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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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Jan 1, 2022 17:33
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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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How Wonderful! posted: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? In the OP now so you have to post it. Now that you're not a moderator anymore I outrank you so no backtalk!
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Jan 1, 2022 23:13
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Maybe he just forgot that he was doing the weird time-shifted continuity thing at all and thought they were contemporaneous.
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Jan 2, 2022 06:27
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Oh no I just did a continuity error. Don't worry, these things don't publish for weeks. Just come up with some bullshit to save the theater at the last minute. But if I do that, my readers won't know that selfish non movie theater going people are letting the perverts take over America. Hm, gee, that is quite the dilemma.
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Jan 2, 2022 06:33
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Cheer Up Boss Dharma
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Jan 2, 2022 21:40
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Jan 4, 2022 00:28
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Hel posted:I thought the thread head canon was that he was actually Dustins own kid. I think that's just me. The theory doesn't seem to be as popular as my "the Tinkersons are background civilian characters on a crime procedural" theory.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:35
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Cheer Up Boss Dharma
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Jan 5, 2022 21:11
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Cheer Up Boss Dharma
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Jan 7, 2022 02:54
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Samovar posted:I don't know if Tauhid ever read this thread (I know he was around during the time in which the forum existence was up in the air), but Crabgrass is very good. I don't think he ever expressed awareness of the thread itself, he just put out a confused but grateful message on his Patreon when his supporter count ballooned to a giant number out of nowhere. Which surprised me, since it implies he doesn't have access to his own referral links. How much is he making anyway? I've always kind of idly wondered if someone could ask him to make a reward goal for "will not get mad if someone posts my bonus comics on Something Awful" because I'm not a Patreon guy but I would definitely consider sending money his way if I could read the bonus comics the only place I ever read any comics, at all.
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Jan 7, 2022 16:58
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riderchop posted:Rae The Doe, which you can support by pledging to the author's Patreon Is this comic just a new art style every day now? Not that I'm complaining, that's just quite the gimmick to come up with out of nowhere at the start of a new year.
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Jan 8, 2022 21:52
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Cheer Up Boss Dharma
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Jan 9, 2022 01:53
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Oh my God, they killed Wilbur!
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Jan 9, 2022 06:13
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Jan 10, 2022 01:31
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Jan 12, 2022 05:38
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Jan 12, 2022 20:09
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Cheer Up Boss Dharma
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Jan 14, 2022 02:54
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Cheer Up Boss Dharma
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Jan 15, 2022 03:47
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Kennel posted:Shauna sent her brother to prison, right? Yep. The thread had much vigorous debate on the subject as to how much resentment Darren was allowed to reasonably have over the issue. On the one end, she was maybe ten years old. On the other end, Shauna's actions had disastrously hosed up consequences for Darren even beyond the prison time, because he'd taken out a small loan right before being pinched that had completely ballooned out of control to an unmanageably large number by the time he got out and could pay it again.
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Jan 16, 2022 03:09
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Jan 16, 2022 03:50
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Jan 17, 2022 03:19
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Jan 18, 2022 01:47
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Jan 19, 2022 04:13
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If a person reading this thread didn't get it I can't imagine how any random newspaper reader was supposed to.
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Jan 19, 2022 10:38
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Jan 21, 2022 01:39
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Jan 21, 2022 23:39
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Giant Ethicist posted:And I don't usually share Q-Rais' dailies, but I felt compelled to translate yesterday's (it's from a series of "surreal night visits to Q-Rais' apartment"): How do we bribe you into translating this comic every day?
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Jan 23, 2022 06:16
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Jan 23, 2022 06:52
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Haifisch posted:Mandrake Hm, the literal magic you use to trick people into believing crazy things all the time says that her story is true? Somehow I'm not convinced.
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Jan 23, 2022 09:21
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Giant Ethicist posted:This particular series is only updated weekly (most of his dailies are the fat cat or the cute mouse or things in that vein) and often pun-based and/or just very surreal, but I'll see what I can do! Aaand you're in the OP, between Nancy and Oaky Doaks. Thank you kindly 
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Jan 24, 2022 00:43
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Jan 24, 2022 01:15
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Jan 25, 2022 02:41
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Green Intern posted:
Hm? I must have missed that one. I only remember the ones where he went after Little Orphan Annie.
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Jan 25, 2022 03:53
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I'm just thinking about that Little Lefty strip now where they showed a dozen different ways Dick Tracy was a racist strip.
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Jan 27, 2022 01:10
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Cheer Up Boss Dharma
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Jan 28, 2022 03:15
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Jan 31, 2022 02:49
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Feb 1, 2022 04:39
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Samovar posted:In today's later-than-usual Blueberry: Looks like that poster's coming in REAL handy!, or Our new friend realizes that putting on a poncho and calling yourself a bounty hunter will not guarantee you the success of Eastwood's characters in the Dollars trilogy, or Blueberry makes yet ANOTHER enemy for life Since I haven't had a chance to mention it yet this year, I think spoilering problematic images tends to make the thread tedious to read, especially when so many of the problematic elements aren't very visible. And that even when they aren't, timg tags work to the same purpose with a lot less fuss. But as to your example specifically I can't imagine the Mexicans will be any worse than the Indians, although I guess we'll find out.
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 19:50 |
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Feb 2, 2022 03:10
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