Panel Discussion - The ILX Comic Strip Poll Results

I like yr list WilliamC tho I don't think I know Arlo and Janis. Also disagree a bit with yr worst - I quite like some of the funky line drawing on Miss Peach, and I have fond memories of reading prime-era collections of Andy Capp in English barber shops, doctor's waiting rooms and the like when I was growing up (it was seemingly everywhere). Obviously it is an extremely problematic comic these days ("Andy Capp you lovable wife-beating drunk" etc), but there is def a level of craft there.

I can't find my own ballot, but if I were to submit one today I would find room for The Wiggle Much, as recommended by Jim Woodring on his Facebook page recently ("metaphysical sustenance of a high order") - only 14 known strips:

http://wigglemuch.tumblr.com/comics

great poll! really knew how to milk my didn't-vote-in-it guilt.

silly for achewood to place in this company but achewood really was funny: the consistency of the different characters' strange voices was a bit like krazy kat. (obv the images are incomparable. tho the great outdoor fight storyline, which i kinda think is overrated as a storyline, does some nice, stark stuff with the images' limitations.) reading from the very beginning probably bad advice as for a long time it is a pretty standard early-00s webcomic. i'd probably start here, not because it's suddenly incredibly funny but because the ensemble is in place and actually used for the first time. from here it gradually rises to a peak and then gradually deflates--oddly despite the desultory images this decline coincides imo with a greater and greater indulgence in truly vast slabs of text and increasingly rococo dialogue (partic from cornelius--americans shouldn't try wodehouse). his rhythm starts to go. i interviewed onstad in 2007 or so for a portland alt-weekly and he told me his big ambition was to do shouts and murmurs pieces, which is one of the weirdest things anyone's ever said to me.

re calvin and hobbes i just wanna say how much i love hobbes' horny grin, on display above in the faux-soap strip but used often. (when hobbes wears a tie to susie's birthday party? maybe.)

ha, I kept clicking all the way to the end of the party from that link

wait i just read that spike strip sic posted. wow i'd never seen that one. destroyed me all the more for schulz's line having just started to wobble.

We should be done by 2015.

― Look at this joke I've recognised, do you recognise it as well? (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, June 10, 2014 6:25 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Great work sic, and forks, and Mordy.

My ballot, weighted towards my childhood nostalgia, comics from AU/NZ, and ignoring the creator's descent into misogyny and/or born-again Christianity (even if they were, on reflection, apparent within the strips themselves):

Dick Tracy, by Chester Gould
Footrot Flats, by Murray Ball
Peanuts, by Charles Schulz
Robotman, by Jim Meddick
Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson
Hagar the Horrible, by Dik Browne
Ginger Meggs, by Jimmy Bancks
Bluey and Curley, by Alex Gurney
The Far Side, by Gary Larson
Andy Capp, by Reg Smythe
Garfield, by Jim Davis
Ettamogah Pub, by Ken Maynard
Tracts, by Jack Chick
Beetle Bailey, by Mort Walker
B.C., by Johnny Hart
Blondie, by Chic Young
The Wizard of Id, by Johnny Hart and Brant Parker

Top 5 worst:

Fred Basset by Alex Graham
Any webcomic that took inspiration from Penny Arcade
Any webcomic that is an outgrowth of online fandom
Any post-Blondie comic where the main theme is "the battle of the sexes"
xkcd

I say we have a do-over.

now accepting ballots

Well having not voted all I shall do is pace back on forth in this room lamenting that Peanuts didn't get no. 1, although I have nothing against C&H. But Peanuts is what I grew up with, I still have my early 80's little paperback comps, all ragged now but still containing the slips of paper I put in some point in the 90's to remind me which frames to photocopy for mixtape/cd covers.
Doonesbury actually taught me about American politics, reading it in the Guardian in front of my mothers gas fire, prolly this was the asterisk for president era? Then PBF was in the Guardian later, yeah I liked that, I appreciated the judicious use of the 3 frame format.
I donno most of the older stuff, but I really need to check out the Krazy Kat bisnes, that is very much appealing to me from these strips.

Larson to me is just birthday cards from vaguely-remembered relatives, and my uh Former Partner pishing herself laughing at THE MEMORY of some strip about, I forget... boneless chickens? I was baffled at the time and kinda remain so.

my ballot:

Peanuts, by Charles Schulz
Popeye, by E.C. Segar
Krazy Kat, by George Herriman
Barnaby, by Crockett Johnson
Little Nemo, by Winsor McCay
Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson
Sick Sick Sick, by Jules Feiffer
Moomin, by Tove Jansson (and Lars Jansson)
Little Lulu, by Marge
Mafalda, by Quino
Life in Hell, by Matt Groening
Little Orphan Annie, by Harold Gray
Cul de Sac, by Richard Thompson
Nancy, by Ernie Bushmiller
Polly and her Pals, by Cliff Sterrett
Great Pop Things, by Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death
The Kin-der-Kids, by Lyonel Feininger
The Family Upstairs, by George Herriman
Skippy, by Percy Crosby
The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts, A.K. by Rube Goldberg

5 worst:

