Greatest Comic Strip of All Time

Best?

  • Calvin and Hobbes

    Votes: 37 50.0%
  • The Far Side

    Votes: 8 10.8%
  • Garfield

    Votes: 3 4.1%
  • Peanuts

    Votes: 5 6.8%
  • Dilbert

    Votes: 4 5.4%
  • Foxtrot

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Dennis the Menace

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Krazy Kat

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Pogo

    Votes: 2 2.7%
  • Blondie

    Votes: 1 1.4%
  • Beetle Bailey

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Doonesbury

    Votes: 2 2.7%
  • Little Nemo

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Pearls before Swine

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • For Better or for Worse

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 9 12.2%

  • Total voters
    74
I vote for Mallard Fillmore. Fillmore is the best. :goodjob: In second, I would have to choose Pickles.





 
I voted for Calvin and Hobbes. It's the strip that inspired me to start making comics in the first place. :D
Seriously, just how many people has it inspired? I've read, like, a dozen webcomics that trace their origins back to Watterson.
 
I had to vote "other" because the poll isn't multiple-choice. :(

My favorites:

Peanuts
For Better or For Worse
Hagar the Horrible
Cathy
- and for webcomics: Fuzzy Knights
 
Am I the only one here who likes For Better or For Worse? That one has some rather infamous storylines, not to mention sending the country into mourning when she killed off one of the main characters.
 
I don't really like For Better or For Worse because it is mundane and unfunny. It's not meant to be funny, but all that means is that it isn't really suited to the medium.
 
Am I the only one here who likes For Better or For Worse? That one has some rather infamous storylines, not to mention sending the country into mourning when she killed off one of the main characters.

I read it some in the past. But not any longer, even though it's in the local paper. I don't find it interesting.
 
WHAT??? :eek:

It certainly is so suited to the medium! As for "funny" - how many comics are? For Better or For Worse was intended to tell a long term story - that of a family. It started when the kids were really small (Liz was just a baby) and it ended when Liz got married (20+ years later).

I guess you have to be Canadian to like it. And preferably one who also likes dogs, as the main character I referred to before was Farley, the family dog. I cried for a week after he was killed off, and still get teary whenever I re-read that storyline or any of the "remembering Farley" storylines or strips that came later.
 
Yeah, but they stopped telling that story and rebooted from the beginning. So if you were following it up to then, there was no reason to continue after that.
 
The reason the strip stopped at that point is because Lynn Johnston developed a chronic illness that affected her ability to draw. I don't remember the name of the disease, but it has a really debilitating effect on her hands. She decided to end the strip at a logical place - and because so many of her fans really wanted to see Liz and Anthony get married. The stuff she does now is drawn in a different style - one she doesn't find as difficult or as physically taxing.

I haven't read any of the stuff she put out after the wedding; for me, the story is over and done. But I still enjoy reading the old strips.
 
It was OK. I just never would have called it great. Over the long run, I much prefer Doonesbury. Those characters have grown and aged as well.
 
I'm not sure that a long running story is suited to the medium. You need to be able to take each instalment on its own as valuable for it to be a good comic strip, IMO. That's why humorous comics tend to be better. If its purpose is that of storytelling, then the story is going to be disjointed and only an avid follower is going to be able to fully comprehend the meaning. That might lend itself to good entertainment value for that avid follower, but I don't think it really counts as being all that good if the entertainment value for everyone is severely diminished.
 
Before the past couple of years, everyone who followed comics got the newspaper every day. They would rarely have missed a day.
 
Well, it wasn't quite like a soap opera. The storylines lasted anywhere from one-shots to a week or so. And then the story would go on to another character or situation. Maybe the first would come back for a couple of days. A long-term story arc could last for years.

The thing is, with comic digests being published and everything archived online now, it's quite easy to read the entire story.

For example, the Farley story. Farley died of a heart attack because he saved April (the youngest kid) from drowning in the river. The kid survived, but Farley didn't. He was buried under a special tree and his spirit was shown to hang around there. Years later, when April's bunny Mr. B. died, he was buried next to Farley. The dog and rabbit were shown playing together as spirits. Sometimes there were one-shot memorials to Farley.

For the longest time, I was so damn mad at April for going down to the river and falling in... like it was All Her Fault that Farley died. And I wished she had been the character killed off. Sounds awful, right? To think that I would wish a little kid dead instead of the dog. But that's an honest human reaction to death - why couldn't it have been somebody who deserved it more, instead of the heroic dog?

But Lynn Johnston intended to age the characters in a way that made sense, and it just wouldn't make sense to have a 20-year-old dog gallivanting around. So she killed him off in a way that shocked the fans, because nobody was expecting it to happen.

And that's a life lesson, too - unfair things happen unexpectedly, and there isn't a thing you can do about them except try to deal with the aftermath as best you can.
 
Do all American newspapers have these? The Guardian, which I usually read when I can bear it, has never carried more than two daily comic strips, both of which are political (Doonesbury on American politics and If... on British). I think that such strips in British newspapers, at least broadsheets, tend to be exclusive to the paper, not sold to many papers by syndicates as in the US. (E.g. Alex is a famous and popular comic strip which appears exclusively in the Telegraph, and the unnamed cartoon by Giles was exclusive to the Express.) It seems to me that non-topical, widely distributed comic strips in newspapers are quite an American institution and one which isn't reflected so much in other countries. Which is why the points about the episodic nature of the medium strike me as rather odd. I don't see anything intrinsically episodic about comic strips compared to other media. In a way, it's odd to think of the ones listed in the poll as episodic, daily media at all - I know Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, etc. solely from books.

Of course, a lot of literature is like that, not just comics. Many nineteenth-century novels that we think of as single works were originally serials in magazines or newspapers, such as most of Dickens' output and some of Hardy's and Conrad's. Today we read them as integral novels but they were not originally intended to be read that way (and in some cases, such as Conrad's Nostromo, not only don't seem to know where they're headed half the time but even have sections ghost-written when the author was unable to meet his deadlines). I'm sure the same is true of these comics - although originally written episodically for inclusion in newspapers, future generations certainly won't read them that way.
 
One major difference between political cartoons (or politically-themed comics) and family-oriented comics (including long-term storytelling ones) is that the political ones have to be more current. It's pointless publishing a cartoon about the Libyan protesters a month after everything happened. But comics such as Garfield, Peanuts, For Better or For Worse, etc. are done weeks in advance of when they are seen in the newspaper. This makes for a vastly different style in getting the story told.
 
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