[Note: Every Friday on First Thoughts we host heated, half-serious, half-cocked arguments about some aspect of pop culture. Today’s theme, which was suggested by reader Don McClane, is the best newspaper comic strips. Have a suggestion for a topic? Send them to me at jcarter@firstthings.com]
The lowly comic strip is one of the most critically neglected of pop art forms. The reason for this becomes apparent to anyone who has read the “funny pages” over the past four decades: Most comic strips are utterly worthless.
Although there are hundreds to choose from, there are few worthy candidates for a list of “best” comic strips from the past forty years. The dailiness of producing a strip makes it an extremely demanding medium; consistency of output rather than quality and creativity are traits prized by the newspaper syndicators. That is why many of the best comic strip artists (Bill Watterson, Gary Larson) retire relatively early while the hacks dominate the format for decades.
Once a strip makes it into syndication and last longer than five years a strange, unexplainable force manages to keep it in existence, sometimes even after the original artist has passed out of this life. Even when I was a kid (in the late 1970s) no one I knew read Apartment 3-G, Flash Gordon, and Mary Worth (all three of which are syndicated by King Features) yet they stay on the comics page like zombies that can’t be killed off.
Because of the paucity of great comics, choosing a list of the “best” strips would make too short a list (I can only come up with five). Instead, I’ve decided to go with the more mushy, less committal modifier of “significant.” Each of these eight comic strips are arguably significant in their own unique way:
1. Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson) – A strip in which the primary characters are named after a sixteenth-century theologian and a seventeenth-century political philosopher sounds both dour and pretentious. Yet Watterson managed to turn the adventures of a young boy and his stuffed tiger into pure magic. Calvin and Hobbes is indisputably the best comic strip ever created; no other comic can compare. Indeed, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is the only comic strip collection that qualifies as great modern literature.
2. Dilbert (Scott Adams) – Dilbert does such an superb job of capturing the bizarre zeitgeist of corporate culture that its easy to forget the strip was started twenty years ago (April 16, 1989). Adams is the greatest satirist of business of our era—if not of all time.
3. The Far Side (Gary Larson) – Calvin and Hobbes generally required four panels to achieve greatness; The Far Side managed to do it with one. No other artist has managed to squeeze comic genius out of otherwise trite tropes (cavemen, cows, desert islands) as did Larson, who retired the strip after a brilliant fifteen-year run.
4. Peanuts (Charles M. Schulz) – With 17,897 strips published in all, Peanuts is, as Robert Thompson of Syracuse University claims, “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being.” By the mid-1980s, Schulz story was wearing thin, yet the strip remains, nine years after the artist’s death, one of the most popular and widely syndicated strips.
5. Bloom County (Berkeley Breathed)— It’s difficult for Gen X-ers to explain the impact Bloom County had on us. It was a simpler time (c. 1980) when jokes about a cocaine-snorting cat, Mary Kay cosmetics, and Michael Jackson were still fresh and funny. It’s difficult to say how they would hold up today (what Bloom County fan has the heart to revisit them?) but at the time they provided an accessibly subversive critique of mass culture in a era long before The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
6. Doonesbury (Garry Trudeau) – Yeah, I know: I hate Doonsebury too. But before Trudeau’s famed hiatus (from January 1983 to October 1984) it had its moments. And for better or worse it pushed the editorial cartoon onto the comics page and gave it narrative form.
7. Blondie (Chic Young, Dean Young, and John Marshall) – Don’t think this light-hearted, long-running strip is significant? Consider: It led to the long-run Blondie film series (1938-1950), a popular Blondie radio program (1939-1950), provided the template for television sitcoms (bumbling but lovable, somewhat dim father/husband; the smart, long-suffering wife/mother), and provided a name for a famous sandwich (the Dagwood). What other comic strip inspired film, radio, TV, and delis?
8. B.C. (Johnny Hart) – Hart referred to his strip as a “ministry” intended to mix religious themes with “secular humor.” Although its always been one of the better strips, B.C. is significant for being one of the few religious themed comics to gain a broad audience.
Which comics strips would you consider to be the most significant?
Selection criteria: Only comic strips from the past forty years that are still running were considered. Such comics as Pogo and Katzajammer Kids are no doubt as “significant” as any on this list, but few people have read them. Also, only comics that were syndicated in mainstream newspapers made the cut (which is why you won’t find Matt Groenig’s Life in Hell on this list).
December 18th, 2009 | 8:51 am
Only comic strips from the past forty years that are still running were considered.
Eh? Calvin and Hobbes, Far Side, and Bloom County finished their runs.
Anyway, agreed on the importance of those three.
B.C. jumped the shark years ago, if it was ever worthwhile, so I’d delete that and replace it with “Giles.” Not all the great comics are American.
December 18th, 2009 | 8:53 am
Here’s a sample of Giles:
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/10/24/stars-of-political-cartooning-carl-giles/
December 18th, 2009 | 8:54 am
Joe,
I have to agree: its Calvin and Hobbes and then everything else.
That said, I’d argue that Get Fuzzy is straight up funnier than any of the others that you mention.
December 18th, 2009 | 8:57 am
Actually, I reread my Bloom County books regularly and they are VERY funny still.
I would also suggest the long running Stan Lee Spider-man.