The Amazing Spider-Man, by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Alex Saviuk
Rose is Rose, by Don Wimmer and Pat Brady
Mallard Fillmore, by Bruce Tinsley
Hi and Lois, by Mort Walker and Dik Browne
Mr. Potato Head, by Jim Davis

(looking back, i'm pretty sure i meant to vote for sally forth, not rose is rose, but oh well.)

i just wanna say how much i love hobbes' horny grin, on display above in the faux-soap strip but used often.

was thinking about when this grin comes over him, because "often" is wrong; his most dramatic expression in most strips is an eyeroll. (i think his big beatific smile in the very early strip above is out of character, even tho beatitude in general is crudely in character. compare it to the dryness of his truly hobbesian smile as he tells calvin what we're here to do--or to the many dailies where he's lying in the sun and calvin provokes him, where he is all regal composure.) it's specific things that make him show teeth. a few times over susie (she gives him a valentine!). a few times over tuna. once over a smock. smock smock smock smock smock smock. i'm sure i'm forgetting things.

peanuts is obviously in so many senses peerless. (apparently when schulz phoned lynn johnston to warmly congratulate her on being syndicated in her hundredth paper, she joked "i'm catching up with you!", an obvious hyperbole, and he snarled "call me when you're in the louvre" and hung up. this is the second-best story about charles schulz and lynn johnston.) and the astonishing expressiveness schulz puts in such a tiny, legible space is in a way more impressive than the gorgeous work watterson was eventually able to do on the lavish canvases he demanded and got. (of course the shrinkability of peanuts is maybe part of the reason watterson had to demand that stuff in the first place. and he was plenty great in four cramped panels himself. in the paragraph-long introduction schulz did to the first c&h treasury, he says "i like calvin's little shoes that look like dinner rolls". god, just imagine getting that.) but i am okay with c&h winning because i am a corny millennial the two characters are eventually such rich, unique elaborations of comic-strip cliches (bratty kid, aloof cat) and they tussle+embrace in such complicated ways, and the focus is always firmly on their multiaxial dialectic, sorry, their friendship. (this narrow focus on a personal relationship that is also in unsummarizable ways an ideological one is something the strip owes to krazy kat besides the rock formations.) peanuts in contrast has a big shifting ensemble that periodically gets usurped by snoopy--tho of course c&h runs for 10 years and peanuts runs for a million. anyway, i was an only child. a philistine on the sidewalk.

This is definitely one of the best threads ever.

I think Achewood is one of the most wonderful things. I regret none of the hours I've spent reading it.

I've read a bunch of Achewood now and yeah this is not for me you ppl are crazy

POLL DO OVER

the C&H plane/train/earthquake strip above it so expertly done

I lose it every time at "his eye twitches involuntarily"

yes. iirc the caption on that strip in the 10th anniversary book: "One of Calvin's better buildups."

My favorite bit in the Prehistory book:

http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/insert_main_wide_image/public/02-far-side-dennis-the-menace.png

xp still i think my favorite cruel-god-calvin strip is this earlier, cruder one. the timing.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v87/Inuxx/664f9ab0ded9013171bc005056a9545d_zps48z20fwu.jpg

boredom comes so swiftly.

hahaha i'll never get over the petrified skull mixup

That deer one sure hits a bit closer to home than it used to.

some kid in my cub scout "pack" made half of us enact that one as a skit. he worried you a little.

later he threatened to kill me over his sister (we were 9)

Wow, I just went through the whole thread after only doing sections at a time.

Top Of My To Do List:
~Gasoline Alley
~The Spirit

I used to collect Fox Trot when I was younger. And like lots of things, I got turned off and remain that way. I remember when Jason didn't like school in the first couple books.
Life In Hell is overrated.
Achewood is overrated.

ok, maybe I'm being a little hard on Groening

i had a lot of foxtrot books too. this was in the dark years after c&h ended. my best friend and i sat in a panda express and talked about it as a potential second coming. of course it wasn't.

In my memory, FoxTrot was already past its peak and well into routine by the time C&H ended. It only debuted a couple years after C&H, so I guess that's not so surprising. Or maybe I was just growing out of it. I like the 80s-ness of the early strips, with Peter obsessing over Bruce Springsteen and stuff.

oh yeah i was reading it in collections exclusively; i don't think it was in my paper.

a personal second coming i guess.

so apparently there's a new achewood and it's a good one! (there are 2 new ones actually, the other is a fuck you friday)

a brief rumination on recent Achewood:
http://fleen.com/archives/2016/08/26/in-which-i-go-on-about-achewood-for-a-while/

on the discussion about the degree to which Achewood was native to the web, and to not being stand alone random gags: Tyrell using hypertext there, far more than explicit wording, to reference and allude to the way the accretion of detail is linked through time, both for the reader and the characters' lives within the strip (cf the recent one with Beef divining Showbiz' approach by treating the local papers minor police reports as runes)

although, of course, his doubt over whether this death of Todd's will take any more firmly than any previous can give weight to those who want to dismiss any seriousness of character or tone

recent achewood has been scorchin, reminded me why i loved it in the first place

RIP New Zealand's David Sim.