Newspaper Strips - The Good, The Bad, And Fred Basset

[Catalogue Trousers]

Okay. Inspired by the comments about The Kids Of Today on the Tumblies 2007 thread, I felt sufficiently enthused to start a thread purely on newspaper comic strips/one-panel cartoon series.

There are a lot of bad newspaper strips about - the aforementioned Kids: Nemi; George And Lynne - the sole purpose of which, as we all know, is to keep its title stars in a permanent thirty-something limbo of chiselled jaws and taut pecs, peroxided blow-waves and impossibly full and gravity-defying tits and semi-nudity. To name but a few.

And then you've got the likes of Fred Basset. I find it hard to be as cruel about this as some, as - once you can grasp that it isn't meant to be funny, but a sort of newsprint equivalent of a nice mug of cocoa when it's raining heavily outside - it works pretty successfully on its own odd merits. It's so gentle as to be anodyne, which means that I tend to be impervious even to that approach, but it's obviously succeeding to some degree.

But what of the good strips? We can probably take certain ones as read - The Far Side, Calvin And Hobbes, Bloom County - but there are good British ones, as well.

Carl Giles's work, for example. My Dad's a huge fan of Giles, and while I can see that some might lay the same charge of reassuring "niceness" at his door as at Fred's, I reckon that there's much more to him than that. There's a vein of cheery scepticism running through his work - simplistic as it is, it frequently theorises that Life is pretty rubbish on the whole, that Love is present but never fairy-tale (his "family" clearly love each other, but very much under a heavy coating of antagonism), and that - despite all of this - it is still possible to face the World defiantly with a smile and a song, or at least a shout of "bollocks to it all". Nobody could capture a rainy day like Giles:



He was also a master at anthropomorphising animals without making them cute. Look at Butch the dog's permanently bemused expression at events around him. In many ways, Giles's work feels a lot like Hancock-lite to me, and that's not a bad thing at all.

Flook, by Trog (aka Wally Fawkes). This was damn weird. How it ended up in the Daily Mail, I'll never know, as it's one of the most cheerfully anarchic and liberal strips that I've ever seen. A bizarre, intelligent but naive prehistoric creature is revived in the present day, befriends a young boy named Rufus, and has many strange and sometimes satirical adventures. It feels a bit like Paddington Bear taking the stage at The Establishment:



I'd love to know if there are any collections of that available. It confounded me as a kid, but I still found it irresistible and funny.

Bristow, by Frank Dickens. Again, I first met this as a child, and it confused me. I could sort of understand that it was about an average little man, a "cog-in-the-machine" figure (Molesworth and his "clump-press minders" had given me a very rudimentary idea of the class system at a very young age), but a lot of the jokes, simplistic as they were, I just didn't get. But something about Dickens's art style just made me laugh:



It's so sketchy, it's almost embarrassing. But somehow, even now, just laying eyes on Bristow's ludicrous 'tache and bald dome, I find myself beginning to smirk.

And The Perishers.



Forget Peanuts (pretty good as it was), Dennis Collins and Maurice Dodd were depicting children that I recognised. There was at times a certain sentimentality to it, but again, the very character of Wellington was just bizarre. On the one hand, there's his almost Huckleberry Finn nostalgic (and presumably orphan) life - living in an abandoned small-line railway station with his pet dog - on the other, he's constantly skint and seemingly frequently on the verge of starvation. His best friends are an idiot, a trainee harridan, an annoyingly precocious toddler and the aforementioned dog. And yet - somehow - there's a believable feel to the whole thing, for all of the heavy infusion of highly intelligent, talking (but only among themselves) animals.

Anyway, it's my bed time, so I'll leave you with these ones for now. Please feel free to add your own nominations/arguments/what-have-you to the thread.

Or it's the cobblestones for you.

[alan nagsworth]

Forget Peanuts (pretty good as it was)

Pretty good? PRETTY GOOD?! Ohh I think that Peanuts is the best newspaper strip ever made. Kids dealing with issues that are way above their station. Charlie Brown has depression and is a total blockhead but his friends love him deep down because they all know how much he cares about them. They're all such colourful characters and seeing kids deal with complex issues is pretty charming, especially since in the middle of it all is a dog who really couldn't care less. I have an undying love for Peanuts after reading hundreds upon hundreds of them as a young'un, me ma's got loads of the original paperback collections. Luvvit.

[Huzzie]

There was an extrememly ridiculous Nemi strip in the Metro yesterday. Anyone see it? I forgot what it was now.

