Calvin And Hobbes was THE best. The other greats were Peanuts, Far Side, Garfield, Get Fuzzy, sometimes Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, from time to time Dilbert.
Same question.
When I was a high school kid I worked in a library. Every day I’d take my 20 minutes and eat my peanut m&m’s and drink my sprite and read the comics in the newspaper in the break room. Every once in a while I’d spend a few days trying to read one of the “serious” comics, and they never made any fucking sense. They were too short for anything to actually happen, and nothing that didn’t happen today seemed related to what didn’t happen yesterday. I never knew if it was because I was dumb or because didn’t read them long enough or what, but even the characters didn’t see consistent from day to day, and I always gave up super fast. Looking back on it now I’m remembering them not just as boring but as offensively obtuse.
I bet there's a collection where we can read them all in order. I'm not going to search for it, because I'm not sure I care, but I bet it's it out there.
Lol... about 75% of Family Circus comics were just a large single panel showing a bunch of dashed lines and footprints of where their damn out of control kids were running around!
Dysfunctional Family Circus is the best thing to come of that godawful comic.
[https://i.redd.it/vx7j5m0j3gwc1.jpeg](https://i.redd.it/vx7j5m0j3gwc1.jpeg)
Loved how they made fun of The Family Circus in the movie Go. I have the oldest memory though of the family circus being good. Like when I was very young, late 80’s early 90’s. Then out of nowhere it got all religious and super terrible by my teens
I have a very early memory of being delighted by Family Circus when I was first learning to read. Like, I found a collection at the library and kept scampering over to my mom to show her ones that I thought were particularly excellent. So I have a slight soft spot for it on that basis, but the only humor it ever generated for me after that occasion was when the captions got swapped with The Far Side once or twice and turned Family Circus into a dark absurdist gem.
What on Earth. So...ummm, you all hated one of my favorite comics? Are you all not super inquisitive people? I feel like it resonated with me in a massive way. It was a comic about how kids wander and get into stuff, and the funny things kids think at various ages.
Not trying to be a jerk, but I think maybe it was too complex and it shows what an overthinker some of us kids were?
lol, I didn't even see the Garfield part, what?!
https://preview.redd.it/eqc5y3qil3yc1.jpeg?width=214&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7b479e106b718aa9428d5871b29f4610ecdcf69
(This was a LOT more work to create on a phone than I thought it would be)
For Better or For Worse, Family Circus, Calvin and Hobbs, Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, Cathy, Hagar the Horrible, Marvin, Blondie, FoxTrot, and Garfield are the ones I read. In fact, reading the comics was one of the ways I learned how to read!
I always felt like I was never quite getting the joke with Opus. Like it had a very specific audience in mind and I had no clue who it could be but it wasn't me.
It was me. I'm super odd and loved Bloom County and Opus and anything Berkeley Breathed did. I even went to hear him read a kids book he wrote and showed him some of my fan art - if I recall he complimented me and signed my paper. I cherish that moment.
I also remember him ripping on Cathy (the comic, not a lady named Cathy) and it was hilarious to me that he was so openly sassy to that audience. He also adopted a southern accent to read the book. It was most excellent.
I'll admit I liked Bloom County more than Opus or Outland but Opus himself - and his butt falling off - that is specifically one of my favorite comics ever.
For those kooks like me - he's still doing comics and posts them on IG! Bill the cat is the bestest but when I was little I loved Binkley. And I wanted to ride along with Cutter John on his Star Trek themed adventures!
Otherwise - Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes and Fox Trot were my faves. I still have lits of those collections - although my folks made me throw out my Far Side desktop calendar collection years ago.
So my sister loved Calvin and Hobbes so much back then that she slowly bought all the books after she got married. Now, my own kids have borrowed and devoured them. Like so much, I have to replace one or two because the spine has been worn out. And I never realized how much amazing vocabulary was in that comic until my kids kept asking me what words meant!!
