Genre Comics

[filkertom]

Great love for today's Sheldon.

What are your favorite SF/fantasy genre comics? I don't mean web comics -- I mean the stuff that gets mainstream distribution, on Comics.com or MyComics.com or one of those. The obvious ones -- Fox Trot and Sheldon -- are essential reads every day. Brewster Rockit: Space Guy started out slow, but has become one of my absolute faves. I also have great fondness for Heart of the City, and Ink Pen is quickly moving up the list.

(If you want to name your other favorite comics, that's cool too -- just keep it to mainstream distro for this thread. We'll do web comics later today or tomorrow. Mine would be the ones above, Doonesbury, For Better Or For Worse, Pearls Before Swine [I like the strip generally, but OMGWTFBBQ whenever the Crocydiles show up], Luann, Off the Mark, Over the Hedge, The Boondocks, Dilbert, 9 Chickweed Lane, Pibgorn, Big Top, and Candorville, with Pooch Cafe and Get Fuzzy bringing up the rear. Political cartoonists Mike Luckovich, Ben Sargent, Tom Toles, and Stuart Carlson also ring my chimes.)

Comments

[allisona.livejournal.com]

I love Dean in "Heart of the City". Sadly, my daily paper doesn't carry the strip anymore. After reading this post I went over on-line to have a look at recent strips and was amused to see Dean conversing in his bedroom with Lucas and Burton. Dean is just so lovably geeky.

[dubheach.livejournal.com]

"Dork Tower" is usually spot on for gamers.

[daundelyon.livejournal.com]

Pibgorn is amazing at the moment. I'm also fond of Frazz, who kinda makes me think of a grown up Calvin. Even looks a bit like Calvin.

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

Frazz is definitely one of my favorites. You're spot on about the Calvinesque feeling, but Frazz seems... warmer, somehow. It's hard to explain.

(Among my other favorites are, yes, FoxTrot and Sheldon, and Get Fuzzy, though I fear the latter is falling into a bit of a rut.)

[daundelyon.livejournal.com]

I think it might be because he's older. He doesn't have the same self centered view that Calvin, being a child, has of the world. Frazz is like Calvin, grown up and found his niche, if that makes sense.

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

That's true. I meant the whole comic, but the difference in personality is a big part of it. C&H always had a sense of conflict to it - Calvin running up against (and past!) the boundaries of authority, childhood, etc... but the core of Frazz is Frazz's friendship with the schoolchildren, which transcends the boundaries that restricted Calvin's life so much.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Sure--look at the recent sequence about Frazz and the kids playing Bedlamball. Spouse pointed out that's what happens when you get lots of kids playing Calvinball.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you could explain why drawing this distinction is important?

This subject being very close to my heart, my livelihood, and my raison d’être...and my loathing for the major comic strip syndicates being near to absolute...just a warning that my hackles are on standby.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Unlax and rewind, champ. I'm just noting the peculiar situation that there are a few mainstream comics which are obviously done by geeks.

An internet-only-comics thread will cover things far and wide, many of which many of us will have never seen, and that's tremendously cool, and it'll be fun.

These strips, on the other hand, can be theoretically read by my Aunt Toots in Taylor and Karen's mom in Traverse City. I'm interested in the fact that, even though they are rife with in-jokes which at one time we'd have thought only we would get, the audience has expanded. I mean, Fox Trot regularly does jokes about specific online games, fer gosh sakes, in such a way that I don't have to explain it to my mother.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I will admit that the mainstream dailies set up an interesting (and challenging) set of parameters to write within. It's a great blessing that a cartoonist no longer MUST write inside of those restrictions to have a semblance of success. But now that we have other options, I can freely appreciate a Fox Trot or a Bizarro for choosing to stay within the tough boundaries, but still finding fresh and relevant ground for jokes.

See, here's the chip on my shoulder.

I tried to create a comic strip before the web liberated the medium from its decades of oppression and stagnation. I was swatted down like so many others. Unlike a lot of those others, I've had a second chance to prove that my stuff has worth to people. They were wrong; I was good enough. Any fair system would have given me a chance to show it.

I could have started what I do at age 20 instead of age 32, if I'd had these kinds of opportunities (which would put me where at 37, I have to wonder). The brilliant artist I partnered with in 1991 died in 2001, so he'll never know what kind of success he could have found in a fair system.

The major syndicates were not strictly or completely to blame for their suppression of talent in favor of totally worthless shit, and the thousands of dreams they crushed. But I'll never forgive them for the way they did business for 50 years. I'll always hate strips like Broom Hilda and Beetle Bailey, which had no redeeming value but choked the comics page off from people who could have been using that space to make people laugh every day.

I like to hope that webcomics will eventually put the syndicates six feet under the clay, but I think they play too dirty not to survive in some form or another. Their relevance fades every day, though, and that warms my bitter heart. *evil grin and knifetwist*

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

I'm going to stretch this even a little farther than you, and include not only SF elements, fantasy elements, and geeky characters, but also the just plain weird.

