1. What was your favorite comic strip as a child?
I read them all, to the extent that I spent a fair amount of childhood with greyish-black elbows from the days when newspaper ink rubbed off....I have to confess to enjoying Beetle Bailey and Sad Sack because my father was in the Army.
2. Which comic strip today most consistently tickles your funny bone?
Unfortunately I can't remember its name right now -- later today I can come back and edit it in, after the paper comes. It's recycling day this morning. Anyway, it's a newer one with mostly dogs as characters and the occasional cat. Many of their concerns are those of dogs and cats -- for instance one I remember dealt with how dogs know people by their smells.
I also like For Better, For Worse, and Doonesbury, which are not always necessarily funny.
3. Which Peanuts character is closest to being you?
My kids would probably say, the grown-up character in the tv shows who says "Blah, blah, blah." I think Schroeder, who is off in his own little world much of the time and only relates to Lucy, etc. when he's forced to.
4. Some say that comic strips have replaced philosophy as a paying job, so to speak. Does this ring true with you?
Very likely. Although I don't know to what extent philosophy was ever a paying job! The NYTimes Book Review recently featured a collection of Jules Feiffer's cartoons that would certainly fit into the philosophy category, and there are some other cartoonists, especially working in alternative papers, who do quite a bit of philosophizing -- again I can't remember the name of the one I'm thinking of.
5. What do you think the appeal is for the really long running comic strips like Blondie, Family Circus, Dennis the Menace as some examples?
Familiarity, I suppose. I don't think we get those (we get a 5-day local paper and a Sunday close-to-local paper, and the Sunday Times but I skip over the "comic strip" in their magazine). There doesn't seem to be much new in them, and aren't the original creators all dead?
Bonus question: Which discontinued comic strip would you like to see back in print?
Well, it's not a comic strip as such, but I always enjoyed The Far Side by Gary Larson. He retired from the cartoon in 1995. While looking this up I found that there's a two-volume set in a slipcase of all the Far Side cartoons for $150.00. Put that on my list of "Things I Don't Need that Would Be Really Cool to Have."
See you in the funny papers!
5 comments:
I liked Beetle Bailey too! And I'd forgotten about Sad Sack.
I know the strip you're talking about with the dogs and occasional cat and I can't think of it's name either. It's good.
I would like to see what I remember as Hatlo's Hades. I did some research and found it also called Hatlo's Inferno.
I find it interesting that you liked Beetle Bailey because your dad was in the Army. Maybe it related more to the Army than the Marine Corps. That's what my dad was in, so I grew up on Marine bases.
I'm laughing about "the grown-up character in the tv shows who says 'Blah, blah, blah'"!!! Too funny!
:)
the Far side!!!
Yay!
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