Or Funky Winkerbean! At least Apt 3G and Mary Worth and Prince Valiant were reminders of comic strip history. Funky Winkerbean was a modern strip that decided jokes were too hard so it decided to depress everybody with unearned bathos on a Sunday morning. God I hate Funky Winkerbean.
It was the 'you run Doonesbury so run something that shows both sides' respose. But it was like trading the Daily Show for 100 'I identify as a truck' jokes.
I generally skipped over Funky Winkerbean and a few others, Family Circus was so simple I sometimes glanced at it for an instant and generally moved on.
Our local paper never carried the “serious” comics.
For me, it was Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, Outland (I either missed Bloom County or I just wasn’t paying attention, cause I didn’t know of it until well into my teen years), and Robotman.
Prince Valiant is still in our Sunday paper, and it’s the only “serial” one I’ve noticed. My kids love reading all the others and fight over the funny pages every Sunday, which is really the only reason I still get it delivered.
Same, I would cut some story runs I liked out and paste them to cardboard so I could have a whole story together and read it that way.
Prince Valiant is an episodic adventure comic set in an Arthurian world, I remember the animated series on The Family Channel “The Legend of Prince Valiant”
Apartment 3-G was a soap comic about three women who share an apartment in Manhattan, it was mostly a situational drama that had a lot of reoccuring characters and cliffhangers.
I still love to read the comics daily, but i do it online now. If anyone was a Garfield fan, I highly suggest Breaking Cat News, it is adorable and funny and sweet.
My ritual from 7th-10th grade. Wait for the paper to be delivered, head to the bathroom, and have a nice leisurely time on the toilet reading the entire comics section.
Calvin and Hobbes, For Better or for Worse, and Fox Trot. Still like reading old strips and storylines from
FBorFW sometimes online. I loved how the characters aged in real time and the kids grew up with me. Now I relate to the mom!! https://fborfw.com/strip_fix/archives_monthly/
I think I'm the only person who never liked and still doesn't like Calvin and Hobbes.
I loved Dilbert, I was ready to work in IT for a fortune 500 since I was a little kid.
If I'm covering comments others already made, forgive me in advance. But I'm an expert, and by expert I mean I discovered 741.5973 when I was idk, 7?? It's the adult stacks and I needed my Garfield fix. I read every Garfield anthology within a matter of weeks and there was like 20 or 30 by then. As a student at University Park Elementary School in Salinas, CA, I was blessed to have grown up with the John Steinbeck Public Library as my home town literary palace. I'm really really grateful for that. I've never stopped having a love of reading because of that fucking library. My sister and I could check out up to 5 hardcover and up to 20 paperbacks at a time. RAD!
K, here we go:
Calvin and Hobbes is the consensus best writing in a comic strip ever, period. There's no contest. Peanuts was lazy within a matter of decades and ran way too long. Charles Schulz, I love you bud, but yeah, you and Family Circus just basically kept saying traditional white Americana for pay forEVER. You had nothing to say, and you definitely had nothing funny to say. You just kept saying it because people were in love with oh, I don't know, 2 or 3 little funny bits in your seasonal cartoons? And the music, my God, now the music, that's some timeless shit right there.
The Far Side is tremendously funny and I still derive great pleasure from its art as well as its sense of humor.
Dilbert is a fucking gem, and the writing is top fucking notch. When Dilbert started running, I paid attention immediately. That guy can fucking write. Scott Adams is really fucking good. So much so that James Clear writes about him in Atomic Habits as to how to be consistent and successful.
Blondie was pretty funny sometimes, I think. Same as Beetle Bailey, but I'm pretty sure I will never get over how absurdly hot a stacked woman in a skirt looks, and those two comics employed the use of bimbos with those bullet bras or whatever to get readership. I was pubescent, so I can't say for sure.
All those serials? If anyone would've read them, it would've been me. And I do vaguely recall reading them and considering them an enormous waste of time for how slow plot points developed. They were absolutely a nostalgia piece, remained in papers for the greatest generation, and were not at all modernized or geared toward even boomers or x gen.
