What's the worst comic strip not counting Mallard Fillmore?

Seems everyone goes with Mallard Fillmore. So, to make it more varied we'll eliminate that up front...

A few from the top of my head...

Family Circus - Repetitive, unfunny as hell and I swear the kids each have some sort of learning disorder

Snuffy Smith - Absolutely no appealing characters at all. A shiftless chauvinist, his door mat wife, his equally shiftless drunkard neighbor and the neighbor's abusive shrew of a wife. Yeah, that's funny...

Peanuts - (after the early 80's) In addition to losing his sense of what made Peanuts funny in it's prime, Schultz later gave the impression that he was keeping the strip going only so he could whore it out to any advertiser who was willing to meet his price.

Garfield - biggest waste of ink on paper ever. Made even more repulsive by the self-congratulatory celebration of its anniversary every year.

Thank God for "Pearls before Swine" because I don't think there'd be much reason to read the comics nowadays otherwise.

or anything that just keeps rehashing 80's yuppie-style humor over and over again. These people just need to do like Sam Watterson and Gary Larson and just quit when they run out of material.

Family Circus-I just saw Family Guy where Stewie is wearing a diaper made out of the Sunday comics and takes a serious dump, making sure he smears the target. "Who did that?" He says. "Not me, I dunno." Now THAT'S comedy!

Sam Waterson is the prosecutor on Law and Order.

and B.C.

With Brooke Shields...you wouldn't think it could possibly be WORSE than the comic strip....but it succeeds!

I do not get any of the humor.

Also:

B.C.

Any serial made after 1970.

Can't stand it!

Being neurotic, a little pudgy, and single is only good for a limited quantity of funny.

This strip has not been funny from the beginning, IMO.

I fucking hate Family Circus

"I fucking hate Family Circus"

A quick google search found this:
http://www.drivenbyboredom.com/family_freak_circus.htm

same guilt trip-style comic as Cathy and BC

Or maybe Mary Worth. That's pretty bad.

"It's about two naked eight-year-olds who are married."
-Homer J. Simpson

Awww...

What is funny about it?

Everyone else is free to think this strip sucks, which I once thought it did. Then I joined the Army and found out that, well, every unit has one of *those* guys in it.

Or you will get the FLAMING OF YOUR LIFE!!!!!!!!

It's fundamentalist, evangelical tone irritates me. However, for pure retch value those darling little kids in Family Circle are about as bad as it gets. And, I used to have fantasies of a strip where Mary Worth is beaten to death by a motorcycle gang.

In which she advises a friend to commit suicide.

Does it seem to be more religious now than say, 10 years ago?

Garfield hasn't been funny in a long time. Had to be done... someone had to say it. And I was a HUGE Garfield fan, so it is disappointing to have to come to this conclusion.

It makes me not so mad at Bill Waterson when I think about it, 'cause even though he stopped writing my favorite comic strip in the whole wide world while it was still at the top of its game, I would be even more angry with him if he had let Calvin and Hobbes deteriorate to the level of unfunniness that Jim Davis has let Garfield sink to.

On edit. Ooops, guess it would help to read the WHOLE text of the thread opener!! :dunce:

that published a giftware magazine..we used to joke that it would have a cover story: "Garfield or Heathcliff, Who Cares?"

All the realistically-drawn strips. I've always ignored all of them.

It's like a short soap-opera in the Variety section. I HATE soap-operas.

There's something "Ed Wood"-ish about Mark Trail...the dialogue is terrible, the stories are deathly slow and dull as dishwater, the characters are ciphers, and periodically all of the "action" will be eclipsed by a raccoon or chipmunk in the foreground for no apparent reason...

Probably the best since Calvin and Hobbes? It is called "Big Nate." If your newspaper doesn't carry it, you can see it on Comics.com. Check it out, and look at a couple months of his strip. The writing is consistently funny, and drawings are neat but not realistic. All around a great strip.

Definitely an underrated strip, in my book. I never miss it.

As for the ones I'm sick of, sick to death of, that would include "B.C." and "The Wizard of Id," both for being tired, sexist, and just plain right-wing. They weren't always that way, but apparently Johnny Hart subscribes to the view that right-wing politics and Christianity go together just beautifully, thank you very much. It's the kind of nonsense that gives people the wrong impression of Christianity.

Besides, both strips are just so smug and cold and unfunny.

