporary newspaper comics. |
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42 | 17.07% |
| I enjoy reading historical newspaper comics. |
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88 | 35.77% |
| I enjoy reading newspaper comics from foreign countries. |
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52 | 21.14% |
| Total: | 246 votes | ||
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Welcome to the 21st iteration of Something Awful's most resilient and content-dense thread. The Comic Strip Megathread had humble beginnings as a dedicated thread dealing with For Better or Worse thread, a widely syndicated Canadian family comic strip that's now in permanent repeats. Eventually the scope grew to expand to all newspaper comics as the scope expanded and the thread began to serve comically elaborate archival purposes. Which is the theme I have arbitrarily chosen for this years op! First off, the full history-
Because this thread is such a resource, not just for contemporary comics but also old comics and foreign comics, I'm including a full alphabetical glossary below that I'll update throughout the week as posters provide us with detailed summaries of what their comics are and why they post them. You're welcome, future academics. As for those of us in the here and now, if you want to post a new comic, just post a new comic. At this point we're defining "newspaper comic" as meaning just about anything that uses a similar serial styled format. So preferably originally published...somewhere that's not just a book, with the benefit of an editor. Use the glossary for reference if you're not sure it qualifies. Have fun! --------------------------------------------------------------------- 9 Chickweed Lane is banned from this thread because it's seriously really gross people come on stop it. Link to them if you must post them at all. And He Did  Created by J.C. Henderson, “And He Did!” began its run in 1913. It is the original “gently caress Around and Find Out”. Andertoons  Reliably good-to-great jokes. Apartment 3-G  The art is real good and sometimes it's got a good story. Aragones  A mainstay of Mad Magazine, Sergio Aragones is the king of ¡plop! Arlo and Janis   A long-running comic strip by Jimmy Johnson about a happy, well-adjusted couple and their extended family. Ostensibly a wholesome cartoon, with a suspiciously large number of punchlines that only seem to make sense as sexual innuendo. Also posted in classic (nineties) form. Axa  A late-70s/early-80s post-apocalyptic adventure/pin-up comic, drawn by the excellent (if horny) Romero. Starring the titular Axa (and her breasts), her semi-love interest and generally lovely person Matt, and the true star of this show: Robot Mark. They have weird adventures across the wasteland of... uh... Europe? Bad Machinery  The third comic set in the Bobbinsverse, following the adventures of six schoolfriends who solve mysteries. Ballard Street  Drawn and written by Jerry Van Amerongen, Ballard Street shows us a window into a community ripe with crazy (but delightfully benign) boomers. There are no recurring characters to speak of. Many of the people on Ballard Street own dogs, who tend to be just as crazy as their masters. Big Nate  The long-running comic strip, now a TV show, straight from its first year in 1991. Posted in classic form, but not modern. There's a reason for that. Bizarro  A gag-a-day strip, almost always single-panel, which relies heavily on puns and visual humor. Every strip has hidden symbols scattered somewhere around the drawing -- the number beside the artists' signatures tells you how many there are. Blind Alley  One of the more borderline comics posted in the thread. It's a webcomic, but published by an illustrator who works with The Globe and Mail. So ehhh close enough. Blondie (From Zero) (June 22-24, 1931)  I can see why Blondie had to completely reinvent itself as a domestic strip from your posts. What looked promising at first has become increasingly tired and gimmicky, and I can only imagine how insulting this kind of high society drama must have felt to people during the Great Depression. Blueberry  A long-running Belgian Western serial that started back in the 60s by scriptwriter Jean-Michel Charlier and the reknown French comic artist Jean Giruad AKA Gir AKA Mœbius - whose work in other projects is stunning, and is no different in this. Bobbins  John Allison's revisiting of Bobbins, the original strip that got everything started. Set more in less concurrently with the original stories, it revolves around the staff of City Limit, a local magazine, and their friend group in more slice of life stories. Boondocks  Apparently a lot of people were only familiar with Boondocks from the cartoon, while I only read the comic and saw maybe 3 episodes of the cartoon before forgetting about them, so my take's probably going to be different from some's. Boondocks is...an extremely Bush era comic. There's no getting around that. On the whole I think it aged really badly. Some of the strips I remember as being funny are still funny, but a lot of them are just either a)not funny, b)sexist(in a way that's not obviously meant to be the characters being flawed) and not funny c)homo/transphobic and not funny. Breaking Cat News  Twee as hell, but in a way I like. I still think it suffers from having to fit its art into comic strip size instead of the huge pages of the webcomic BCN, but it's adapted well overall. Really needs to stick to the cat jokes and stop doing sudden extended storylines that are all OTT mushiness and no jokes. Brenda Starr  In its heyday, one of the most popular soap opera strips, chronicling the life and many, many romances of the worst reporter in the Midwest. Buni  A cute, visuals heavy contemporary comic strip that never wears out its welcome since we only get a couple a week. Calvin and Hobbes  Do I really need to explain this one? Is there a single person on the planet who doesn't know what this comic is?? Cat Tales  An old comic about the adventures of a taciturn cat. ChaCha Chako  This made so much more sense when you finally explained the story takes place in a pastiche world based on a children's cartoon with anthropomorphic food and animals. Strangely, this information neither improved the comic nor made it worse. It's still equally great. Cheer Up Boss Dharma  The only South Korean comic in the thread, translated by me, personally, the only one here who (I think) can read Korean. Cheer Up Boss Dharma is an office humor comic that appears on weekdays in the Sports Dongah, a sports/entertainment newspaper that's sixteen pages long. I pull them from here, if you're wondering. Cheer Up Boss Dharma is on two of those pages, always in color. It's also unrepresentative of South Korean comics in general, which are predominantly webtoons written by salaried professionals on portal websites. Other South Korean newspapers have long running serials of about comparable density and the occasional gag strip, but they're hired per paper and not syndicated. Compu-toon  Compu-toon is almost the exact same kind of novelty as Heathcliff, come to think of it, just not intentionally and with a very different topic. Crabgrass  A slice of life comic about two BFFs from the guy who made A Problem Like Jamal. A genuinely charming and funny thread favorite. Crankshaft  I find the smugness of Crankshaft to be every bit as infuriating as Funky Winkerbean these days because it seems like every other strip relies on understanding some arcane internal or external reference that Batiuk doesn't even attempt to explain. Curtis  Curtis is usually below-average, with a few strips that are extra-bad and a few that are shockingly good(usually the barber and church-lady-hat strips). The kwanzaa strips are always a delight, although I swear this year's is a rerun. Maybe I'm too used to the rhythm of them. Daddy Daze  I liked this for the week-ish we all thought the joke was the dad inventing explanations for baby babble. Dark Laughter  Ollie Harrington started this comic in 1930s African-American newspapers as a satire of Harlem society. It features lovable rascal Bootsie. Dark Side of the Horse  Ranges from okay to fantastic. The simplicity works in its favor. Dick Tracy   Locher-Era Dick Tracy is boring at worst, charmingly batshit at best. It's copaganda, of course, but with the tiniest arms you've ever seen. Modern Dick Tracy hasn't been reliably posted here in quite some time because it's very boring, even by thread standards. Dilbert is banned from this thread because Scott Adams is so politics adjacent it's too much of a headache to deal with his output anymore. Link to them if you must post them at all. Dinky Dinkerton  A slapstick detective comic that's reminiscent of Smoky Stover but not as good. Dogbert  Dogbert was one of Morrie Turner’s less-known strips for the Chicago Defender, set in the armed forces. Dok's Duck (November 26, 1913)  I loved the duck back in the YOU RUMMY era. This incarnation of the duck has slowly been losing me, since it loves to get into a storyline and wring every bit of life out of it while not being particularly clever along the way. The arcs where the joke is LOOK AT THIS RACIAL STEREOTYPE BIRD don't help either. Dustin  What's there to say about