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

bristow, for better or worse, robotman or whatever it's called these days... in fact it's probably quicker to list the comics that haven't fallen into this category

andy capp

Yeah, but with syndicated sitcoms there are at least such things as ratings, which means that they'll inevitably end when the ratings go down, or at least when the actors get bored of the series or turn old. With comic strips there aren't any such problems (or do newspapers actually do some polls on which of their comics people read and enjoy?), so they can just go on forever, even after the people who created them have died.

(x-post)

well, really little kids probably enjoy some of the 'lame' strips - i quite liked garfield as a kid, probably well after its 'good' stage (tho some time before its current state of lameness). i imagine most of them have their audiences - even family circus is probably a hit with 80-year-olds who like it cos it reminds them of their grandchildren or something. really, there's very little point applying harsh critical standards to this stuff; it's like criticizing oatmeal for not being spicy. the fact that some strips have been convention-transcending art (peanuts, calvin and hobbes) blinds us to the fact that the vast majority of strips are dumbed-down and dull to anyone older than 8.

frankly stuff like hagar offends me a lot less than strips that try to be hip but fail, whether hilariously (funky winkerbean!!!) or annoyingly (get fuzzy - i'll never understand the hype!).

And I don't think this woul be a problem if the strips had been milquetoast from the beginning, but all of the three strips I mentioned were really quite good for at least their ten first years. Early Robotman strips are super funny too.

(x-post)

one of the few old-time 'hand-me-down' comic strips still worth a look is dennis the menace - whoever draws it now does a terrific job of capturing hank ketcham's incredibly unique and beautiful style.

A few disconnected thoughts (posting before breakfast is a bad idea, but...):

Comics Curmudgeon is a good source for making fun of this sort of stuff.

My favorite Garfield was when he turned into his alter-ego - the amoeba! And then there was the real weird one where he thought that he had died. Yes, the cat used to be funny.

A lot of people are rehashing jokes from classic comics whose artists quit before their strips jumped the shark. I've seen jokes by Breathed, Larson, Watterson and others repeated in Get Fuzzy, the Boondocks, and others.

Now, those guys (The Big Three) were all harassed repeatedly about the content and style of their strips. Some old lady would get pissed off that Opus made an off-color remark about President Reagan, and the Topeka Capital Journal (or whoever) would pull the strip, costing the syndicate money. Maybe some of the good old strips that descended into mediocrity faced similar situations but then kowtowed to the syndicate's demands that they tone down their strips.

Garfield was probably never that provocative; I can't speak for Hagar or Beetle Bailey.

I never ever understood Andy Capp. What was the point?

Spousal abuse and alcoholism are hilarious, eat Hot Fries.

Yes, see, there: the continued existence of bad comic strips would make a lot more sense if Twinkie the Kid and Toucan Sam had their own strips. Wherein they drank a lot and beat their wives.

I love Beetle Bailey! Support our troops!

Cathy. Cathy. Cathy.
Ugh.

Yeah, I was just gonna say CATHY is way worse than all these. I really do love Beetle Bailey, no joke. In high school I had a notebook in which I pasted all these out of context panels, and whole strips when they were good.

Glad to see the beaten-down strawman that is Family circus absent, not even worth rehashing.

Do these comics show up in Finnish papes, Tuomas?

frankly stuff like hagar offends me a lot less than strips that try to be hip but fail, whether hilariously (funky winkerbean!!!) or annoyingly (get fuzzy - i'll never understand the hype!).

Oh man, I don't think the Wink Bean has even tried to be funny for years. A woman died of cancer in it this week! And the band teacher started going deaf earlier this year.

Funky's just a cavalcade of absurd tragedy. All folks catchin' Ebola in Iraq while watching their high school sweetheart have a stillborn child who is discriminated against because of the color of their skin and religion and shit.

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

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.

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