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Comic Strips

D

Deleted member 133

Guest
This thread is intended to cover comic strips, and anthologies thereof - distinct from Bats' thread on comics and graphic novels.

Comic strips might be considered very very short comics - typically one, a few, or several panels long, and are generally first seen in daily newspapers (which are slowly going the way of the dodo so that's no longer true, with many comic strips now showing up online.)

The more successful strips, both in the past, and today, end up in printed anthologies, typically covering a bunch as first published chronologically, or thematically.

Some comic characters have been represented both in strips and comic books. I can recall a daily Spiderman strip - as one example.

My appreciation of, and love for comic strips probably began with Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace. For some strange reason, as a four year old I could really relate! :) My dad was a regular customer of many bookstores, and while he was picking the latest spy novel, I got to take home a Dennis the Menace book. I still have them all.

I soon caught on to Johnny Hart's B.C. and his and Brant Parker's Wizard of I.D. , Dirk Bowne's Hagar The Horrible, and others. What's neat is that high quality anthologies have been published in recent years for many of these.

As I got older I was attracted to two other kinds of strips: those involving social and political commentary (Trudeau's Doonesbury) and those taking a look at what it was like to raise kids (Waterman's Calvin and Hobbes - although there's great "commentary" in it as well, and later Amend's Foxtrot, and Scott and Borgman's Zits).

One of my favourites right now is Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur which covers both social commentary in his one-off panels, and "kids" in the recurring story line(s) involving Joe, Danae, Lucy etc. His anthologies (like "Dead Lawyers and Other Pleasant Thoughts" and "Lucy and Danae") are terrific.

I could go on. But like before, now its your turn. Any other lovers of comic strips out there?
 
< raises hand >

Me!

Calvin & Hobbes was formative for me. Of course, I have the full collected set, and I'm happy to say all three massive volumes are showing some excellent wear due to being read repeatedly by my children. Much of my parenting philosophy is based on Calvin's dad.

My other long-time favorite is Larson's The Far Side. Pure genius. And the many scientific references resonate with me personally.

Bill Holbrook's Kevin & Kell is an excellent though lesser-known series. Some of it's a bit dated, as the main character (a human-size rabbit) is an operator of a dial-up (yes, telephone) bulletin board (a forerunner of the world wide web in a sense, for those young-uns who may not know of them). :laughing: I have a hand-drawn and unique+autographed original of the dad with his baby daughter hanging in my kids' room. Holbrook has a few other good series as well - On the Fastrack and Safe Havens.
 
Oh, and how could I - and Jeff who's Canadian! - forget For Better Or For Worse. Excellent series with interesting and unusually aging/developing characters. We've got all of those as well.
 
dont forget peanuts.

Peanuts_gang.png
 
Thanks Akula, I hadn't heard of that site. Looks cool!

Another one I forgot - Bloom County. Opus rules! Bill for President!
 
I DO appreciate comic strips. That was a great thing as a kid. I lived in the sticks and only had a black & white tv until high school. We only got four channels (one very poorly)! So the comics were fun for me.

I am also attracted to them because my uncle was a cartoonist.
George Breisacher.



He took over writing the Mutt and Jeff comic strip before he died. He was friends with Hank Ketchum and Bill Pitzer and many others.

He started writing a strip called Boon Dock back when I was a kid. We had all sorts of his rough drafts and all the homemade holiday cards he did every year. Here is a photo of a strip draft and one of his infamous caricature Christmas cards.



His sense of humor:



Here is a brief bio he wrote about himself with a self caricature.



And here is a link to a very nice article written about him after he died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Photos of some family and many cartoonist friends who gathered to remember him.

http://www.mooneyart.com/bygeorge/aug30_04.html


I dearly loved Uncle George. He was a great man in many ways. Our family always had a HOOT when together (we a still do).
I remember one gathering shortly before his death we were ALL in stitches and ALL telling stories and jokes. Uncle George stopped the fun for a brief moment and told me, in all sincerity, that I should do stand-up comedy. An endorsement I'll never forget! I miss him!
 

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I deeply miss Far Side, Bloom County, and especially Calvin & Hobbes.

The first collection of Garfield clips is hilarious, but that strip took the night train to Sucksville, rapidly; can't stand it now.

Enjoy: Red and Rover, Zits, Pearls Before Swine, LuAnn, Red Meat.

I really, really really wish would go away: Peanuts (ENOUGH with the reruns already, give a starving cartoonist a chance!) and Family Circus :angry-screaming: :eek:bscene-birdiered: :eek:bscene-hanged: :eek:bscene-moneypiss: :puke-front: :puke-huge: :sad-roulette: :scared-shocked: :text-banplz: :violence-rocket: :violence-minigun: :violence-stickwhack:

My current favorite is very polarizing, people either love it or hate it: F Minus:

2006.04.26.gif


:handgestures-thumbup:
 
Have to say I loved Dilbert during the first portion of my cube farm life. I always had a Dilbert calendar on my desk and looked for it in the comics section. Once I left my first job though I never picked another Dilbert calendar up.
 
Crap, I completely forgot about Dilbert! Patron Saint for Engineers!!! :handgestures-thumbup: :handgestures-thumbup: :handgestures-thumbup: :handgestures-thumbup: :handgestures-thumbup: :text-bravo:
 
Ok OT I know but Akula got me browsing gocomics.com, found this one and thought it was great:

69d8aff0ebf301300ab6001dd8b71c47


:text-link:
 
Yeah, and the other neat thing about GoComics.com is that you can access years worth of any particular comic. Call me crazy but, for example, I've used that site to download every Non Sequitur strip since its (1992) inception! While Miller has published many anthologies, they have been thematic, rather than (comprehensive) chronological, so I was able to access strips that I would never have seen otherwise.
 
Botch said:
Crap, I completely forgot about Dilbert! Patron Saint for Engineers!!! :handgestures-thumbup: :handgestures-thumbup: :handgestures-thumbup: :handgestures-thumbup: :handgestures-thumbup: :text-bravo:
You can of course subscribe (for free) to the daily Dilbert cartoon and have it appear in your email inbox. http://www.dilbert.com/

I should also point out that http://www.arcamax.com/comics has a pretty good selection of comics and you can choose quite a number of them (again for free) for daily email delivery. I get eight (8) every day from them. There is an overlap between what they offer, and what GoComics has.

Fans of Joe Martin's Mr. Boffo ("people unclear on the concept" etc.) - of which I am one - can access all of his past strips at http://www.mrboffo.com/mbarchives/mbarch.html. The "Pick a Date" drop box is usually current up to the current date (or even the next day's edition.)

Foxtrot went from being a daily to a weekly some time ago (good thing Bill Amend didn't go cold turkey like Waterman did with Calvin & Hobbes.) You can get his now-weekly strip at http://www.foxtrot.com/. It's usually updated every Sunday.
 
PaulyT said:
Ok OT I know but Akula got me browsing gocomics.com, found this one and thought it was great:

69d8aff0ebf301300ab6001dd8b71c47


:text-link:

That's hilarious.

I just added that comic to my daily email. I really can't recommend that service enough- a nominal fee, zero hassle.
 
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