Dustin that hasn't been said already? gently caress you, Kelley. Parker is a good artist and glancing at his twitter suggests he's not a shithead. I can only assume he's stuck here because he can't find a better gig. Dykes To Watch Out For  The only thread where you're allowed to use this word and not be homophobic. Unless you want to talk about Dick Van Dyke. Or Sonny Dykes. Or the useful physical structures used to protect our friends in low-lying areas from flooding. Encyclopedia Brown  Encyclopedia Brown is about the son of a cop who supposedly memorized the entre encyclopedia and uses that knowledge to accuse people of crimes. His logic varies from plausible to really stupid, but nobody's ever going to call him on it or question why he's being brought in to solve crimes, because he's the son of a cop. Each case only lasts a week, so at least it doesn't overstay its welcome. Based on the children's brain-teasers of the same name. Ernie Pook’s Comeek  Originally published without her knowledge thanks to Matt Groening, the alt-weekly strip ran from 1979 until 2008. It follows the families of Arna and Arnold Arneson and their cousins Marlys and Maybonne. Lynda Barry is a certified MacArthur genius, and this comic holds a very special place in many readers' hearts. Everyday Movies  By Denys Wortman. It ran from 1924 to 1954 in a couple of long-defunct New York papers, the Sun and the World-Telegram, and features slice-of-life humor combined with notably detailed art for a daily panel. F Minus  One panel gag-a-day strip that is usually pretty good. The Family Circus  The adorable adventures of a large family, based heavily on the real-life family of Bil Keane in the 1960s. You should probably interpret that sarcastically. The Far Side is banned from this thread due to a DMCA takedown notice. Link to them if you must post them at all. Fingerpori  Fingerpori is a cult classic from Finland, drawn and written by Pertti Jarla. The comic features far fetched (and often untranslatable) puns and also a bunch of social commentary on the hot issues of the day. Flash Gordon  The classic adventure strip about the jock turned heroic space dude. Hurt a lot by the weekly update schedule, which can make it hard to remember what's going on. Flyin' Jenny  A comic about an aviatrix who gets up to some pretty wild adventures. Footrot Flats  Footrot Flats is mostly focused on the life of Dog on his master's farm in either New Zealand or Australia(I'm not sure if it's meant to be somewhere specific or just vaguely evocative of both). The strip is charming and funny, and also not afraid to show Dog eating the half-rotten corpse of a sheep. For Better or For Worse  I read somewhere that teenagers these days don't actually drive anymore. Part of this is COVID keeping them from driving anywhere, but also everything being online has reduced the need for it. So being able to drive isn't the rite of passage it used to be. I bring this up, not to critique this individual comic, but to emphasize how despite pretending to be a modern comic strip nearly every single For Better or For Worse has some really subtle cultural element that doesn't at all track to life as how we know it today. FoxTrot  FoxTrot is a sitcom strip about the Fox family, most frequently featuring nerdy young Jason. It's been around since the 1980s but went to Sundays-only in 2006. Funky Winkerbean  Funky Winkerbean has the bad habit of making me hate the jobs of the characters it depicts despite the fact that I know full well Batiuk does absolutely no research about anything, and certainly not the professional work he dedicates entire plotlines to. Funny Online Animals  A Tuesday/Thursday newspaper comic by K.C. Green.The general framework is that it's about a collection of past characters from previous webcomics/projects working together at an online content company run by Question Hound (or the This Is Fine Dog if you only know Green's stuff from his pervasive online meme popularity). Garfield   Modern Garfield isn't bad. It's not great. But it's not as awful as you'd expect a zombie strip to be. Also posted in classic (eighties) form, which is indisputedly much better. Gay and Her Gang  One of the “flapper girl” strips from the late 1920s, “Gay” stands out with well done word-play and excellent put-downs. Created by thread favorite Gladys Parker, the strip ended in March of 1930. Get Fuzzy  Liked Get Fuzzy as a teen. Still like it now, but I feel like some the tone of the strip comes off worse outside the context of the early 00s media landscape. It's a very "haha, everyone is kinda weird and there's a token jerk we're all putting up with for some reason" thing. The Good Innvandrer  A strip about Janine El Khawand from Lebanon that fell in love with a Norwegian, went to visit him, got stuck in the corona epidemic and made a comic strip about it. Haraiso Days  Basically Urumachi Sakaba, but with different characters in a more long-winded format that allows for more complex stories. Takes place in a bar in a deliberately ambiguous near future cyberpunk setting in Japan. Heart of the City  A long-running comic about a bunch of kids in suburbia somewhere. Got a new artist in 2020, who continues to make storylines with the characters that are almost interesting. Heathcliff  Briefly surreal but not terribly memorable to be entirely honest. Herman the Heathen  A strip about three cavemen: Herman, a dumb ugly brute who's main concern is eating meat. Little Man, a naive doofus. Old Man, a mad scientist type of guy (kind of like Professor Farnsworth). Other characters include God, the Devil, the Apocalypse, Adam, Eve and their sons Cain and Abel. It started as a backup strip in the Scandinavian Phantom magazine and soon proved popular enough to get a magazine of it's own. Intelligent Life  It used to be in papers and is now online only on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. There's lazy copy-pasted art and blatantly reused panels, story arcs that go on for months and accomplish nothing, story arcs that just get dropped so the status quo won't change, and constant references to pop culture "nerd" media properties in place of jokes. Into Ilves  An adventure comic strip by Finnish cartoonist Egon Meuronen, who also created Surgeon's Tales which was a thread favorite for the previous three years. The strip ran in Helsingin Sanomat 1949-1954 and was Meuronen's first long-running strip after two short propaganda series he drew during the war. Johnny Hazard  Johnny Hazard is about a...spy? I'm not actually sure what Johnny's job is. Anyway, it's about the titular Johnny getting into all sorts of high-stakes drama involving a revolving door of ethnic stereotypes. It's generally pretty good. Jucika  Jucika (yoo-si-ka) by Pál Pusztai ran from 1957 to 1970, "featuring a young, independent woman, frequently in risqué situations." It was rediscovered by the internet recently and the obvious quality of humor and risqué situations made it a cult classic. It can be read in full at Jucika Daily and Jucika In Order, both on Twitter. Junk Drawer  A pretty good single panel strip by Ellis Rosen. It is published every whenever Ellis feels like it, usually once a week these days. Kevin and Kell  Kevin & Kell is "the world's longest-running daily webcomic" by Bill Holbrook (who also does On The Fastrack and Safe Havens), who has been publishing it since 1995. (Technically it was Monday-Friday at first, but switched to a full-week format with big strips on Sunday a few years in.) It was also published as a syndicated strip in a few newspapers for a while. It's set in a world similar to our own, but where all people are anthropomorphic animals, and follows the adventures of a blended family: Kevin the Rabbit and Kell the wolf; Kevin's adopted daughter from his previous marriage, Lindesfarne the english hedgehog; Kell's son from her previous marriage, Rudy the wolf (who is half-fox); and Kevin and Kell's daughter Coney, an omnivorous, predatory rabbit (owing to her wolf heritage). Along with a slew of other collateral characters. Seriously, it's been twenty-five years, it's basically a soap opera in comic strip form. Notably, the world it's set in is absolutely horrifying if you put a bit of thought in it and make inferences based on what is shown. But I digress. You'll see for yourself. Currently we're about ten years in, 2005, posting one week at a time; I also post the modern strips, one day at a time. Life  Back in the twenties Life was a humor magazine packed to the gills with cartoonists. These are their comics. Life in Hell  A curated collection of strips from Matt Groening’s (yes, that Matt Groening’s) long-running strip, Life in Hell. The strip began in 1977 and ran weekly in various alt papers around the country until 2012. In a world populated by anthropomorphic rabbits (and exactly two humans), our main character is the hapless Binky. However, there is no plot. L-Insight  A Norwegian comic by an eighteen-year-old, about eighteen-year-olds. Little Lefty (October 28-30, 1935)  Here again. More straightforwardly aggressive children. But they're also Communists. The Lockhorns  The Lockhorns is far funnier than a strip about a bickering boomer couple has any right to be. And considering the artist/writer is a 90 year old