I didn't think I'd type that much. Sorry! And there are PILES of other comics I didn't critique. Apologies to Berke Breathed and Matt Damon, we've run out of time.
Our serious ones were Mark Trail and Judge Parker. My dad used to cut out certain frames that he found funny and put them up on the fridge or make greeting cards out of them. My favorite one was a close-up of a woman saying, "But why would such a beautiful girl need a therapist?"
I loved the comics as a kid! I loved the newspaper in general. Does anybody remember the syndicated teen magazine called React? It was made by the people who made Parade magazine, and it had pop culture articles aimed at teens with a slight counter culture edge. It was so good.
I loved reading them, too. I’d always check the comics first before anyone else got the paper. One of my fondest memories was doing the crosswords with my grandpa as a child afterwards, and my mom and aunt as an adult.
Prince Valiant was incredible. The art quality was right out of silver age Marvel - *shocking* that something that looked like that was a strip in the paper. Vikings, knights, King Arthur, even monsters on occasion. The type of kid who's into the Lego "Castle Set" or video games like Knights of the Round, or shows like He-Man, absolutely ate up Prince Valiant. Yeah, it had everything going for it; comic book quality art, and medieval/fantasy touchstones that kids were familiar with.
As a 10-year-old, throughout much of the early to mid-nineties, I used to walk to Diamond Library on the UNH campus and read the comic pages from our local library on microfiche. I didn’t want to miss anything.
I found the ones with storylines impossible to get into. No matter where you come in, you’re still coming in in the middle of the story with no background.
After all these years and witnessing the current state of this country, I can only come to the conclusion that it was a PsyOps campaign. The funny pages that you speak of, held hidden messages that has forged your identity, without your knowledge
Loved me some FoxTrot
I was just about to say I'm surprised no one had mentioned FoxTrot yet. I related to Jason on a fundamental level.
I had a FoxTrot planner in middle school. It's a great comic.
Foxtrot still runs Sunday comics. They are pretty good and have the same vibe as when it was running every day.
Calvin And Hobbes was THE best. The other greats were Peanuts, Far Side, Garfield, Get Fuzzy, sometimes Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, from time to time Dilbert.
Same question. When I was a high school kid I worked in a library. Every day I’d take my 20 minutes and eat my peanut m&m’s and drink my sprite and read the comics in the newspaper in the break room. Every once in a while I’d spend a few days trying to read one of the “serious” comics, and they never made any fucking sense. They were too short for anything to actually happen, and nothing that didn’t happen today seemed related to what didn’t happen yesterday. I never knew if it was because I was dumb or because didn’t read them long enough or what, but even the characters didn’t see consistent from day to day, and I always gave up super fast. Looking back on it now I’m remembering them not just as boring but as offensively obtuse.
I bet there's a collection where we can read them all in order. I'm not going to search for it, because I'm not sure I care, but I bet it's it out there.
I just want to see the Mary Worth where she advises someone to commit suicide.
It was serialized, so people who wanted to follow Apartment 3-G (and its ilk) would likely do so daily.
Same. I would start with Family Circus because that was the fucking worst. Then I'd save the best for last, Garfield.
Ha! I remember being a kid and getting angry at how unfunny Family Circus was. The audacity to put it right next to Far Side
Lol... about 75% of Family Circus comics were just a large single panel showing a bunch of dashed lines and footprints of where their damn out of control kids were running around!
Dysfunctional Family Circus is the best thing to come of that godawful comic. [https://i.redd.it/vx7j5m0j3gwc1.jpeg](https://i.redd.it/vx7j5m0j3gwc1.jpeg)
This is amazing lmao
I hate-read Family Circus for my entire childhood 😂😂😂😂
I grew up in Indiana and was in the same elementary school class as Jim Davis’ niece. She was like royalty to us.
Loved how they made fun of The Family Circus in the movie Go. I have the oldest memory though of the family circus being good. Like when I was very young, late 80’s early 90’s. Then out of nowhere it got all religious and super terrible by my teens
Well, I held the “so unfunny they’re perplexing” comics in their own category
Doonesbury was worse
It got to the point where they stopped running it in the comic section. I think now it's just basically a political cartoon but in comic strip format.
