Punk Accountants

"RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht" (ramblininexile) 04/29/2015 at 09:54 • Filed to: None

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ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 04/29/2015 at 09:55

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I miss Gary Larson. And Bill Watterson. Is there anybody doing anything remotely as brilliant as those two?

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 04/29/2015 at 10:08

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No, but there are a couple consistently funny. Consistently funny and clever without falling into cheap trained-seal clap humor is a hard line - Get Fuzzy for one hit it for a few years, but faded. Pearls Before Swine is often lazy, but funny often enough to keep up with, at least - you can tell Pastis is having fun. Nothing as seminal as Far Side that I’m aware of in over a decade. For a while I was reading The Comics Curmudgeon religiously to keep up with the full newspaper comic slate (joshreads.com), but there are only so many ways you can goof on Mary Worth before you start to enjoy it non-ironically...

Alfalfa Romeo > ttyymmnn 04/29/2015 at 10:08

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I’m quite partial to Pearls Before Swine, but that’s about it.

ttyymmnn > Alfalfa Romeo 04/29/2015 at 10:11

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I read Pearls for a while, but just couldn’t get into it. The only thing I read daily is Calvin repeats.

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 04/29/2015 at 10:14

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I gave Pearls a good honest try when I learned that Watterson had done some panels for it. But I just couldn’t get into it, and I think your assessment of “lazy” is spot on. But it’s got to be hard to come up with funny or insightful day after day, and it’s the reason that Watterson had the good sense to get out when he did.

Rainbow > ttyymmnn 04/29/2015 at 10:19

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I like Pearls Before Swine , Foxtrot , Zits , and occasionally Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! They don’t really compare, though...

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 04/29/2015 at 10:21

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Don’t get me wrong, Pastis can engage in genius from time to time, and his writing outside cartoons is really funny. That being stated, he saves perverse wit to flavor the weekends and rarely employs it when a goofy one-liner will suffice. It’s better pacing himself than most cartoonists do, and it’ll keep him at that level of freshness for years, but there’s no sense of wonder when you go to look at a daily Pearls. Just “Oh. *snicker*” and move on. It’s better way to be than Funky Winkerbean (a few years of brilliance followed by decades of clinically depressive psychopathy and smugness), but it’s no C&H.

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 04/29/2015 at 10:24

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I read Winkerbean in the early ‘80s. Is it still around? It was getting stale back then. But has there ever been a deader horse than Garfield ?

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 04/29/2015 at 10:33

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Funky Winkerbean is a dead horse in an entirely different manner than Garfield. Garfield is a dead horse that’s beaten, but has had all beating surfaces replaced with a natural looking silicone and the rest preserved with the most cutting-edge medical science. Funky Winkerbean is a dead horse that has disintegrated to putrid sinew and gobs of fetid flesh on a cracking skeleton, which still twitches due to foul necromancy binding serpents and maggots to the corpse.
Let me illustrate: the band director developed tragic hearing loss. Multiple people contracted and/or died of cancer. People went bankrupt and otherwise had their lives ruined in Russian tragedy-esque arbitrary disasters. Promising sports careers were cut short, IIRC. Les, whose wife died of cancer, moved on to a new love after Lisa-Lisa-Lisa whining for an interminable time, and then there was a metaphorical or possibly real ghost-of-Lisa shown on panel blessing the union during the prelude or possibly actual act of sex. All this carried on under a banner of incoherent “musing” intro panels with leaves or small animals like Mark Trail on crack and concluding with anti-punchlines of people smirking either in self-regarding smugness or utter emotional collapse. In short, Funky Winkerbean is beyond fucked up.

RustedSprinter > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 04/29/2015 at 10:35

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Holy. I think your post is beyond fucked up.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > RustedSprinter 04/29/2015 at 10:36

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I needed to stretch for a really illustrative metaphor to carry how loopy the strip had gotten.

ttyymmnn > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 04/29/2015 at 10:46

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Holy crap. I guess I’m glad I got out while the getting was good. Which brings up the question of whether or not to have your comic characters age. It seems to me that the great ones, like Calvin and Peanuts , didn’t do that. And the ones that I got sick of reading, particularly Foxtrot , did.

RustedSprinter > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 04/29/2015 at 10:46

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Well you nailed it.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > ttyymmnn 04/29/2015 at 11:03

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Zits and Baby Blues carried off in-strip aging pretty well, at least in comparison to For Better or For Worse, but it was something that suited the nature of the strips well. That being said, it’s very much a concession to being a chronicle strip and not a primary humor one, and the first step toward a disastrous end destination like Funky. Foxtrot, in being very much a family dynamic strip half the time, got very awkward in *not* doing so. As much as it has attacks of a Family Matters’ Urkel focus on Jason, the kids being in a somewhat realistic set of relationships with friends, community, etc. it got a bit loopy with people not aging. Foxtrot, of course, is now in reruns for everything but Sunday strips, which is probably the best choice for all concerned. Not so much trying to have its cake and eat it anymore.

CTSenVy > ttyymmnn 04/29/2015 at 13:04

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The Argyle Sweater at it’s best times is FarSide good, it’s just not near as constant as Larson’s work.

I’ve never seen anything that comes close to Calvin and Hobbes.