woman, it's somehow better at showing how people use(both generally and also specifically holding/interacting with) phones and tablets than a lot of other comics. Luann  I'm never going to pass up an opportunity to poo poo on Luann. Luann is a comic written and drawn by people who are completely out of touch with how modern American society, relationships, and culture work, but who are dimly aware of some of the superficial signifiers. And who think that sex before marriage is evil. Macanudo  Fluff written by someone who doesn't know how to be sincerely cute or heartwarming, so it all comes off like a dollar store hallmark card. Mandrake   I have completely lost track of what's going on in Modern Mandrake, which is funny because I can remember offhand pretty quickly that Classic Mandrake is currently about a convoluted jewel heist involving mummy impersonation and that Mandrake is currently trolling a dude with lots of tattoos by making the tattoos move. Mark Trail  The plotting is a mess. I've accepted it's probably always going to be a mess. It's enjoyable if you treat it as a goofy strip where sometimes people are getting into a fight or exploding boats and the villains are captain planet stereotypes. Mary Worth   Modern MW is a masterclass showpiece of the social dynamics that let toxic people get away with being toxic and pressure their victims into being quietly unhappy forever because god forbid you "rock the boat". I hate it and I can't stop reading it. Also available in the somewhat less hateable seventies form. Modesty Blaise  The legendary post-WWII adventure strip we all know and love, starting over from the very beginning. Monty  I like Monty. His pathetic bachelor lifestyle is something I can relate to. Monya the Grey  A cute Japanese comic that's a riff on the Wizard of Oz, with the title character being a sad, ostracized witch who eventually is befriended by Dorothy and Toto. Not pictured in the sample comic: any of those characters. Mopsy  Gladys Parker created Mopsy after “Gay and Her Gang” ended and it became her most successful and long-running feature. It ended in 1965. Mutt and Jeff  I like this comic a lot and am glad you added it to your lineup. I'm assuming these are all older ones? I'm surprised at how easy they read, since it seems like most classic comics have a nearly inscrutable setup structure. Mutts  Extremely inoffensive. Not unpleasant by any means, but it's easy to see why Mutts hasn't been in the thread for years. Nancy    Most of feel like Olivia started off strong, then realized she ran out of jokes and has just been coasting for a paycheck since then. Old Nancies from the Bushmiller era are also posted, and much more widely liked since that guy never ran out of jokes and nearly every last one of them has aged fantastically. The seventies version also has its moments. Night Visitors  A weekly comic from thread favorite Q-Rais where the author entertains a series of strange guests. Oaky Doaks  “Oaky” ran from 1935 to 1961. Features a continuing plot, with a decent joke into almost every strip. On The Fastrack  All of the metaphors in this comic are very disturbing. I mean sure, that's true for any Holbrook cartoon, but this is the only one that purports to take place in something approximating the real world and depicting characters like you and me. Origins of the Sunday Comics  A curated selection of Sunday comics posted to Gocomics, usually with commentary. Sometimes there's repeats of stuff it's done before, or overlap with stuff posted by other people here, but I doubt anyone minds. Out Our Way, featuring the hit character of 1937. "Hit" as in "preferably with a blunt instrument". (December 13-15, 1937)  This is a better puzzle strip than Encyclopedia Brown as I'm always left wondering, what is this reference supposed to mean? Was life eighty years ago really that different? The Outbursts of Everett True  Created in 1905 by A.D. Condo and running until 1927, “True” was one of the most popular features of its day. The WWI era strips did not go over well in this thread for good reason. Post-war, topics have returned (mostly) to pre-war themes. Overboard   Surreal in a fairly memorable way is why I like this comic more than I probably should. Nineties Overboard is also posted, and is less surreal and more recognizably a comic about pirates. Pearls Before Swine  I used to really dislike Pearls Before Swine because of its sheer smugness, but I find the pandemic has had a very effective humbling impact on Pastis that gives the strip a much more grounded perspective in regards to the uselessness of superiority complexes and how it fuels depression. Also it has better jokes now. Peanuts   Like, see here, the whole idea of writing letters to thank people seems wholly alien to Skippy. Or even something like Out Our Way, which has more polite kids in general. Anyway, Peanuts is well-known enough to not really need an introduction. We've got the fifties and the seventies varieties. The Phantom  The Ghost Who Walks! The Phantom is a guy who comes from a long line of other guys who fight against bad guys as the Phantom. Supposedly the only people in on the secret that it is not in fact the same person is a tribe called the Bandar. The current Phantom is the 21st and has two kids and a wife, with the son Kit being prepped to be the next Phantom although we all know it should be the daughter Heloise. Phoebe and Her Unicorn  Pretty good, usually funny, sometimes phones it in with a week of "haha, UNICORN!". Pickles  Pickles depicts the kind of old person I want to be some day. Pondus  Supposedly the most successful ongoing newspaper comic strip in Scandinavia, despite the typically hideous art. Pooch Cafe  Sometimes it's slightly funny. Most of the time it's just kind of there. The way Poncho's ear is drawn has always bugged the hell out of me. Popular Comics  A grab bag of various old comics. Prince Valiant   Prince Valiant is a legacy strip that began in 1937. Drawn for decades by the brilliant Hal Foster, it follows the many adventures of the titular prince of Thule and knight of the Round Table. The strip is Sundays only, so I have been posting the modern strip (by Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates) on Sundays and classic strips otherwise, from the excellent Fantagraphics collections. If you like what you see, I urge you to buy some of these collections, as they reproduce the strip in a lovely oversized format with stunning color fidelity. Foster's artwork is spectacular and these collections are probably the first time it has been given a format it deserves since first being published in papers. The modern version of the strip is also published here, and is excellent in its own right, but doesn't get as much attention since it's published in weekly rather than daily snippets. Rae the Doe  I find this comic about as tiresome as Modern Nancy any time it's not using the deliberately nonsensically convoluted puns. Retail  Retail is about how working in retail is a living hell. It ran from 2006 to 2020. Rex Morgan MD   Tooting my own horn and posting 70s RM next to modern to illustrate just how nothing modern Rex is. 70s RM drags on too long but things actually happen and they're actual things real humans might care about irl. And it doesn't keep letting the air out of its own tires by cancelling out any remotely interesting bits 5 strips after they happen. And it does still involve actual medicine sometimes. I don't even read modern RM 90% of the time and it moves so slowly and does so little that it's still not hard to know what's going on. Rhymes With Orange  A long-running gag-a-day comic by Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo. Rip Haywire  Rip Haywire is like a case study in how constant plot twists in the context of a daily strip just make the whole thing drat near unreadable. Safe Havens  Currently on Safe Havens, a mouse and a bird (?) have been turned into humans, have had a human baby, and now apparently that baby is talking much faster than she should. That's it. That's the comment. Any given day the Safe Havens storyline is based on premises equally bizarre. Sally Forth  I find the soap opera aspects of this comic more compelling than the actual soap strips, and the humor aspects less compelling than the actual comedy strips. Scary Gary  Gary the vampire's not so scary. That's the joke. The Shadow  An adaptation of the pulp character into somewhat incoherent dailies. Skippy (April 16-17, 1934)  It's a weird analogy to make, but I can't help but see Skippy as being a kind of proto-Peanuts in that the characters, being slightly older, are also much better at being straightforwardly aggressive. Yet at the same time, there's a big generation gap at play because it feels like post World War II kids were expected to have better manners. Smokey Stover  A screwball comedy strip that takes a carpet-bombing approach to puns and sight gags. If you don't like one joke, just wait -- there will be six in the next panel. So It Seems  A short-lived strip from the early 1950s. Solver Spring Special  Another John Allison comic, this one focusing on the young adult adventures of Lottie of Bad Machinery as she works a normal job and other people assume something must be wrong with her since that's very