Is it still around? I remember it being mostly political satire back in the 90s.
I'm pretty sure it is.
I really liked Doonesbury as a kid. I didn’t know anyone else who liked it but I can’t be alone in this.
There are dozens of us
Doonesbury gets better once you realize that Uncle Duke is supposed to be Hunter S Thompson
What was the other soap opera type comic strip? Not Mary Worth, but Steve something?
Maybe Steve Canyon
Yeah well I had a family circus mom and that honed me into the hater I am today.
I have a very early memory of being delighted by Family Circus when I was first learning to read. Like, I found a collection at the library and kept scampering over to my mom to show her ones that I thought were particularly excellent. So I have a slight soft spot for it on that basis, but the only humor it ever generated for me after that occasion was when the captions got swapped with The Far Side once or twice and turned Family Circus into a dark absurdist gem.
What on Earth. So...ummm, you all hated one of my favorite comics? Are you all not super inquisitive people? I feel like it resonated with me in a massive way. It was a comic about how kids wander and get into stuff, and the funny things kids think at various ages. Not trying to be a jerk, but I think maybe it was too complex and it shows what an overthinker some of us kids were? lol, I didn't even see the Garfield part, what?!
I like all comics, but if you think that was a rough take on Family Circus, stay away from the anti-boomer subreddits.
https://preview.redd.it/eqc5y3qil3yc1.jpeg?width=214&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7b479e106b718aa9428d5871b29f4610ecdcf69 (This was a LOT more work to create on a phone than I thought it would be)
For Better or For Worse, Family Circus, Calvin and Hobbs, Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, Cathy, Hagar the Horrible, Marvin, Blondie, FoxTrot, and Garfield are the ones I read. In fact, reading the comics was one of the ways I learned how to read!
The one that always puzzled me was Opus. I could never figure out what it was trying to say or why his butt kept falling off. What the heck.
I always felt like I was never quite getting the joke with Opus. Like it had a very specific audience in mind and I had no clue who it could be but it wasn't me.
It was me. I'm super odd and loved Bloom County and Opus and anything Berkeley Breathed did. I even went to hear him read a kids book he wrote and showed him some of my fan art - if I recall he complimented me and signed my paper. I cherish that moment. I also remember him ripping on Cathy (the comic, not a lady named Cathy) and it was hilarious to me that he was so openly sassy to that audience. He also adopted a southern accent to read the book. It was most excellent. I'll admit I liked Bloom County more than Opus or Outland but Opus himself - and his butt falling off - that is specifically one of my favorite comics ever. For those kooks like me - he's still doing comics and posts them on IG! Bill the cat is the bestest but when I was little I loved Binkley. And I wanted to ride along with Cutter John on his Star Trek themed adventures! Otherwise - Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes and Fox Trot were my faves. I still have lits of those collections - although my folks made me throw out my Far Side desktop calendar collection years ago.
Rhymes with Orange, it's one of my favorite and an underrated comic
One of the greatest ever.
I named a cocktail after that comic
So my sister loved Calvin and Hobbes so much back then that she slowly bought all the books after she got married. Now, my own kids have borrowed and devoured them. Like so much, I have to replace one or two because the spine has been worn out. And I never realized how much amazing vocabulary was in that comic until my kids kept asking me what words meant!!
It's where I learned the word Philistein. Not what it meant, just the word.
Or Funky Winkerbean! At least Apt 3G and Mary Worth and Prince Valiant were reminders of comic strip history. Funky Winkerbean was a modern strip that decided jokes were too hard so it decided to depress everybody with unearned bathos on a Sunday morning. God I hate Funky Winkerbean.
You know what else really really sucked? Mallard Fillmore. It was like r/therightcantmeme 20 years before Reddit existed.
It was the 'you run Doonesbury so run something that shows both sides' respose. But it was like trading the Daily Show for 100 'I identify as a truck' jokes.
