Author notes

#35 American Comics

Hawk

on Jan. 19, 2006

At some point in your life you look down on the comic pages and realize that something's wrong. I try to read the comics page every day, but in reality I'm fooling myself. The funny pages have reached their ultimate low, and scavenging them for a laugh is all too often fruitless.

Now, I'm sure there's one or two you still love, depending on your taste, but you have to admit… most syndicated cartoonists don't know what's funny anymore. Or they're Jim Davis and they don't care what's funny anymore. Tadashi is right to judge our newspaper comics harshly. Without the ulimate greats Bill Watterson and Gary Larson to hold the funnies together, it's essentially a page full of merchandise advertisements.

I still get a laugh out of Dilbert and on occasion Get Fuzzy, but both have been known to settle for "less than funny" at times.

(I harbor a certain amount of respect for Charles Schultz, even if retrospecively Peanuts wasn't near as funny as Calvin)