Favorite Newspaper Comic Strips

[Leo656]

I'm almost positive that this has been discussed before at some point, but I'm as lazy as it gets so I'm certainly not about to go digging for it.

Just out of curiosity, what are/were some of your favorite newspaper comic strips? I confess, I haven't really kept up on any in many years, but I was fairly devoted as a kid. I rarely bothered with the black-and-white weekday strips, but I almost never missed the color Sunday ones. As I got a bit older I started bypassing the newspaper printings entirely and buying collected editions. Just seemed easier.

- My all-time favorite would almost certainly have to be Calvin & Hobbes. I own several large collected volumes, which never fail to make me laugh even today. I think it's probably the most relatable strip ever for anyone who first read it as a kid. I know I certainly identified more than a little bit with Calvin; particularly in how I had my own near-symbiotic relationship with a stuffed animal (fox) at that age. It's just such an all-around great piece of work.

- Second-place is a bit tricky. But for all-around quality purposes, I would have to give the nod to Dick Tracy. This one, I've actually NEVER read in the newspapers, for the simple reason that no paper in my area has ever consistently carried it. My exposure was entirely through colorized comic book reprints, and later, the gigantic collected editions of the black-and-white strips. I became a fan of the character with the Warren Beatty film, which led to a flood of reprints of classic material hitting the market shortly afterwards; the early-1990s were a great time to discover the roots of the character, as most of the best stuff was being re-released in almost any format you could ask for, and I picked up as much of it as I could.

I do confess, I kinda have to tap out once it gets to the sci-fi/"Moon People" era, and am really not at all a fan of that stuff; there's some fun to be had and some clever characters and stories, but I just find the whole thing far too incongruous with the hard-boiled detective strip it originated as. And I haven't kept up with anything "modern" that's been printed in the last few decades. But I still love the strips from the 30s, 40s, and some of the early 50s a lot. You just can't beat the classic Flattop, Shoulders, and Brow stuff.

- Finally there's Garfield. A somewhat controversial choice, perhaps, since it's become semi-fashionable in recent years to bash the strip, but I absolutely loved it as a kid; thus why it's a difficult choice between this and Tracy for my second-favorite - Tracy is absolutely the superior strip, but I definitely paid more attention to Garfield, especially when I was very young. Again, I had several of the original collections (I may still have them somewhere); I actually loved seeing how the earliest strips were so different from what it became famous for later, and watching the evolution unfold. It's gotten a reputation for being a bit dry, repetitive, and self-referential, but I've kind of always loved the sort of deadpan, Norm MacDonald-style humor it puts forth.

- Honorable Mentions: As a kid I paid a lot of attention to Peanuts, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it was one of my very favorites. I mean, maybe; I followed it a lot, watched all the animated specials, etc., but it always seemed a little "dry" to me.

Back when I read the papers a lot a little over ten years ago, I was a big fan of Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy. Those were consistently funny.
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I anticipate several responses in favor of the old TMNT strip, or various super-hero strips such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc. I haven't listed any of those for the simple reason that they were never consistently published in my area, so I barely even have a passing familiarity with them despite being a fan of the characters otherwise. I vaguely remember reading a couple of the TMNT strips on the old official website 15+ years ago, but only a few, and I honestly don't recall any of it. The super-hero strips, I've only ever seen in occasional issues of Comic Shop News or some similar insert. So while I'd like to speak to some of that stuff, I simply can't. I'm almost positive that, at the least, the Superman and Batman strips have seen some of their stuff collected but I haven't picked any of those up as of yet.