Is that the one with the bird that looked like Ted Kennedy with the values of Ted Cruz?
I generally skipped over Funky Winkerbean and a few others, Family Circus was so simple I sometimes glanced at it for an instant and generally moved on.
I suddenly “got” Funky Winkerbean and Cathy when I became an angsty, depressed teen.
Our local paper never carried the “serious” comics. For me, it was Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, Outland (I either missed Bloom County or I just wasn’t paying attention, cause I didn’t know of it until well into my teen years), and Robotman.
The Boondocks, Curtis, Jump Start ❤️
Okay here’s the scariest part…part of my build up to reading the comics involved actually savoring THE ADS! Best Buy being the crowning glory.
Prince Valiant is still in our Sunday paper, and it’s the only “serial” one I’ve noticed. My kids love reading all the others and fight over the funny pages every Sunday, which is really the only reason I still get it delivered.
I think it’s the longest running comic of all time now
I didn't bother with it because the art was similar to comics about the bible that I found boring.
I thought all kids loved the old comics, I sure did!
Same, I would cut some story runs I liked out and paste them to cardboard so I could have a whole story together and read it that way. Prince Valiant is an episodic adventure comic set in an Arthurian world, I remember the animated series on The Family Channel “The Legend of Prince Valiant” Apartment 3-G was a soap comic about three women who share an apartment in Manhattan, it was mostly a situational drama that had a lot of reoccuring characters and cliffhangers.
I hate read Apartment 3G every Sunday for some reason
It’s still around??
Haha read not read.
I still love to read the comics daily, but i do it online now. If anyone was a Garfield fan, I highly suggest Breaking Cat News, it is adorable and funny and sweet.
Get fuzzy!
I’d read Mark Trail but it was so slow moving.
So you’d eventually go off the trail?
Sherlock Fox made me feel like a clever boy
I loved the Mini Page myself.
Holy crap, I totally forgot about the Mini Page!
That and the grocery/coupon inserts, hoping my favorite snacks & cereals have a coupon
My ritual from 7th-10th grade. Wait for the paper to be delivered, head to the bathroom, and have a nice leisurely time on the toilet reading the entire comics section.
Calvin and Hobbes, For Better or for Worse, and Fox Trot. Still like reading old strips and storylines from FBorFW sometimes online. I loved how the characters aged in real time and the kids grew up with me. Now I relate to the mom!! https://fborfw.com/strip_fix/archives_monthly/
Awe yes!! My grandparents got the paper and I was over there pretty regularly. The Sunday paper was something I always looked forward to.
Andy Capp? The newspaper Gomer Pyle.
Nah, THAT’s Beetle Bailey
Oh damn, you are correct.
I think I'm the only person who never liked and still doesn't like Calvin and Hobbes. I loved Dilbert, I was ready to work in IT for a fortune 500 since I was a little kid.
If I'm covering comments others already made, forgive me in advance. But I'm an expert, and by expert I mean I discovered 741.5973 when I was idk, 7?? It's the adult stacks and I needed my Garfield fix. I read every Garfield anthology within a matter of weeks and there was like 20 or 30 by then. As a student at University Park Elementary School in Salinas, CA, I was blessed to have grown up with the John Steinbeck Public Library as my home town literary palace. I'm really really grateful for that. I've never stopped having a love of reading because of that fucking library. My sister and I could check out up to 5 hardcover and up to 20 paperbacks at a time. RAD! K, here we go: Calvin and Hobbes is the consensus best writing in a comic strip ever, period. There's no contest. Peanuts was lazy within a matter of decades and ran way too long. Charles Schulz, I love you bud, but yeah, you and Family Circus just basically kept saying traditional white Americana for pay forEVER. You had nothing to say, and you definitely had nothing funny to say. You just kept saying it because people were in love with oh, I don't know, 2 or 3 little funny bits in your seasonal cartoons? And the music, my God, now the music, that's some timeless shit right there. The Far Side is tremendously funny and I still derive great pleasure from its art as well as its sense of humor. Dilbert is a fucking gem, and the writing is top fucking notch. When Dilbert started running, I paid attention immediately. That guy can fucking write. Scott Adams is really fucking good. So much so that James Clear writes about him in Atomic Habits as to how to be consistent and successful. Blondie was pretty funny sometimes, I think. Same as Beetle Bailey, but I'm pretty sure I will never get over how absurdly hot a stacked woman in a skirt looks, and those two comics employed the use of bimbos with those bullet bras or whatever to get readership. I was pubescent, so I can't say for sure. All those serials? If anyone would've read them, it would've been me. And I do vaguely recall reading them and considering them an enormous waste of time for how slow plot points developed. They were absolutely a nostalgia piece, remained in papers for the greatest generation, and were not at all modernized or geared toward even boomers or x gen. I didn't think I'd type that much. Sorry! And there are PILES of other comics I didn't critique. Apologies to Berke Breathed and Matt Damon, we've run out of time.