out of character. Spiderman   Newspaper Spiderman is about the world's stupidest superhero and the even dumber situations he finds himself in. It ended in March 2019, but reruns keep the magic going. Also available in his seventies incarnation. Steeple  Another John Allison webcomic, the most story intensive one of the bunch. Stephen Collins  A contemporary British comic with a very dry sense of humour. Would probably get to be very tiring if new ones came out more than once a week. Storm P  Robert Storm Petersen (19 September 1882 – 6 March 1949) was a Danish cartoonist, writer, animator, illustrator, painter and humorist. He is known almost exclusively by his pen name Storm P. Non-English Wikipedia also mentions the following: "He tried his luck in the USA, but the Americans did not care for his drawings and did not understand his humor." Sylvia  By the Chicago based Nicole Hollander, Sylvia is a daily slice of life feminist and VERY 80s/90s comic featuring the titular Sylvia, her unnamed daughter, Harry the bartender, and Sylvia’s sometime lover who is also an alien. There are also a lot of cats, two Dogs From Hell, the Fashion Police, and occasionally Satan, along with numerous one-offs. This comic also has no plot. Take It From The Tinkersons  A strange strip that should be either terrible or forgettable, but is actually pretty good? Tegnehanne  A contemporary Norwegian comic with terrible art but surprisingly sweet writing about a pair of domestically inclined Millennials who have a baby. Thimble Theater (July 28-29, 1938)  It is incredibly weird just how modern and experimental this strip feels given that Popeye is synonymous with cliched damsel in distress cartoons for children. Those Were the Days  Created by Art Beeman, TWTD perfects nostalgia for a world that never existed. It ran forever. Tina's Groove  A now-ended gag strip by Rina Piccolo about a waitress Toonerville Folks (June 27-29, 1918)  Toonerville is probably my favorite vintage comic in the thread. It somehow avoids getting stale despite literally all of its characters involving one joke each, probably because the characters are given hints of their lives outside that(see: how The Powerful Katrinka got a boyfriend at some point). Up Front  Set in WWII, “Up Front” features infantrymen Willie and Joe and first ran in “Stars and Stripes” in 1944 before being syndicated. Uramachi Sakaba  An indy slice of life-ish comic about a bunch of barflies who are regulars at a little unnamed bar in a deep sub-level of a cyberpunk-ish megacity. It's self-published - web and self-printed zines essentially - and AFAIK I'm the only person translating it to English and this and the other webcomic thread are thus the only place to read it in English. People have described it as "Cyberpunk Cheers" and that's probably as on-the-nose as you can get. There's a lot of implied setting, but it's basically a romanticized mid- to late-20th-century working-class Japan with sci-fi trappings. The author, Maruoka Kuzo, really knows how to tell a tight little character-focused story in 4 pages and it's a god-drat shame he's not more popular than he is. Vater Und Sohn  From 1930s Germany about a father/son pair and their mostly extremely wholesome everyday adventures. It was originally published in a weekly Berlin paper, in the early years of the Nazi regime - well before the war, but well into the time period, too. For the most part, that's background information, as the strip itself is almost pointedly apolitical. Wallace the Brave  I'm not sure if Wallace or Valiant is the best strip in the thread. It's just  Wee Pals  Wee Pals was the first strip with multi-cultural characters to gain wide syndication and its creator Morrie Turner was one of the first African-Americans artists to appear on a mainstream comics page. Zits   Available in both modern and historical (by which I mean the nineties) varieties, Zits centers around teenager Jeremy and his parents, and consistently shows surprising prescience when it comes to the generation gap. It's equally fair (or unfair) to both sides. Zofie's World  A comic strip made by taking old comic strip panels, enlarging and exaggerating them, and then giving them new text. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Apr 23, 2022 |
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I like comics!
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Jan 1, 2022 17:36
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What's black and white and read all over?
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Jan 1, 2022 17:41
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Love these threads A sincere thanks to all who post comics, even the bad ones
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Jan 1, 2022 17:44
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The Bloop posted:Love these threads Seconding this. The comic strips threads are what has kept me coming back to SA year after year.
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Jan 1, 2022 17:53
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Happy New Year everyone!  Here's to another year of the best thread on this forum.(I don't like the thread poll because it won't let me pick all four options.  )Vintage Valiant (Jan. 23, 1949)    Prince Valiant is a legacy strip that began in 1937. Drawn for decades by the brilliant Hal Foster, it follows the many adventures of the titular prince of Thule and knight of the Round Table. The strip is Sundays only, so I have been posting the modern strip (by Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates) on Sundays and classic strips otherwise, from the excellent Fantagraphics collections. If you like what you see, I urge you to buy some of these collections, as they reproduce the strip in a lovely oversized format with stunning color fidelity. Foster's artwork is spectacular and these collections are probably the first time it has been given a format it deserves since first being published in papers. When I was a kid I had trouble getting into Prince Valiant because it had a long backstory and seemed wordy and dense, so I'm including a high level summary of the plot of the classic strips to this point to help those who haven't been following along. Feel free to ignore everything past this sentence if this strip isn't something that interests you.  The classic strips begin with Val's family being ousted from Thule by the usurper King Sligon. Val grows up in the wilderness of King Arthur's England, becoming famous through heroic deeds, but also suffering under a witch's prophecy that he will have a life of adventure without contentment. Val falls for the beautiful maiden Ilene and rescues her father, but discovers she is betrothed to Prince Arn of Ord. When Ilene is kidnapped by Viking raiders, Arn gives Val the charmed Singing Sword and together they try to rescue her, but alas she dies at sea. Val loses a joust with Sir Tristram and returns to his father, not knowing that King Arthur wishes to knight him. Together he and his father plan to return to Thule to retake the throne, but they are delayed by a Saxon invasion of England. Val devises a strategy to defeat the Saxons, and is knighted following the battle. Returning to Thule, Val and his father King Aguar gather allies to overthrow Sligon, but Sligon barters away the throne in exchange for a quiet retirement. Val travels to the continent seeking adventure, and learns that western Rome is collapsing under pressure from the Huns. He takes part in a great battle at the castle Andelkrag, builds an army, frees the city of Pandaris through trickery, and finally defeats the Huns in a clever trap. He travels to Rome, where he is falsely accused of the assassination of the general Aetius. Val escapes, but is captured as a slave by Angor Wrack, the Sea King. Angor takes the Singing Sword, but Val escapes again with the help of a magical necklace. Sailing from island to island without any provisions, he has a strange vision of a beautiful young queen named Aleta, and wakes to find his little boat filled with food. Through a series of adventures Val pursues Angor Wrack to Jerusalem and beyond, eventually regaining the sword and making peace with the Sea King. He goes in search of Aleta, but through a misunderstanding comes to believe she is a villainous tyrant, and through youthful foolishness he believes also that his growing love for her is the result of a curse. Val befriends a Viking named Boltar, with whom he travels to the jungles south of the Sahara in search of gold, though he spends all of his share paying a ransom for his friend Sir Gawain. He and Gawain enjoy a few adventures together as they return once more to England. In England King Arthur sends Val and Gawain to gather intelligence against the Picts. Gawain lingers at a castle to indulge in luxury, but rescues Valiant when he is captured. Arthur leads his men in victory against the Picts and their Viking allies, aided once again by Val's clever strategy, but Val leaves to search for the witch who had once prophesied his life of empty adventure, hoping she can cure Aleta's curse. When that fails, he travels to Merlin, who knows Val's enchantment is an illusion and sends him on his way. Val returns to Thule, where he foils a