Comic strips that haven't been funny in decades, yet still continue to appear in the newspapers, and probably will do so forever.

Terry & the Pirates always looked cool to me, but I got my fill on that kind of thing through Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy which I think is basically forgotten at this point except in serious newspaper serial strip circles.

I got v.1 of the Captain Easy Sundays last month -- fantastic stuff.

I stand corrected re:Steve Canyon.

The WWII period of Terry (the last two of the six recent reprint books), where it transcends its Tubbs-inspired adventure origins, is well worth checking out.

And the Caniff biography linked above is excellent. An insight to the newspaper strip industry in its heyday when the likes of Caniff were among the highest paid entertainers of the time.

i've never explored any of the adventure comics too deeply but the smithsonian book includes an extended sequence from crane's 'wash tubbs' which still reads well -- funny, suspenseful, and lots of brilliantly drawn action. a major influence on schulz and i think jeff smith also -- wash's facial expressions and general design are very fone bone-ish.

heh i held off on posting something similar to sic's response re: the obscurity of milton caniff, 'cos i really wasn't sure what - if anything - caniff means to modern american newspaper readers anymore, w/ the adventure comic strip being dead and all. but certainly in the 40s/50s, canyon (and terry before it) were massively popular and familiar creations, and if Caniff wasn't exactly a household name, he was certainly the cartoonist most ENVIED by other cartoonists, in terms of having the kind of career and profile they cld only dream of.

the smithsonian comic book collection is equally great - it's where i first saw things like john stanley's little lulu, and 'master race' by krigstein - tho' i don't think it's quite so easily found as the newspaper strip volume.

fourthing or something the greatness of the smithsonian collection. is that the one that has sunday pages of White Boy? Just amazing artwork - the only images I can find online are tiny, here's an example - http://www.lambiek.net/artists/image/p/price_garrett/price_whiteboy2.jpg

I haven't read all the Terry & the Pirates collections; I felt like the WWII stuff was less exciting, in the way that it marginalized a lot of the amoral characters, since everyone needed to take a side. One of my favorite moments (in about 1938) is the Dragon Lady, captured by a Chinese warlord working for the Japanese invaders, rallying his men to her side with a patriotic speech about their duty to their homeland. After she is freed, she explains to Terry that she couldn't care less about patriotism, but Japanese rulers would systematically eliminate bandits like her, whereas if the Japanese were defeated, the resulting chaos would allow her to profit immensely. To me, it's a lot more fun when Caniff is clearly paying attention to politics but adventure is still a main ingredient.

Why . . . why are there Ghost Wookiees? Why?

Chew(ie)s did 9/11

xp White Boy pages also appear in the Art Out of Time book, and in an issue of The Comics Journal. It is indeed gorgeous. It was only ever a Sunday strip, and ran for something like three years.

Terry & the Pirates never appeared in my local papers, so for a long time I only knew it from Bloom County occasionally mocking it.

Caniff left in 1946 and the zombie version ended in the early 70s

this is great

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2013/04/04/funky-winkerbean-crankshaft-funkywatch-march/

i mean

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.comicsalliance.com/media/2013/02/funkyfeb10.jpg

Really puts the 1981 air-guitar-competition run into perspective.

jesus christ Funky

I don't have time right now to read that entire Funky Winkerbean/Crankshaft thing but wow

guys i am obsessed with this, the june dispatch is particularly amazing - a crossover between crankshaft and funky winkerbean despite the latter taking place 10 years later than the former

http://comicsalliance.com/funkywatch-junes-most-depressing-funky-winkerbean-comic-strips/

can i advertise for just a second:
golf, amirite? ilx's comic strip voting thread is now open

i never read Funky Winkerbean, but everything time i hear about it, it sounds absolutely ridiculous

i met the guy who's done this one for 46 years

http://www.knightfeatures.com/KFWeb/content/features/nonkffeatures/UM/Graffiti/Graffiti.html

10 years from now we'll have video funnies on our take-everywhere wifi flexisheets

― blueski, Monday, October 8, 2007 9:21 AM (7 years ago)

prescient

from 1990: ken tucker rates and reviews the most popular newspaper strips in the country:

http://ew.com/article/1990/10/05/ken-tucker-rates-daily-comic-strips/

reading it now, what's weird isn't so much that his top two strips are long gone, but that most of the others are still running!

The end of Funky Winkerbean: Ohio creator Tom Batiuk closes out the comic strip Dec. 31
https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2022/11/the-end-of-funky-winkerbean-ohio-creator-tom-batiuk-closes-out-the-comic-strip-dec-31.html

I used to read it in spite of myself. Surprised to read it started in 1972, and that he also does Crankshift.

OMG

There's multiple "The xxx Most Suicidally Depressing ‘Funky Winkerbean’ Strips" pages out there in case you want to catch up and then kill yourself.