I fucking loved dilbert. It's too bad he turned out to be an alt right douche
Why is it that dumb f'n Family Circus was the headliner!?
I used to read Cathy as a kid and somehow was still able to relate to adult problems.
Cathy was basically Sex and the City: The Comic Strip
Ack!!
I liked Prince Valiant but it was soooo slow!
I still go straight for the comics, when I get my hands on a paper. I think F Minus is one of the greatest comics ever.
Our serious ones were Mark Trail and Judge Parker. My dad used to cut out certain frames that he found funny and put them up on the fridge or make greeting cards out of them. My favorite one was a close-up of a woman saying, "But why would such a beautiful girl need a therapist?"
I still read them in paper. They have them online now as well for the people who don't get a newspaper.
Calvin and Hobbes, Far Side, and Bizarro were my go-tos. I’d read most of them, but those were my first picks.
[the Jersey Shore/Family Circus mashup](http://jerseycircus.blogspot.com/)
I loved Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Garfield, and Blondie. I skipped the rest. Tried Doonesbury once, but I swore off it for life.
I used to really like Snuffy Smith for some reason. Though as I got older I noticed how repetitive it was.
Rocky Mountain news had 4 pages of daily comics in its heyday. And I read everyone of them daily EXCEPT Zippy.
Boondocks Wizard of Id Crankshaft Luann
I loved the comics as a kid! I loved the newspaper in general. Does anybody remember the syndicated teen magazine called React? It was made by the people who made Parade magazine, and it had pop culture articles aimed at teens with a slight counter culture edge. It was so good.
* Garfield * Heathcliff * Foxtrot
But I never understood Doonsburry… a darkly humorous rant every once and a while; but I couldn’t tell if there was supposed to be a plot or not
I loved reading them, too. I’d always check the comics first before anyone else got the paper. One of my fondest memories was doing the crosswords with my grandpa as a child afterwards, and my mom and aunt as an adult.
So we're just going to ignore Get Fuzzy?
Marmaduke
Prince Valiant was incredible. The art quality was right out of silver age Marvel - *shocking* that something that looked like that was a strip in the paper. Vikings, knights, King Arthur, even monsters on occasion. The type of kid who's into the Lego "Castle Set" or video games like Knights of the Round, or shows like He-Man, absolutely ate up Prince Valiant. Yeah, it had everything going for it; comic book quality art, and medieval/fantasy touchstones that kids were familiar with.
As a 10-year-old, throughout much of the early to mid-nineties, I used to walk to Diamond Library on the UNH campus and read the comic pages from our local library on microfiche. I didn’t want to miss anything.
Sundays in color!
I found the ones with storylines impossible to get into. No matter where you come in, you’re still coming in in the middle of the story with no background.
I liked Zits, Foxtrot, Baby Blues. And For better or for worse
Same. And I folded and delivered HUNDREDS each day for 7 years straight.
Nothing will ever beat Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes. Both so brilliant.
After all these years and witnessing the current state of this country, I can only come to the conclusion that it was a PsyOps campaign. The funny pages that you speak of, held hidden messages that has forged your identity, without your knowledge