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

maybe tuomas needs help with our idioms

I like that he used the umlauts in Hägar's name!

there are like five-seven syndicated comic strips total i can make a case for the continued existence of. the funky/crankshaftverse rules though

Well THAT convinces me that he's not fake Tuomas, xpost

i love andy capp's hot fries

How about the reverse? I never bothered with it as a kid, but I'm totally digging Sally Forth lately.

chaki OTM

Do these comics show up in Finnish papes, Tuomas?

Yeah, the reason I picked these three is that they all appear in the local newspaper I subsribe to (though the latter two only in the Sunday edition), and have fone so for as long as I can remember, even though only Garfield has actually been funny during my lifetime.

"fone" = "done"

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

Cathy is about to end!

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2010/08/11/cathy-comic-strip.html?ref=rss

ack!

does a tuomas read fingerpori?

CATHY dying...it's like when my racist great-grandma died. A bitter, harsh lady who never did anything but name her black pet dogs racist names. But OTOH an inartuiculable vacuum exists where she once was.

she named her dogs racist names?

wow, Cathy G was 25 when she started this. She's not even 60 yet.

Cathy (character) is married to Irving. Once Cathy gets married, there's nowhere to go.

irving is a lamewad

Cathy's wedding was a grotesque embarrassment of website product placement

http://a.imageshack.us/img828/8413/productplacement.gif

Once Cathy gets married, there's nowhere to go.

They said the same when Blondie married Dagwood (circa 1925), and look what a pure fountain of inspiration has gushed from that marriage over the many, many decades. Blondie shopping for hats has probably provided a few thousand strips all by itself.

Blondie did not need a man! She was a crazy far gone flapper. But Cathy's sole fret was phallocentrism...and shoes. And her waistline. Blondie has learned to accept her beau's sandwich fetish and has marketed it into a circa 1990s catering service. Blondie is not progressive; "Cathy" ostensibly got picked up because its 1970s birth was a timely era for women doing it solo (and cats, Jim Davis?). I blame Blondie's metabolism and the "grandfathering" of comics.

Also 90+% of the strips are about Mr Bumstead and his tragic narcolepsy and malingering.

dagwood is a metaphor for the american dream

The other day I was wondering if Kathy Acker was called Kathy Acker because of Cathy and her terrible catchphrase 'ack!' but I forgot to look it up

turns out Acker was her first husband's name

what an anticlimax :(

i'm sure someone posted this already, but MORE ON CATHY
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=05232003

http://www.deadline.com/2010/10/fox-walden-media-win-the-family-circus/

EXCLUSIVE: 20th Century Fox has teamed with Walden Media to buy rights to Bil Keane's venerable syndicated comic strip The Family Circus, and they've hired Bob Hilgenberg & Rob Muir to script a live action feature. John Baldecchi and Stacy Maes are producing. Bil Keane started the strip in 1960 and continues to generate the single-panel script with his son Jeff. It is the most widely syndicated strip in the world, according to King Features. A number of studios competed for the rights for what is envisioned as a multiple quadrant family franchise.

this is new, not old, but i want to know who is the person who can create this and think "yes, this is something i should be proud of, am willing to present to the general public in real newspapers, and actually receive money in exchange for"?

http://www.gocomics.com/replyall/2012/08/28

like this was in today's chicago tribune

Wowwwwwwwwwwwww. Yeah, that reads like a parody of terrible, terrible late-90s webcomics.

Yeah, for some reason we started getting the Sunday Trib delivered to us and I couldn't believe this was an actual strip made by someone with a brain when I saw this particular gem:

http://www.gocomics.com/replyall/2012/08/26

http://www.replyallcomic.com/911tributeart.html

Looks like Donna Lewis needs to return to her music career. "I Love You Always Forever" was head and shoulders above this hot garbage.

Holy fucking crap, that is awful.

thanks for this, n/a

RIP ms paint irony

this is still better than mallard fillmore.

Good grief.

Ugh, that's like a Lena Dunham version of Cathy.

It's not great but it's far from awful. There are loads of daily comics far worse than that.

http://www.replyallcomic.com/images/640_Smoke.jpg

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

My son, 6, loves Garfield. In case you were wondering who's into it.

she's a lawyer at dhs! I CAN'T STOP READING THIS

Reply All highlights those moments in today's information-overloaded environment when you forget your adult-self and toss the megaphone to your fifth-grade inner child.

