I don’t know if the 80s really were a sort of Golden Age of syndicated comics, or if I’m just remembering the highlights better than the lowlights. But there were some genuinely great strips back then, many of whom made the rare decision to exit the field before they got stale and stagnant. We got ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, ‘Bloom County’, ‘This Modern World’, ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’, we got ‘Dilbert’ (hey, they didn’t all get out before going stale and stagnant…)

And we got ‘The Far Side’.

The wonder and beauty of ‘The Far Side’ is that even though it ended almost twenty years ago, in a way it’s still with us today. Because that was what made it so great; Gary Larson wasn’t just a talented writer and a gifted artist, he had a sensibility that changed the way you look at the world. And that change has been passed on ever since, a meme that has continued to spawn and mutate even though the strip is long gone from the funny pages. Gary Larson didn’t just make perfect, hilariously funny single panel comics day in and day out, he made the world seem like a strange and unusual place. Nobody who’s ever seen a ‘Far Side’ strip can quite think of human history the same way after seeing a picture of two cavemen staring at a dead mastodon, a spear impaled in its side, and saying, “Ooh. We should write that spot down.” (And it’s all part of the peculiar alchemy of his words and his art that the people who’ve never read that strip are saying, “What’s so funny about that?” while the people familiar with it are smiling all over again.)

Larson’s work was an inspiration to a generation of comedians, who went on to found single-panel “quirky” gag strips like ‘Close to Home’, ‘Bizarro’, ‘Ballard Street’, ‘The 5th Wave’, ‘Rhymes With Orange’, ‘In the Bleachers’…good strips in their own right, all clearly bearing the unmistakable stamp of their ancestry. They all work in a world where the strange and unusual is commonplace, where people are slightly eccentric in entertaining ways, and where animals behave like (slightly eccentric) people. They write what they know, and what they know is the world Gary Larson showed them. And even better, Larson’s interest in science, combined with his way of writing about it in an entertaining and humorous way (an amoeba husband hectored by his wife: “Stimulus, response, stimulus, response–don’t you ever THINK?”) inspired a generation of young people to take an interest in anthropology, astrophysics, biology, paleontology (the classic cartoon, featuring a bunch of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes with the caption “What Really Killed the Dinosaurs”) and a host of other fields. ‘The Far Side’ was witty, literate, twisted, and indescribably funny. Every day since Gary Larson brought it into the world is a slightly more amusing, slightly more amazing day. Whether it’s pushing on a door marked ‘PULL’ (“School for the Gifted”) or trying to train your dog and imagining it hearing, “blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah GINGER”, we’re all of us touched a little bit by Larson’s extraordinary perspective on the world.

Now, may I please be excused? My brain is full.

Last Sunday’s episode of For Better or For Worse presents an interesting paradox: the punchline involved John, the husband,writing on a dollar bill, but Canada (where the strip is set) did away with dollar bills in favour of coins in 1987. FBOFW true believers will, of course, remember that creator Lynn Johnston re-booted the strip in 2008; the presence of the dollar bill, though, implies more than a simple reboot, and leads to the suspicion that the 2007 period in which several different timelines appeared simultaneously in the strip was not a simple narrative device but actually reflected some untold crisis in the universe of the strip. Based on the available evidence, we can say that last Sunday’s punchline reflects one of the following possibilities:

• The new continuity takes place in a universe where the world changes more slowly, so that dollar bills are still in use; we can call this the Earth-2 version.
• The new continuity is meant to be a darker, edgier version of the original, and thus is set in the United States; call this Ultimate For Better or For Worse.
• Last Sunday’s punchline was a “rogue joke” that somehow survived the annihilation of the previous timeline. As time goes on, the implications of the paradox it embodies will wreak havoc on continuity and on causality itself, leading to a crossover event in which multiple versions of each character appear and Farley the dog sacrifices himself to save all of the universes.
• Due to the commercial success of the strip, Johnston has as little familiarity with small denominations as George H.W. Bush had with barcode scanners.

I don’t know if anyone but me reads comic strips anymore, but here are my thoughts on a few I follow:

Pooch Café: Bill Watterson once called Pogo “the last of the enjoy the ride strips,” by which he meant that while it often had continuing storylines, the point wasn’t to get to the end but to see how many enjoyable tangents you could take along the way. (Mid-series episodes of The Simpsons are a good example of this as well.) Pooch Café has a lot of this quality to it, with stories often making vertiginous twists and ending up in much odder and funnier places than you might have imagined from the beginning. I can’t say for sure, but I’d like to think that Paul Gilligan, the writer/artist, just lets the stories run in whatever direction they like the way Walt Kelly did.

Zits: The subject matter may not be particularly unusual (though it’s done in a more original way than any other “teen” strip) but Zits is one of the few strips today that is actually doing interesting things with art. Bill Watterson (again) famously dismissed a lot of comic strips as being (I’m paraphrasing) “Xeroxed characters standing talking to one another,” and for the most part that’s true today — almost literally true, since many strips make use of scanned images of their characters that are used over and over in slightly different poses (Shoe has been done this way since Jeff MacNelly’s death, something I hope has him turning in his grave.) Zits, on the other hand, often makes the art a key part of the action, in strips like this one. Not the greatest gag in the world, to be sure, but compare it to a typical strip in the same paper. Here’s a test: cover the bottom third of each of these two strips. Which one is still (vaguely) funny? Tip to cartoonists: comic strips are not supposed to be funny without the art.