At unitedmedia.com:

9 Chickweed Lane (Thorax)
Ballard Street (general weirdness)
Barkeater Lake (talking dog)
Bo Nanas (talking monkey)
A Case in Point (general weirdness)
Cow and Boy (talking cow)
Dilbert (accounting demons, time travel, etc.)
Get Fuzzy (talking animals)
Frank and Ernest (use of SF, fairy tales)
Pearls Before Swine (Love the crocodiles, like the killer whale, and generally hate Pig and Rat, but this one was wonderful.)
Pibgorn (fairies and demons)
Rose is Rose (dreamships, guardian angels, tub monsters)
Rudy Park (general weirdness)
Sheldon (ten-year-old software billionaire, talking duck)
Strange Brew (general weirdness)

At ucomics.com:

Big Top (talking animals)
Doonesbury (computer geekiness, some fantasy)
Fox Trot (Jason)
Heart of the City (Dean)
Ink Pen (talking animals, superheros)
- and a quick nod to the now-ended Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet

At kingfeatures.com:

Franklin Fibbs (time travel, the Hulk, etc.)
Mutts (talking animals)
On the Fastrack (computer geekery, fantasy)
Safe Havens (fantasy, some computers)
Zippy (general weirdness)

For the strips I couldn't cram onto that list, my favorite right now is Frazz, and For Better or For Worse, Luann, and The Boondocks are must-reads.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I'm a fan of a good number of those, and didn't name them only because I decided to name my favorites. (Although, then, I should've included Bizarro. :)

[lanchid.livejournal.com]

I love Frazz it reads to me as if Frazz is Calvin from the great Calvin and Hobbs all grown up.

[beldar.livejournal.com]

Your list covers a lot of my favorites. Add Strange Brew, Rhymes With Orange, and I wish Cho hadn't given up on Liberty Meadows (but I understand his disgust with the industry)

Fun fact about Big Top. The artist lives and works in Indianapolis, but the Star won't give him the time of day -- yet insists on carrying Peanuts reruns. Not wanting to diss Charlie Brown, but every Peanuts strip that will ever be drawn has already been published. Just get the books, and let papers run something fresh! seethe seethe seethe

Thinking old-school, I like the style of Mutts (I know it's recent, but retro-styled), I miss The Phantom (though I'm sure there are papers around with it) and I was always surprised at the quality of story in Alley Oop -- always sucked me in, at least.

Speaking of suck, ever seen a paper that had Bugs Bunny comic strips (I hope they don't du that any more). I swear they went out of their way to NOT be funny.

Favorite comics

[nezmaster.livejournal.com]

Boondocks hands down.

Dykes to watch out for is that kind of inbetween. It's not a web comic, but it's not exactly main stream either. You find it in alternative papers though. Same with Tom Tommorow.

Get Fuzzy is around #4.

Over the Hedge is also good.

I used to like foxtrot, but when I read hte books, It just kind of took a 'theres only three jokes' feeling and I got bored with it.

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

Ballard Street is my #1, I've been a fan since the first time I saw a Neighborhood strip.

The rest are in no specific order, as some days some are better than others.

Farley, Dilbert, K Chronicles, Non Sequitur, Six Chicks, Zits, This Modern World, Doonesbury, Boondocks, Foxtrot, Fasttrack, Safe Havens, Mutts.

And if Tom ever asks us what our favorite web comics are, I hope he insists that links be posted. I hate hearing about a great new web comic and not being able to find it.

[droewyn.livejournal.com]

I don't read comics so much anymore, but boy do I miss Liberty Meadows.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Buck Godot for sf. Nothing touches it. (Sorry it isn't current, but then neither am I...hmm. I'm Not Current, I'm Resistance. How would that look on a shirt?)

I only get my local paper for the funnies...

[gypsy1969.livejournal.com]

(yes I admit it)...and half the time the smaller paper makes a mistake and prints the same comic twice leaving out another one. Since we have two local papers, I have lots of comics to read.

In the Courier-Journal I like Dilbert, Cathy, Jump Start, Speed Bump, Hi and Lois, and Fox Trot.
In the Evening News & Tribune I like Frank & Ernest, Arlo & Janis & on Sundays there is Non-Sequitor

Oh but wait, you said SF/Fantasy. Well, they have all ventured into that realm at one time or another. My favorite Geek comic though is On the Mark. And though he's not in my papers right now, he could appear anywhere (in a card, magazine, t-shirt, whatever).

Something just occurred to me

[gypsy1969.livejournal.com]

Why don't they make a daily newspaper that is just comics! Pages and pages of them! That would make the newspaper worth its subscription price. But it will never happen, too much diversity and you couldn't get them to agree to be together.

[sylverwolfe.livejournal.com]

9 Chickweed Lane, Garfield, The Boondocks, Get Fuzzy, and sometimes Close to Home. sadly, only Garfield is in the Lousiville paper, so i have to hunt down the others online.