plot against his father. King Aguar calms further unrest among the Vikings by offering them rewards for voyages of exploration and for opening trade routes, as well as granting them permission to raid anywhere but King Arthur's realm. After a series of adventures battling the Finns on Thule's border, Aguar asks Val to consider marriage, but Val believes he is still under Aleta's spell. Val sails with his squire Beric to confront Aleta, but he suffers a head wound in a shipwreck and becomes incoherent. Beric leads the ailing prince to Aleta's Kingdom of the Misty Isles, but Val picks a fight in which Beric dies. Enraged and still unable to think clearly, Val storms into the throne room and abducts Aleta, escaping in a stolen ship. Aleta remembers and has fallen for Valiant, but the dazed prince leads her aimlessly through the North African desert. After a long fever Val comes to his senses, and eventually understands the true nature of his feelings for her. Aleta is promptly kidnapped by the scoundrel Donardo, but Val raises an army and rescues her from his city of Saramand. They then travel together to Rome with the King of the Vandals, Genseric, and are married in a forest grove by a former cardinal. They travel together back to Camelot, and along the way Aleta recruits a handmaiden named Katwin. In England Aleta tries her hand at knightly adventure and embarasses an outlaw in a swimming contest, and Arthur takes the outlaws on as scouts for his army. Aleta then claims to be involved in a tryst with Sir Launcelot, who has in truth been seeing Queen Guinevere, to foil Sir Mordred's plot against the king. Val and Aleta go to Thule to meet Val's father, and Aleta defuses a feud with an old friend of the king. She is then kidnapped by a raider named Ulfrun, who sails west across the sea to evade capture. Katwin tries to save her, and swims back to shore with a broken arm to join Val in the pursuit. They chase Ulfrun to the Americas and the lands of what will one day be the Haudenosaunee, where Ulfrun is vanquished and Aleta rescued. Val and Aleta spend the winter in the vicinity of Niagara Falls, where their first child is born. The infant prince is named Arn in honor of Val's boyhood rival. The natives believe Aleta is a goddess and assign a woman named Tillicum to serve her, and when Val and Aleta leave for England, Tillicum comes with them. At Camelot Val and Aleta decide their son's godfather should be his namesake, and when Val goes to find his old friend he discovers Arn has also married, and named his first son Valiant. The two infant princes are christened together at Camelot.
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Jan 1, 2022 18:01
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Happy New Year, fellow comics goons! And many thanks to Some Guy TT for creating this shiny new thread. Classic Zits is Zits, but classic.  Love in Hell is a curated collection of relationship-themed strips from Matt Groening’s (yes, that Matt Groening’s) long-running strip, Life in Hell. The strip began in 1977 and ran weekly in various alt papers around the country until 2012. In a world populated by anthropomorphic rabbits (and exactly two humans), our main character is the hapless Binky. However, there is no plot.  Sylvia by the Chicago based Nicole Hollander is a daily slice of life feminist and VERY 80s/90s comic featuring the titular Sylvia, her unnamed daughter, Harry the bartender, and Sylvia’s sometime lover who is also an alien. There are also a lot of cats, two Dogs From Hell, the Fashion Police, and occasionally Satan, along with numerous one-offs. This comic also has no plot.   Marlys! is a collection of comics from Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek. Originally published without her knowledge thanks to Matt Groening, the alt-weekly strip ran from 1979 until 2008. It follows the families of Arna and Arnold Arneson and their cousins Marlys and Maybonne. Lynda Barry is a certified MacArthur genius, and this comic holds a very special place in my heart. Barry was based in Chicago during the time she was writing this, and as a weirdo teen and pre-teen, I felt grownup picking up the Reader every week and seeing this; it felt private, and written just for me. 
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Jan 1, 2022 18:06
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Alright! New thread! Which means I can get started on my uploads! So! As was detailed in brief in the OP, I am the person behind uploading Blueberry - a long-running Belgian Western serial that started back in the 60s by scriptwriter Jean-Michel Charlier and the reknown French comic artist Jean Giruad AKA Gir AKA Mœbius - whose work in other projects is stunning, and is no different in this. Now, I'm not simply doing this for your enjoyment, ladies, gentlemen and NBs all - my circumstances mean that I have these comics not in the original French, but in translated Swedish which I am translating for you all here into English. This does mean that I have editorial biases and - while I try to keep the original meaning as close as I can to the Swedish translation - there are times where I feel the need to step in and add my own touch. Most of the time this involves having the language of the Native American peoples not be the stereotypical 'Me-talk-in-third-person-like-caveman', however there have been times where I have altered the dialogue - though I do make note of that in my notes when it happens, in hopes that my reasoning makes sense to you, my readers. Also, please note that my scans are in black-and-white. This is for ease on my part to sharpen scans and to translate dialogue, but also to provide an impetus to any readers to check out and purchase actual copies from an accredited source where you can enjoy the art in full, and by God is it a treat. Also, to address the elephant in the room - this is a comic on the American West from Belgium back in the day, so it is within the 'racist but not as racist as you might expect' category e.g. researching aspects of the Native peoples of America, but then applying them wholesale to EVERY different tribe in the U.S. If something egregious comes up, I'll be sure to acknowledge it/spoil it as I feel is appropriate, and if anyone who is more qualified to comment on things that are mentioned in the comic, I ask you, please do not hold back - I would welcome it. Also, the comics' grasp on actual U.S. history is... I would say as close as Hal Foster's Prince Valiant is on the history of Europe and the Middle East in the early Dark Ages, i.e. not very. It shall make for some very amusing stories in the future, I can assure you. So! The story so far: We began in post-bellum Arizona, where we are quickly introduced to the eponymous hero/occasional anti-hero who is shown as a rogue, but a general force for good and for justice. Michael Steven Blueberry is a cavalry officer, lieutenant class, veteran of the civil war who joined the Union forces despite being a Georgian by birth, stationed to Fort Navajo where, due to bigoted zealotry, a full-scale war breaks out between the U.S. government and the Apache and Navajo peoples. These costly hostilities are defused thanks to the hard work of Blueberry, the Lt. Crow - a Native officer forced to abandon his oath to the U.S. army by the repugnant prejudice of his superiors - and the rascally prospector Jim McClure, but not without a heavy cost - for the noble Crow was betrayed and slain by the vengeful Quanah, who would accept no peace from the U.S., believing that the government would seek to impoverish and crush his people in peace and war. News of Blueberry's role in defusing tensions leads to his renown in both other Native peoples and U.S. camps, and he is hired by Union Pacific to act as a mediating envoy to the Cheyenne and Lakota peoples while the trans-continental railway is being built. Blueberry eventually discovers a conspiracy to ignite hostilities between these Native peoples and U.P. (as well as the U.S.) by the rival railway company Central Pacific through their agent, the villainous Jethro Steelfingers. Returning with Jim McClure, and along with the frontiersman 'Red' Wooley, Blueberry is eventually able to lay the conspiracy bare to all parties and bring about a tenuous cease-fire - but his efforts are in vain, for the blue-blooded, decoration-seeking and cruel General Alistair from West Point takes command and begins a massive offensive during the winter months against the Native peoples, betraying Blueberry's word and making him hated by the people he once worked so hard to cease hostilities with. The offensive eventually ends in a stalemate due to Alistair's maladministration, and Blueberry, Red and McClure live to fight another day. Now! Blueberry and McClure, assigned as marshals to a lawless town back in Arizona, are dealing with the unscrupulous Prosit Luckner who claims to have a gold mine deep in Apache territory. Dealing with betrayal from McClure, two ruthless bandits and a posse of insurgent Apache, Blueberry manages to track down Prosit and one of the bandits, Wally Blount, to the site of the mine deep in an unforgiving desert, only to find that the rumours the mine is guarded by a vengeful ghost may be more true than originally suspected...