Why you Dis hagar!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=n9em2eZuP6U&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=n9em2eZuP6U&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=n9em2eZuP6U&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=n9em2eZuP6U&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=n9em2eZuP6U&NR=1

THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING:

Lewis taught herself to draw in law school (where doodling was the only escape from reality) and to write punch lines in the courtroom (no disrespect to judges, attorneys, plaintiffs or defendants intended).

Top comment at maura's link is a truth bomb.

http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/

improves it

I was going through some magazines from the fifties yesterday, and found in an issue of "Look" a "Match The Cartoonist To His Cartoon" photo quiz. Most of the strips used are pretty obscure these days ("Steve Canyon" anyone?), but then there was Al Capp, Sparky Schultz--and the "Gasoline Alley" guy!

And I then thought to myself, "Jesus Christ, "Gasoline Alley" has been around forever!"

0 likes, 67 dislikes

nice.

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.

I once saw a Wizard of Id original where they'd simply pasted new word balloons over old ones, hey presto a brand new strip! Think Hart et al did this quite a lot.

hey when dinosaur comic did that (for every strip) it was postmodern and edgy

my family lived in Boston for a year and that’s how i learned about Zippy The Pinhead. when we went back to Tennessee i wrote a letter to the editor of the Knoxville News-Sentinel asking for them to run it. to his credit he replied to me, but said that its humor only appeals to a small audience so he wouldn’t be running it. which like… is true, but so lame.

As opposed to all those other universally hilarious newspaper strips...

I feel like Zippy got plenty of exposure for something so resolutely odd. Seems like every comic strip has a hard core of ardent fans who will howl in protest if it isn't printed, which was harder to manage when newsprint real estate was actually scarce. For good or for ill, editors had to make choices.

Nowadays there is essentially infinite room, which means no choices need to be made, and I don't know if that's made comics better or worse.

What was the one where they all had big round noses and giant lower lips, and you couldn't see their eyes?
Maybe they were medieval knights or something.... same artist might have done a caveman one as well... (it's not bc though...)

Are you thinking of Wizard of Id?

Nope, the characters had big heads/small bodies, maybe he did one with cowboys?

Tumbleweeds. Where Jim Davis got his start.

Description makes me think of Overboard.

Yes! Thank you, that was driving me nuts...

Not to get too off-topic, but much love for "Lulu Eightball"/Emily Flake! I loved her *Maybe my argument will make more sense if I run it through some of these sick effects pedals* comic so much I put it in a frame!
You can still buy "Lulu Eightball Vol. 2" direct from the publisher: https://atomicbooks.com/products/lulu-eightball-volume-2
Tons of comics here to enjoy on your holiday break: https://thenib.com/author/emily-flake/

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

Clever but not funny for me. Still a daily read, sometimes a hate-read. Bold move by Jaimes to make Nancy a self-absorbed asshole.

modern Nancy has had some really good strips but a lot of it seems too clever for its own good. I really liked the dadaist vibe of the Bushmiller strips.

one I used to like a lot was Get Fuzzy, it's wordy but generally funny

is that Comics Curmudgeon guy still going? I enjoyed that, not only because the guy really is keeping up with all these endless soap opera comic strips but also because it's kind of a remnant of the way the internet used to be

literally clowning Funky Winkerbean in a post today!

http://www.joshreads.com

Comics Curmudgeon is still going, yeah. I wouldn't have heard of most of these if not for him! Got to say that Funky Winkerbean is one of the least appealing strips he covers regularly. I'd be sad if Mary Worth folded, I love following his commentary on it.

xp

His commentary is the only reason to have any interest at all in the "Mary Worth," "Judge Parker" and "Gil Thorp" universes.

Bold move by Jaimes to make Nancy a self-absorbed asshole.

She was like this in a lot of Bushmiller's best too!

Absolutely

self-absorbed but not an asshole imo, a big difference in degree then to now

I see her a little bit like Mattie Ross - convinced of her own certitude despite being constantly bamboozled

I wonder if Pete Bagge is a Tumbleweeds fan....

One of Funky Winkerbean's lasting legacies:

https://frinkiac.com/video/S12E05/t8jUHH0rgJ9IUSDsaSC5vhcP1hM=.gif

Nancy Panel By Ernie Bushmiller pic.twitter.com/pqNw4IVJfz

— Nancy Comics by Ernie Bushmiller (@JohnnyCallicutt) November 25, 2022