What was the deal with him, I can barely remember. Always seemed like some kind of grumpy old cartoonist’s version of a Maynard G. Krebs television beatnik.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/11/21/gocomics-down-due-to-cybersecurity-issues/

I'm amazed The Born Loser is still going. My grandparents lived on the same street as the artist. I'm fascinated by these local comics as a viable career -- in some cases more than viable: Sansom lived in a very fine house overlooking Lake Erie!

Perhaps I have mentioned that I was once a print-based newspaper person; for several fun years I worked as a production artist at a decently large metropolitan paper, where my responsibilities included choosing and placing comics. I had some personal and professional connections in this world, but I don't think I ever met Batiuk.

Nowadays I don't even look at the funnies anymore. The thrill seems to have gone. The last thing I genuinely loved was Ruben Bolling's Super-Fun-Pak series, which is (alas) unavailable at present.

Oh! Forgot to mention my one best memory of Funky W.: the school colors were "Taupe and Clear."

Fight for the old taupe and clear.

It's absurd and funny and so very 20th century and I am glad that existed, even if the world has moved on from that style of humor.

Ymp, bolling’s stuff shows up on The Nib

Weird, I would have sworn I’d read a fair number of Funky Winkerbean strips over the years, but I just read the entire Wiki history/synopsis and I recall none of it.

Most of this thread is nine or ten years old, so maybe it isn't surprising that Dilbert hasn't been mentioned, yet, but *damn* what passes for humor in that strip these days consists exclusively of the worst sort of gloating mean-spiritedness and smug pseudo-superiority.

Probably bc the deranged online persona of Dilbert’s dad is much more notable than Dilbert being very bad now

I see the 'funny papers' like once or twice a year now - my stepmom still gets a weekend paper so I'll peruse them when I'm visiting. It really is a dying art, but most are SO unfunny that maybe it should die

(I still enjoy when Billy on Family Circus does a circuitous route throughout the house and yard to put something away)

Well who doesn't enjoy that? Not me!

I remember Batiuk's other, other strip "John Darling", mainly because of the shock-ending where the hero was gunned down by an unseen assassin - all of this done in the usual 3-panel format.

Looking at Wikipedia now it seems that JD's demise was eventually worked into the Funky W. strip, as a subplot with Darling's daughter!

is Dilbert even older than half the strips in the comic section these days? I know it's been around for 30 years, but none of these people ever fucking retire (besides Cathy!)

it's a weird one, because unlike the others I think it actually was funny back in the day, and what's happening to it now is not exactly laziness but almost a fundamental misunderstanding of what humor is. he still seems good at identifying funny set ups (no doubt mostly provided by his readers) but every punchline is a smug remark or "uhhh, so, that just happened??". like he's not finishing the joke.

There is like a whole venn diagram thing where Crock (Bill Rechin and Brant Parker) is distinct from Wizard of Id (Brant Parker and Johnny Hart) which is itself distinct from B.C. (Johnny Hart). Then there is Hi and Lois (Mort Walker and Dik Browne) which is distinct from Beetle Bailey (Mort Walker).

It is completely false that there were only these five dudes capable of making comics in the 20th century, and yet it seems like this very small set of dudes made a ridiculously large number of the comics.

Oops, forgot to add Hagar the Horrible (Dik Browne). It was a tiny incestuous world and there was no reason for it to be so - there was not a shortage of artists and writers in the world at that time. Those dudes could have spread out the work a bit and been fine.

Excellent work, YMP!

Looking at Wikipedia now it seems that JD's demise was eventually worked into the Funky W. strip, as a subplot with Darling's daughter!

I fell into a bit of a black hole on https://sonofstuckfunky.com looking up this subplot. Most recently: https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2022/09/20/die-die-john-darling/

I was cool with that gang for a while, and of course I loved the slightly more transgressive turn taken by Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, Bloom County, etc.

Subsequently we had the even more edgy moves in a subsequent generation that worked well with the advent of alternative weeklies. Tom Tomorrow, Life in Hell, Red Meat, Emily Flake, Lynda Barry, .

I cannot possibly express to you how delighted I was when I was able to publish Lulu Eightball and Tom the Dancing Bug alongside the Straight Dope and Dan Savage for a glorious shining moment. And then... well. You know what happened.

I mean, really. I do not knof if this will work but it is from Emily Flake's Lulu Eightball and it remains among my favorite things:

https://i.imgur.com/EUkzr0n_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

that is awesome

I loathed "Nancy" back in the day, but it's actually pretty funny now.

While "Funky Winkerbean" finally, finally emits its last groan, I can think of so many more deserving strips that died premature deaths. Two that immediately leap to mind are "Liberty Meadows" and "Rudy."

gocomics is back up (from what I assume was a ransomware attack)

I used to read "Pibgorn" and "9 Chickweed Lane" on gocomics.