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Jan 1, 2022 18:18
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Cheer Up Boss Dharma The only South Korean comic in the thread, translated by me, personally, the only one here who (I think) can read Korean. Cheer Up Boss Dharma is an office humor comic that appears on weekdays in the Sports Dongah, a sports/entertainment newspaper that's sixteen pages long. I pulled them from here, if you're wondering. Cheer Up Boss Dharma is on two of those pages, always in color. It's also unrepresentative of South Korean comics in general, which are predominantly webtoons written by salaried professionals on portal websites. Other South Korean newspapers have long running serials of about comparable density and the occasional gag strip, but they're hired per paper and not syndicated. The author of Cheer Up Boss Dharma is Park Sung-hoon. You could only possibly be familiar with this name if you'd read his predecessor strip It's All Right Chief Dharma from early iterations of the thread (published at that time on Money Today before being canceled and going web-only for awhile until getting a proper finish) or Mother From Another Country also from previous versions of this thread. Mother From Another Country is actually in its fifth season on Kakao but unfortunately I had to stop translating them when they migrated to Kakao because they're much better at preventing image copying than the Sports Dongah, as you can see here. That comic deals with a French woman and longtime resident of Jeju Island with a Korean husband and son, and her various misadventures.
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Jan 1, 2022 18:20
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Safety Dance posted:Seconding this. The comic strips threads are what has kept me coming back to SA year after year. The love to hate part is why I post Intelligent Life. It used to be in papers and is now online only on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, so I dump them all at the end of the week. Ah, what could be said about it if it merits an introduction in the first post? There's lazy copy-pasted art and blatantly reused panels, story arcs that go on for months and accomplish nothing, story arcs that just get dropped so the status quo won't change, and constant references to pop culture "nerd" media properties in place of jokes. These were all in the last thread but let's get them in here for new readers to enjoy  Intelligent Life    Daddy Daze  Take It From the Tinkersons  Macanudo  Dark Side of the Horse 
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Jan 1, 2022 18:27
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COMICS
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Jan 1, 2022 18:30
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Post is not edit...
Samovar fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Jan 1, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 18:30
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Sorry for the delay - my internet has been a bit spotty. In today's Blueberry: Blount and Luckner give away their position, or Blount ain't afraid of no ghost, or Blount is a man with a plan (but there ain't no canal, and thus no Panama)   
Samovar fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Jan 1, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 18:32
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I'm currently posting some of the selected works off John Allison to the thread. I kind of missed out posting yesterday, though, but this way I can cover both my bases at once. Most of his work is set in the fictional northern English town of Tackleford, a magnet for weirdness of varying degrees. I'll also include his commentary on the comics where I can. Bad Machinery is the third comic set in the Bobbinsverse, following the adventures of six schoolfriends who solve mysteries. We are in the middle of the 4th case, the Case of the Lonely One, where a new kid seems to have some sway over all of the school (at least his year), save Shauna and some of the school outcasts.  John Allison posted:Now time has clouded my memory, but as far as I can recall, that's how you meet girls, in your head, when you have no chance otherwise of ever talking to That Girl You Like. Bobbins.Horse is Allison's revisiting of Bobbins, the original strip that got everything started. Set more in less concurrently with the original stories, it revolves around the staff of City Limit, a local magazine, and their friend group in more slice of life stories.  John Allison posted:See, loitering in window pane, the ominous bulk of DORADO RODRIGUEZ. A true nighthawk of the diner.
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Jan 1, 2022 18:43
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Ah, a nice new thread to mess up with comics! Rhymes with Orange is a long-running gag-a-day comic by Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo.  Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley is a pet strip with a low-key, quirky sense of humor. This one is from December 31, 2001.  Brenda Starr by Dale Messick was, in its heyday, one of the most popular soap opera strips, chronicling the life and many, many romances of the worst reporter in the Midwest. Fortunately, we just wrapped up a way-too-long-running story in the last thread, so we're starting fresh here. Brenda and her cousin/roommate, Abretha, have finally found an affordable apartment after a couple years of increasingly improbable housing situations. The only catch is that they don't have enough money for furniture. So they've been living on the floor, something Brenda hasn't shared with her coworkers, and that brings us to November 23, 1947 ...   (And believe it or not, this is the second time in the strip's history Brenda's coworkers have shown up on her doorstep without warning at holiday time, brandishing an uncooked bird.) Smokey Stover by Bill Holman is a screwball comedy strip about a firefighter and his family that takes a carpet-bombing approach to puns and sight gags. If you don't like one joke, just wait -- there will be six in the next panel. Like in this example from May 13, 1945:  And new for this thread, I'm going to try posting Everyday Movies (also known as Metropolitan Movies) by Denys Wortman. It ran from 1924 to 1954 in a couple of long-defunct New York papers, the Sun and the World-Telegram, and features slice-of-life humor combined with notably detailed art for a daily panel. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the New York papers, but through the miracle of syndication and the Wilmington, Delaware, Morning News, we can start with the September 13, 1934, panel: Bonus Ad! While searching old papers for comics, I occasionally notice ads or other material I find amusing and throw them in. Like so:  I'm not particularly religious, but I would totally pull up a pew to hear "the old-time gospel" from an ex-bobby. I also post Buni (Mondays/Wednesdays) and Stephen Collins (Saturdays). Selachian fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jan 1, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 18:58
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Yvonmukluk posted:Bobbins.Horse is Allison's revisiting of Bobbins, the original strip that got everything started. Set more in less concurrently with the original stories, it revolves around the staff of City Limit, a local magazine, and their friend group in more slice of life stories. Dorado's endless meal is one of my favorite things from all of the different series
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Jan 1, 2022 19:01
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Happy New Year, new thread! I've been posting Axa, a late-70s/early-80s post-apocalyptic adventure/pin-up comic, drawn by the excellent (if horny) Romero. Starring the titular Axa (and her breasts), her semi-love interest and generally lovely person Matt, and the true star of this show: Robot Mark. They have weird adventures across the wasteland of... uh... Europe? Currently we're wrapping up a storyline involving a theme park, an obviously sketchy dude who it turns out is into hypnotism and brainwashing. It is frequently spoilered, such as today, due to Romero jumping at every chance he can to have Axa be topless.  I hope to get back to posting my classic comics this year too, I dropped them because I found myself taking too long with them and stressing myself out, but I really enjoyed posting Flyin' Jenny (a comic about an aviatrix who gets up to some pretty wild adventures), Dinky Dinkerton (a slapstick detective comic that reminds me most of Smoky Stover but not as good), and The Shadow (an adaptation of the pulp character into somewhat incoherent dailies, not helped by there being a break in my archives so when I do get back to it, we'll be in the middle of a storyline I didn't see the beginning of). I don't know what to vote for, where's the 'Yes' option?