Pogo and Lil Abner remain some of the most culturally significant strips ever (makes Doonesbury look like a piker in terms of national impact) and to exclude them on the basis of age is nothing short of age discrimination. A bit like saying the Federalist papers don’t matter anymore. I would put the Superman strip of the 30′s to the 50′s in that category as well.
December 18th, 2009 | 9:08 am
That top 4 would pretty much be my top 4. I also always liked For Better or For Worse if for no other reason than the characters actually aged.
December 18th, 2009 | 10:27 am
Pogo isn’t in there? It just fits in the 40 year window, and arguable one of the most influential comic stips of its time. Who hasn’t ever heard the phrase “We have met the enemy, and he is us”? Plus inspired it’s own Christmas special, pegged on nothing better than mis-sung lyrics to ‘Deck the Halls”?
And just drop-dead funny, too.
If you want to make it an even ten, then consider L’l Abner, which inspired not only comics and politics, but spun off a Broadway stage play, a movie of the same, and a imitator TV series (The Beverly Hillbillies.) Al Capp’s political skewering took no enemies, and and hs cartoon women were just . . . lusciously real.
Oh, my!
December 18th, 2009 | 10:40 am
Those strips weren’t zombies that couldn’t be killed off, Joe. Some years ago, my local newspaper ran an article about their occasional test exclusions to see if anyone paid attention. Significant numbers were and always protested loudly. For that reason, The Girls and Herman were retained twenty years beyond their last earned laugh.
December 18th, 2009 | 11:49 am
I agree with the comments on Pogo and Li’l Abner. They were the epitome of the combination of laughter with truly great ink-work (Calvin & Hobbes comes close, and may have been funnier, but I know Watterson would acknowledge his debt to them).
Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, and Steve Canyon, were huge in their time, but their genre has completely disappeared and so (I suppose) the significance drops.
Then, of course, there’s Little Orphan Annie… which is at least remembered through a musical play.
December 18th, 2009 | 11:52 am
And if you really want to go back in time, check out Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo. I’ve always hated the character of Nemo himself, but the artistic accomplishment of the strip as a whole will take your breath away. That was what a cartoonist could do when newspaper publishers were willing to lavish space on them.
December 18th, 2009 | 1:42 pm
There’s a few good comic strips that don’t make it into the dailies. Tom the Dancing Bug is probably the funniest one I’ve seen since Calvin & Hobbes. Google ‘the adventures of God-man’ to see what I mean.
December 18th, 2009 | 3:36 pm
Sorry, but For Better Or Worse is an inexcusable omission. The only strip on your list that is in its class is Calvin and Hobbes. Granted, Watterson’s artwork is way better (and in fact better than every other strip mentioned except possibly Breathed’s), but for three-dimensional characters, heart and character-based humor, FBOW more than holds its own with Calvin and Hobbes, and easily outclasses the rest of the field.
BC just doesn’t deserve a place in the pantheon, unless you’re going to open the doors to the likes of Beetle Bailey or Hagar the Horrible (at one time the most-syndicated, I believe).
December 18th, 2009 | 6:51 pm
You have omitted Ted Key’s Hazel and Jeff MacNelly’s Shoe.
Berke Breathed was often criticized for composing a strip that was derivative, which was odd because Bloom County was invariably superior to Doonesbury, which has been significant primarily as a showcase for the self-satisfaction of its author.
December 19th, 2009 | 8:29 am
For Better or For Worse outranks Calvin and Hobbes (and perhaps even Pogo) as great literature. C&H had great imaginative gags and poignant moments, but FBOFW had richer developing characters, and it treated a much broader range of life–marriage and family, friendship, love, growing up, growing old, dying, pets, work, school, hobbies, and so much more–with moral seriousness, imagination, and rich humor. Here were characters to care about. I can’t remember any other strip bringing me to tears, or one that so celebrated marriage and family.
December 19th, 2009 | 6:19 pm
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December 19th, 2009 | 7:26 pm
I can’t believe anyone is niave enough to try to include Carl Giles in a list like this. Giles made a sort of suburban Adams Family, without the wit or humour, to promote the political agenda that the publisher supported in a newspaper that might have been “national” in the UK – but made little or no impact elsewhere. Giles was good at what he did, but what he didn’t do was create a comic strip or a graphic panel, he was an editorial cartoonist.
Peanuts would be at the top of my list, with C&H in second place and Peanuts is certainly a collection that qualifies as “great modern literature”. Given that cartooning giants like Chris Ware, Dan Clowes and Los Bros Hernandez all cite Schulz as a major influence it is difficult to underestimate his influence on the artform.
Little Orphan Annie is an unforgivable omission from any list, and some of those choices are actually quite weak. While early BC was marvelous, it really ran out of steam a long, long time ago. Still, it’s your list.
In my opinion it’s too soon to include Get Fuzzy, which I like a lot, but I’d have no hesitation including Cul-De-Sac in a collection of greats despite the fact that it hasn’t been going very long and you could also make a case for the short-lived Perry Bible Fellowship.
December 20th, 2009 | 9:19 pm
Don’t forget “Our Boarding House’ with Major Hoople (who even knows what a boarding house is these days?) and ‘The Phantom’ which was very un-PC even before PC was invented.
December 23rd, 2009 | 9:00 am
Where’s Zits? Anybody who’s lived with a teenager has a couple of strips on the refrigerator.
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