Mutts: Okay, after praising two strips I’m going to get mean. But how can you be mean to Mutts? It’s so charming, so cute, so lovable. And I do love Mutts. I think that Patrick McDonnell is one of the best artists working in any medium today. So what’s the problem? He’s coasting. I may say that in part because I usually read it online, so I don’t get to see the creative things he does with the Sunday strips, but even still the strips have a disquieting sameness. If you are a Mutts fan, as I am, try to think of a particularly good one from the last few years. Of course, they’re all good; they’re all fine… but none are really better than the others, or different from the others in any way. It’s as though McDonnell had an endless bag full of strips, from which he drew one at random every day. So while McDonnell is probably a better artist than Jim Borgman, who draws Zits, and each individual Mutts strip is usually better than each Zits, I find myself more interested in reading Zits.

Doonesbury: Speaking of coasting…  Like a few other things I read Doonesbury out of habit, and I wonder if Garry Trudeau might be drawing it out of habit as well. The characters marry, procreate, get old… it’s like Gasoline Alley for liberals, or an inside-the-beltway version of For Better or For Worse. I also wonder if Trudeau, like Tom Lehrer, might just not find the news funny anymore: politics seems to be receding further and further into the background for the last while. Obama, for instance, has barely been a blip — the only appearance I can remember was in a series of fourth-wall-breaking strips about him learning how to be in Doonesbury.

Fisher: I’m getting really obscure here, as I think this strip is only published in the Globe and Mail, but what the heck. What I find interesting about this strip is not necessarily the content (though it is usually fairly funny) but that it takes the same approach to young-ish urban married life that Dilbert took to offices. A lot of comic-strip mavens have expressed bafflement at the success of Dilbert, pointing out its crude art and fairly uncreative gag-a-day structure. What these critics miss, in my view, is that the appeal of Dilbert is not primarily its humour or its art but its relevance: rather than being set in the sitcom never-never land of Blondie or Hi and Lois or any number of other worthless comics, it’s set in something with a recognizable connection to real life. Scott Adams has said that most of the crazy stuff he showed going on in offices (tethering laptops, for instance) was based on things that had happened to himself or his readers, and Fisher has very much the same feeling. Like Dilbert, it may not be the funniest strip out there, but it may be the most clippable.

I thought it was this Sunday! Oh well. Here, belatedly:

Moral: Guys, be sure to tell the awesome women in your life that they are awesome. Sometimes, they need reminding. (Hopefully less in future, but I doubt it will ever be unappreciated anyway, so there you go.)

Top comment: Buy One International Woman, Get Another International Woman at Half-Price! — Matt

User Friendly creator Illiad caught plagiarizing his punchlines from Metafilter comments.

This cannot end well.

Top comment: To make so many people outraged, it must be worse than that Mohammad thing! — nickshogun

I was recently looking through scans_daily, and came across this post, wherein various posters debated the merits of Peanuts. One noteworthy poster claimed it was nowhere near as good as either Calvin and Hobbes or Dilbert. (Frigging Dilbert!)

People. Listen. This is not something I generally say, because I recognize there are many artistic works that I just do not “get” that I recognize are nonetheless of reasonable quality. (My Name Is Earl, anything Jane Austen wrote, most speed metal, et cetera.)

But if you do not like Peanuts, much less think it is in some way not good, then there are only two reasons this could be the case.

1.) You have not read much in the way of Peanuts and are ignorant.
2.) There is something the fuck wrong with you.

This is not up for discussion, unfortunately. These are your options. Sorry!

Also mentioned in this post, the popular – and wrong – concept that Peanuts was only good until an unspecified time and date (usually somewhere in the early 70s, although this is left indistinct by most people making the argument because they have no idea). True, Charles Schulz had a steady run of unparalleled greatness from 1954 until about 1978, and for the rest of his time spent drawing the strip was not quite that good (I mean, come on, that’s twenty-four years at the top of his game for fuck’s sake! Bill Watterson’s entire career only lasted ten! Berke Breathed burned out on a daily schedule after less than nine! Even Gary Larson only managed fifteen!), but even after his peak, Peanuts remained intelligent, introspective, and entertaining, with regular glimpses of where the strip had been in its finest years.

Just for the sake of argument, I’m going to present now a few Peanuts strips from the twilight years of his career.

continue reading "You’re Going Sadly Unrecognized In Certain Quarters, Charlie Brown"

I considered not posting this because I honestly don’t want to get a rep for being Scott Kurtz’s personal stalker or anything like that.

And before I say anything else, let me say that I thought the strip about Francis blathering about spit was pretty goddamned funny, despite A) being an old gag I’ve seen before and B) having some weird art issues with Marcy’s face. And I thought the face work on the creator’s panel strip was definitely a step up for him.

But today’s strip is just…

What the hell?

I have boiled this down to three distinct possibilities:

1.) Scott Kurtz is making fun of obsessive nerds in a horrifyingly un-ironic way.

2.) Scott Kurtz is drawing his “inner child” and forgot that he writes a comic strip and therefore is kind of obligated to write a joke somewhere.

3.) A confused, grotesque combination of A and B.

Discuss.

2004:

2008:

EDIT TO ADD: Since Teh Mighty Kurtz hisself has seen fit to link back to me, I feel it only fair to mention where I previously did not that I think this works more as a funny unintentional tie-in gag more than anything else (with Brent being exasperated with Cole because Cole is making PvP into a Serious Comic Strip). I don’t think that was the intention at all, mostly because whatever Kurtz’s pros and cons may be, “subtlety” isn’t on the list of pros. (And this is a neutral judgement. Gilbert Gottfried isn’t subtle either, and he is as funny as fuck.)All that having been said, I still stand by the comments made in this post, and Brent’s mouth looks terrible now.