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Jan 1, 2022 19:07
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Classic Nancy Nancy originally started as a character in Ernie Bushmiller's Fritzi Ritz, but quickly came into her own strip after getting popular. Nancy joins her friend Sluggo, along with her aunt Fritzi, as well as other minor characters like Peewee or Mr. Sputter. The strip is generally one-off sight gags or wordplay, and often turns absurdist, or we see the result of Nancy taking her aunt's instructions extremely literally. Bushmiller drew Nancy from 1938 to his death in 1982, and was then drawn by several artists in the meantime. We don't talk about Gilchrist-era Nancy here. Nancy has most recently been picked up by Olivia Jaimes and is also posted in this thread. I have three Nancy books: Nancy is Happy which covers 1943-1945, Nancy Likes Christmas which covers 1946-1948, and Nancy Loves Sluggo which covers 1949-1951. I believe all three are out of print, but if you are a fan of the strip and have an opportunity to purchase one or more, I highly recommend it, since the production on the books is top-notch.  We are in the middle of Nancy Likes Christmas. I give you... Nancy 1947 
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Jan 1, 2022 19:13
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"Real" descriptions under the spoilers: Garfield by Jim Davis is owned by Nickelodeon now, it's wild. He's gonna be in the Smash Bros clone! Sometimes the jokes aren't completely bad! ahhh, you know what Garfield is, it's still going  Look man you look at Heathcliff by Peter Gallagher and you tell me you don't feel anything. What a rascal! The current artist, nephew of the original crator, George Gately, just likes getting slightly surreal and weird with it. Prone to theme weeks. Garbage Ape Forever.  Overboard by Chip Dunham is a vibe not concerned with silly ideas like "consequences" or "what animals really look like". You will read a lot of sharks calling each other "sweetie" if you read this. I hope Chip stops making covid strips this year. The comic used to be about sorta mean pirates being sorta mean to each other, now it's about good natured jokes, and pirates wanting self improvement? Beyond the animal art, some talk and some just have thought cloud dialogue, depending on if they wear clothes, I think? It's comfy but I can see how it feels milquetoast.  Monty by Jim Meddick just needs to get through this week. And the next week. And the nex- A sleeper of the comics page, always has solid dialogue, art, and jokes. Rotating focus on the cast of characters means if you don't like the current set, you can tune in next week for better stuff.  For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston is a newspaper comic and it always will be. The originator of these threads! Chronicling the life of a mother with wild beliefs about raising kids! Currently in reruns of lightly edited old strips, to try to make it seem like they're set in current times. It doesn't work.  Compu-toon by Charles Boyce deserves the world, and a big physical collection. I wish nothing but the best for Charles Boyce and his wonderful understanding of technology. No, none of the jokes ever make sense. It's perfect.  On The Fastrack, featuring Dethany! from On the Fastrack! by Bill Holbrook is absolutely going to have an NFT storyline this year and there's nothing you can do about it. About a tech company and how they destroy your will to live. Don't read this one. Save yourself. Why's that lady's neck that long.  Safe Havens by Bill Holbrook has more insane lore than your favorite cross-media anime franchise. On paper, this one's about a genetics lab and the wacky mad scientist, but I don't know man, it's another convoluted Holbrook strip. Has a real early webcomic feel to it, despite being a syndicated strip its entire existence.  op is a hater, Rae the Doe is good, it's just better when there's puns This is a gay comic from a trans woman about a trans deer, probably the most recent strip to be syndicated, loves to do awful puns with lots of buildup, and loves to make video game/anime jokes from time to time  You can support Rae the Doe by pledging to the author's Patreon! Looking forward to reading the thread this year!!! I'm so glad there's this place to experience such a wide breadth of comics, I never would have started reading Prince Valiant or Lynda Barry's work without it!
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Jan 1, 2022 19:26
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Potsticker posted:What's black and white and read all over? A zebra with a sunburn, because no one reads newspapers anymore! Waka Waka Waka!
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Jan 1, 2022 19:29
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Medenmath posted:(I don't like the thread poll because it won't let me pick all four options.  Happy New Thread! Great OP, Some Guy TT! I'll do a blurb for some of my usuals that you didn't get to yet. F Minus  One panel gag-a-day strip that is usually pretty good. Mark Trail  Mary Worth  The Phantom  The Ghost Who Walks! The Phantom is a guy who comes from a long line of other guys who fight against bad guys as the Phantom. Supposedly the only people in on the secret that it is not in fact the same person is a tribe called the Bandar. The current Phantom is the 21st and has two kids and a wife, with the son Kit being prepped to be the next Phantom although we all know it should be the daughter Heloise. The current storyline is a story being told to the Phantom of why he should not go rescue an old ally of his from prison. Somehow this rescue is supposed to lead to the end of the Phantom line, but they're taking their time getting to how that happens. It's kind of annoying, since none of this is actually happening but the strip reads like it is and eventually Phantom is just going to go rescue her anyways. Pooch Cafe  We already broke 2022. Rex Morgan MD  Andertoons Didn't update, but I want to mention it's in my opinion one of the best comics posted for the consistently high level of quality of it's gags. For some reason it fairly regularly is not updated for a few days because of some back-end issue at GoComics. Apartment 3-G  I post classic A3G basically just because I started to when they stopped running modern A3G. The artist is real good and sometimes it's got a good story though, so I'll keep it up. I also post classic Flash Gordon on Sundays.
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Jan 1, 2022 19:32
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Okay, with the introductions in order, let's shift focus to the people who truly make these threads: the people who make comic edits. I'm kidding, it's actually the people who make the crazy effort of posting comics day after day, sometimes even translating them, holy cow! I love you guys for keeping me and many others entertained every day. The edits are a lot of fun too though!  Kennel  me  LvK  Kennel  Me  Johnny Walker  Me  Me  Me  Me  Howard Beale  Powered Descent
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Jan 1, 2022 19:50
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The Far Side   Pickles  Zits 
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Jan 1, 2022 19:55
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God bless this thread and especially God bless our dedicated posters.
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Jan 1, 2022 19:56
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Scary Gary Gary is a schlubby, sensitive vampire who has moved to the American suburbs.  His household includes his evil henchman Leopold, a monster with human parents:    Leopold inherited his mother's scientific bent, and conducts experiments in the basement of the house; one of these experiments is Travis, an optimistic head in a jar.  The household also contains Owen, a depressed ghost.  Leopold enjoys hanging out at a dive bar called The Hammered Henchman:  Leopold isn't all that impressed with Gary:  Gary is chronically single, but Leopold periodically dates the Fifty-Foot Woman, and he's also pursued by Beatrice, a creepy little girl with a crush on him. Other characters include a gay couple consisting of a pair of Frankenstein's monsters, Steve and Frank.     Some crossover action! 
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Jan 1, 2022 20:15
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Powerful Katrinka posted:A zebra with a sunburn, because no one reads newspapers anymore! Waka Waka Waka! As a child the original joke never made sense to me, the wordplay between red and read was boring (and for a while I was convinced that was why it couldn't be the actual punchline) and all the weird "wrong" answers were always way more entertaining.
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Jan 1, 2022 20:19
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A new year a new comic! Into Ilves is an adventure comic strip by Finnish cartoonist Egon Meuronen (who also created Surgeon's Tales which I posted for the last three years). The strip ran in Helsingin Sanomat 1949-1954 and was Meuronen's first long-running strip after two short propaganda series he drew during the war. The comic follows the titular hero Into (whose name causes some confusing sentences when used in English) who wanders around rural Finland and helps people in trouble. After reading the first 80 strips I'm still unsure what year it's set in. Some suits in the first strip seem pretty modern which could mean it's post-war setting, but outside that the only piece of technology I've seen are firearms and it could easily be the 1920s or even the late 19th century. Not that it matters all that much. The comic's setting and stories remind me of the first years of Mark Trail. It's quite fast paced and plot progresses with heroes and villains doing extremely stupid decisions one after another. It's pretty fun from what I've seen so far, but nothing particularly amazing and the scan quality isn't all that great. Nevertheless, once again, this is probably the first time anyone has translated it, so enjoy this curiosity!  Nancy  Dustin  Mandrake  WHAAAAAT?