Not newspapers but I was recently going through a Punch annual from the early 20th century and the cartoons are so beautifully drawn, they are real art pieces.

We also just picked up a book of newspaper cartoons going back to the start of the early 19th century. I love early political cartoons, you can really see the power the people started to get.

I might scan some of these for you at some point if anyone is interested.

[CaledonianGonzo]

While I obviously like Peanuts a lot, I think Calvin & Hobbes just edges it.

The [utr=http://prakashdaniel.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/christmas-eve-poem.jpg]'Christmas Eve'[/url] poem Sunday page remains one of my favourite things ever.

My tiger is now fast asleep
On his back and dreaming deep.
When the fire makes him hot,
He turns to warm whatever's not.
Propped against him on the rug,
I give my friend a gentle hug.
Tomorrow's what I'm waiting for,
But I can wait a little more.

Watterson was right to knock it on its head when he did, though.  Signs of repetition were starting to sneak in, and newer 'themes' like the Chewing Gum magazine weren't really reaping great dividends.

I'd have a Hobbes avatar if it wasn't for respecting the man's wishes about using his characters for base and worthless purposes.

He's recently surfaced (just last month) to review the new Schulz biography for the WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119214690326956694.html

[jutl]

Doonesbury

Yes, there is a large overhead to grasping who the fuck everyone is, but it truly is an incredible work, chronicling the politics and texture of American life since 1970. Here's a week's worth from early November dealing with Cheney's supposed deisre to kick off an Iran war before leaving office. The bald character in dark spectacles is Duke, who is loosely based on the late Hunter S Thompson. I wont try to describe his varied career up to now (the wikipedia article does a great job) but right now he runs a private lobbying firm and has been appointed Ambassador to Berzerkistan.

[Uncle TechTip]

I've never 'got' Doonesbury and, on that evidence, I never will.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Well, cheers for the replies so far - hoping for more. And Huzzie, I'd be very interested in seeing some of those scans...

As a quick sideline, what about good comic strips that went definitively sour?

Johnny Hart's BC.

Sod off Stewie Griffin, BC in its prime was a frequently funny strip. Puns, anachronisms, satire - it was like a more intelligent version of The Flintstones, and neatly-characterised.

And then...somewhere down the line...Johnny Hart became a born-again Christian. Worse, he started letting everybody know it.

I loved Wiley. The grizzled old cynic with a huge, tangled beard and hair, a wooden leg, a tendency to drunkenness and a curious streak that led to him discovering shaving by sticking his head in a fire, only to be jealously cursed en masse by his fellows as a "BEATNIK!!!" His humour, his toughness, his pragmatism, his deadpan affability. Loved the guy.

And then, Johnny Hart got religion.



Lo, Wiley the Hallmark card. It's almost enough to make me cry.

In his prime, Hart was getting plaudits from Rod Serling. To this day, I try to remember that Johnny Hart, and that BC. But it's bloody hard.

A bit more later, when I get really self-flagellatory by remembering how Bloom County should have been allowed to rest in dignified peace, but wasn't...

[Kapuscinski]

I saw a Nemi strip last week where she and some other Goths were frightening Roman Soliders by being "Goth-like" and singing.

This was the sole point of that strip.

[idunnosomename]

And then, Johnny Hart got religion.

I think the most troubling thing with this is that his strip is called "Before Christ"

[gatchamandave]

Understandably the thread has concentrated on comedy strips since they fill the bulk of newspapers every day - but I would also nominate a couple of serious strips, if only because it's the one thing that the British at one time, in the 60s and 70s, did really well, and seem to have lost the knack off, for no good reason.

So first up must be Garth with its breathtaking Frank Bellamy art in the 70s - it's time some-one reprinted this, because it's an essential part of British comic strip history second only to the greatest strip ever in newspapers.

And that is, of course, Modesty Blaise - every time I pick up one of those smashing Titan reprints I am hooked at page 1 and read right the way through, whether the artist is Holdaway or Romero makes no difference to me, each has their own strengths.

Worst ? Hmmm...I remember a strip in the Daily Record from many years ago called - IIRC - Lance Maclain -Space Surgeon that featured as its lead character the aforementioned Lance, a bearded space-surgeon who through many adventures was accompanied by a female android who, er, 'loved' him and who, for some reason

(a) regularly had her clothes ripped of revealing that

(b) some barmy weirdo had fitted her out with nipples.

Even at the age of twelve, it did nowt for me. She also, as I recall, had a three foot long head - this making her supposedly alien and exotic, I suppose.