It's just non-sensical ranting in EVERY strip. But you can NEVER beat Mallard Fillmore in terms of the worst ever. The drawings are HORRIBLE, and the script blows chunks. It's like all the newspapers were trying to find a neo-con strip to distribute, and could NOT find a decent one to "balance out" The Boondocks and Doonesbury, so to speak, so they went with the lowest bidder. MF (you know what that also stands for) looks like it has been drawn by a fourth grader and written by a first grader.

Snuffy Smith has been around since 1934.
http://www.toonopedia.com/snuffy.htm

Beetle Bailey has been around since 1950.
http://www.toonopedia.com/beetle.htm

(Hit those links, help a good website.)

What is considered humorous changes over time, but the strips often do not. Hillbillies were seen as funny in those days, but now the whole strip is anachronistic.

Beetle started when most adult males had some military experience. Now military time is uncommon in the general public. So the strips frame of reference is outdated.

Being funny isn't easy, and few can be good at it for a long time. Strips like those two (and Blondie, and Hi and Lois, and Dennis the Menace etc) simply outlive their currency.

He enlisted during the Korean War, and somehow never got out......

Lois, from "Hi and Lois"! :-)

Family Circus is truly evil, BC is fundamentalist crap nine days out of fifteen, but for true worthlessness Dennis the Menace takes the cake.

Blondie is another bad one. The guy's out of jokes. Lessee...Dagwood gets threatened with termination...Dagwood's friends push him around...Dagwood sleeps all the time...Dagwood eats again. That's it and that's all, and it's real hard to justify the amount of support to terrorism necessary to print this strip. (Printer's ink is made from petroleum.)

Any "family" strip except for Jump Start is bad. I like Jump Start a lot.

I like Get Fuzzy quite a bit.

...mainly because there are so few of them. Forsooth (but not too forsooth):

The Boondocks
Doonesbury
This Modern World
Zippy

That's about it, really.

...my all time hate is "Marmaduke"
About the second time that unruly POS ate my food, his ass would be
staring out of a cage down at the pound.

So I haven't seen a lot of the ones mentioned here yet. In fact I saw a "Get Fuzzy" book at the mall yesterday and thought it was hilarious. Of course my paper doesn't run it. What's funny is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has 2 full pages for a comic section, stemming back from when they took over a rival paper and readers of both wanted their comics to stay.

As far as my most disliked list goes:

Spiderman: I like Marvel comics, but having it as a daily kills the flow. Too much "witty banter" from Spidey to stretch the story to a full week.

Cathy: I skip over it anymore. OK, she's chubby. Does her universe not have a Lane Bryant for chrissakes?

Wizard of Id: It's gotten to the point where it's said all it can possibly say.

Prince Valiant: This is a toughie, I like the comic but I HATE how everything is so drawn out (no pun intended). It's only published once a week, hurry up and do something.



I can't go a day without reading Boondocks, Zits, For Better or Worse, or Garfield.

are *always* guaranteed to piss me off, as is Mallard Fill(myheadwith)more(bullshit).

Besides a very few strips the cartton page has become a vast nothing..Ever since bloom county and Calvin and Hobbes left something has been missing from the daily page..Oh sure there still is Doonsbury and Non Sequitr but thats about it..I dont get Zippy or Boondocks where i live:(

talk about promulgating horrible stereotypes about women! Gah!

bible thumping crap

there's six unfunny strips. (Kind of like science fiction novels.) My least favorite include: B.C., Blondie, Marmaduke, Rhymes with Orange, Cleats, Family Circus, and (this my personal least favorite) For Better or Worse!! :grr:

Some I DO like are Peanuts, Foxtrot, Boondocks, Doonesbury, and Non Sequitur.

Every negative stereotype about middle-aged white professional women and their families rehashed over and over.

I also cannot stand BC.

and she loves that strip.

I never read Rex Morgan MD, Apartment 3G, Brenda Star, Mark Trail, The Phantom or Prince Valient. The only comic strips worth reading are Doonesbury and The Boondocks. Tom the Dancing Bug and This Modern World are also worth reading.

I'm tired of that cat lovin Christian crap!

yech

Ziggy
BC
Heathcliff

Okay, so there are a few others I dislike just as much as this one but they've already been named for the most part, so I figured I'd focus on this one and maybe get flamed a little. I don't "get" Dilbert about half the time, and when I do get it I don't find it very funny. That's why I find it surprising that it was so huge and everything a few years back. I've brought this up to people before and they told me that I just don't find it funny because I've never worked in an office. Perhaps, but I just have this feeling that maybe it's one of those things in life I'm not meant to understand why I feel differently than everyone else about. :-)

RUGRATS ! Even worse than Garfield.