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Jan 1, 2022 20:47
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Grando is prime av material. Might even rename myself I am GRANDO!. Is that a good idea?
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Jan 1, 2022 21:09
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Happy new year, comic strip thread! As forumsposter davidspackage mentioned, posting comics day after day can become a big effort. BUT, if the strips you're posting are being syndicated on the Comics Kingdom or GoComics websites, a little automation can save you a bunch of daily toil. Here are a couple of simple scripts I threw together one day, being used by several of this thread's regular posters, which can be run to do all of that for you: it fetches each comic you've listed, uploads it to imgur, and spits out the bbcode of a complete post, ready to copy-paste into a posting box here on the forums. These are bash scripts that will work natively on Linux or MacOS, and (less conveniently) will also work under WSL on Windows. On most systems, the only prerequisite you'll need is this imgur upload script, which you'll have to put in the same directory from which you're running these. Automatic comic fetching-uploading labor saving scripts! Comics Kingdom: https://pastebin.com/igsZqsrS GoComics: https://pastebin.com/GsZqyNfy Now, I know that unless you're a sysadmin or other technical type, getting these going can be a little... non-obvious. So if you're interested in using these, please feel free to PM me for assistance in getting set up. And if any techies in the thread want to take a stab at rewriting these to be more user friendly, please be my guest -- a nice cross-platform python app, say, or even just a Powershell version so Windows goons won't need to mess around with WSL anymore. Bizarro is a gag-a-day strip, almost always single-panel, which relies heavily on puns and visual humor. Every strip has hidden symbols scattered somewhere around the drawing -- the number beside the artists' signatures tells you how many there are.  The Family Circus features the adorable adventures of a large family, based heavily on the real-life family of Bil Keane in the 1960s. Since Bil's death in 2011, his son Jeff has been 
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Jan 1, 2022 21:16
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Happy New Year, Thread! I'm wishing all of us a good, or at least acceptable, 2022! Let's start the year off wrong with some Luann! Luann tells the story of terminally boring 19-year-old college student Luann and all her horrible friends! It was created by Greg Evans. Several years ago his daughter Karen, upon whom Luann was originally based, joined in as co-writer of the strip. Neither Greg nor Karen have interacted with an actual 19-year-old in decades. While the characters are insufferable and the storylines are infuriating, the art and writing are quite readable and the punchlines are snappy (not to be confused with funny). This perfect balance of competence and incompetence make Luann a Grade-A Hate Read. This week's storyline has dealt with a rare time of self-reflection for the strip's characters as Luann begins to realize that her goal of becoming a schoolteacher might not actually be right for her. She loves working with kids, you see, but she hates boring garbage like teaching them stuff. Her housemate, best friend, and mean judgmental busybody Bernice is helping her navigate this important realization:  For years it's been clear to anybody who cares to notice that Bernice would make a terrible psychologist, but this is the first indication I've seen that Team Evans might be aware of this. Dare I hope that something good might actually happen in Luann? (I've hoped for good things in bad strips before. One of the gifts these threads have given me is the knowledge that life is made of disappointment.)
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Jan 1, 2022 21:18
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Vater und Sohn is a strip from 1930s Germany about a father/son pair and their mostly extremely wholesome everyday adventures. It was originally published in a weekly Berlin paper, in the early years of the Nazi regime - well before the war, but well into the time period, too. For the most part, that's background information, as the strip itself is almost pointedly apolitical. Actually, about that: I've been noticing gaps in my collection here and there, but I just now came across a tiny one-man publisher who sourced strips from the original papers for his own complete edition, and he claims to include some that have been traditionally omitted by publishers where the historical background comes through a little more clearly. His ebooks are very cheap, I'm probably going to look into this. Goethe - respect! (28/1936)  Actually in this one you could probably draw some political conclusions on the featured books and how they're treated. I'm not sure if I can assume everyone's familiar: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the German writer, on par with Shakespeare in terms of their significance in literature, history etc. Interestingly enough, one whose writings and ideas the Nazis never quite managed to fit into their program of German cultural superiority. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jan 1, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 21:21
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Happy new year comics thread! My new year's resolution is to make more edits. Let's see if I abruptly abandon it in favor of something else, like a Luann plot line, or stick with it for an excruciatingly long time, like a Rex Morgan plot line.
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Jan 1, 2022 21:36
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Happy New Year! I normally post Arlo and Janis, a long-running comic strip by Jimmy Johnson about a happy, well-adjusted couple and their extended family. Ostensibly a gag-a-day strip, but has a large, well-depicted cast and a lot of backstory. I also post "classic" reruns of A&J; I am currently in the year 2000. The archives on GoComics hold up extremely well to binge-reading. I also post classic reruns of Tina's Groove, a now-ended gag strip by Rina Piccolo about a waitress, and Garfield, a comic based on the mascot for a defunct quick-service restaurant in Toronto. Arlo and Janis  Tina's Groove Classic (March 12, 2010)  Arlo and Janis Classic (March 12, 2000)  Garfield Classic (March 12, 1990) 
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Jan 1, 2022 21:42
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I also think it was quite common to have nice leatherbound editions of Goethe's work in quite a few volumes. The thing is that unlike Shakespeare who really just wrote a bunch of plays and a healthy handful of poems, Goethe wrote A LOT OF STUFF and a lot of it is fairly dry if you're just a middle-class family trying to class up your home library a bit-- scientific inquiries, bureaucratic papers, travel journals, etc..-- there's a LOT and most of it probably sat on living room shelves untouched. Back when I had first graduated college I was really trying to master my reading German and was doing a lot of translations of German poets and novelists, and I had a close friendship with these two guys in my city who ran a small but very eclectic bookstore that had a side thing with rare/antiquarian books. They did a lot of buying from estate sales and auctions and of course some stuff you can plan on selling and some stuff you can't, so they would occasionally just give me like a big cardboard box full of German books they had no real use for. So I wound up with like-- three different editions of all of that Goethe and even as someone who really likes Goethe, it really did just eat up a poo poo ton of shelf space. So I think the joke here is in part also that Goetheswerk was a very common thing to own and a rather less common thing to actually comprehensively read. Also, I had a hell of a 2021 and due to many reasons was just not able to keep up with Dykes to Watch Out For. I had health issues, and moved into a very fixer-upper house, and sadly in the scuffle I still have no idea where a bunch of my Bechdel is (incidentally I did hold on to all of my Goethe but it is...also trapped in a mystery box somewhere in the basement or attic). But when I find them, I really would like to get back into posting them?
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Jan 1, 2022 21:44
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The Bloop posted:Love these threads
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Jan 1, 2022 21:49
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How Wonderful! posted:
That's awful!!! Hope '22 is smoother in every way for you, would love to see more HW posts any time
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Jan 1, 2022 21:58
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How Wonderful! posted:But when I find them, I really would like to get back into posting them? Please do I've really enjoyed reading DTWOF and the social/political context you provide for the strips has been excellent
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Jan 1, 2022 21:59
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Murdstone posted:
The line art in this iteration of Flash Gordon is insanely good. I look forward to it every week. Though I haven't been able to figure out how Flash gets his pipe-smokin' game on when in space.
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Jan 1, 2022 22:44
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Kennel posted:
New year, new me. Thanks, Mandrake.
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Jan 1, 2022 22:51
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