My Top 10 Favorite Comic Strips of All Time

Just to bide time while I get my thoughts together for the epic Bullet in a Bible, 21st Century Breakdown, and Awesome as F**k reviews, I’ve been reading a lot of comic strips, for no discernible reason other than I used to think Garfield was funny.

Oh, how wrong I was.

I’ve discovered that 99.9% of all comic strips ever made are friggin’ awful. There have been maybe twenty in the entire existence of comic strips that are worthwhile, and that’s stretching to include the underground comix from the R. Crumb days.

Newspaper comics are too sterile and boring to qualify as serious entertainment, or they used to be funny but quickly got bogged down into shark-jumped wrecks that try too hard to push their agenda down your throat (I’m looking at you, B.C.).

Fortunately, the future of comic strips lies in the uncensored reckless abandon of the Internet, where people like Mitch Clem make hilarious comics like Nothing Nice to Say and Penny Arcade. No webcomics here, I’m trying to go with newspaper comics.

Also, this is MY personal list. These are my favorites. These are the ones that still make me laugh and think and feel and question.

To say that the comic strip medium deserves the following comics is blasphemous and you should be punished for thinking so. These comics outclass the others more than anything has outclassed anything.

Runner-Up:

Peanuts (1950-2000), by Charles M. Schulz:

Don’t kill me. This has a good reason for not being on the list.

Okay, back when Peanuts had just blinked its way into existence in 1950, it was BORING. Sure, there were a couple funny gags here and there, but mostly, it was a bunch of stupid kids. And Snoopy.

But then something strange happened: Charlie Brown’s kite got stuck in a tree. Cue an arc that went on for days on end while Charlie sat near the tree, and other kids stopped by to make sarcastic comments. I think that’s where it started to get its philosophical footing.

By the 60s this strip was doubtlessly the best that ever got in the friggin’ papers. It was clever, it was radical, and Charles sometimes got hit with controversy over some of the jokes he pulled, or even characters like Franklin (the first prominent black comic strip character) or Peppermint Patty (who people continue to see as a lesbian. Why? I guess because she calls Charlie Brown Chuck. I always thought she had a crush on him, but whatever). This was the peak, the Golden Age of Peanuts. So what happened? Well, what usually happens to popular comic strips? They go on for too long. By the 70s the strip was now in a comfortable repetition.

By the 80s, strips like The Far Side and Bloom County far eclipsed Peanuts in intelligence and quality, and they were really edgy. So Peanuts sat back and turned into a franchise zombie, with Snoopy and Woodstock making banal jokes on holiday cards. This continued for twenty years until Charles decided to retire for health reasons (in fact, he died just before the last strip saw print).

That is why I can’t let this strip be on the list. It fell into boring reruns (Rerun was Linus and Lucy’s younger brother by the way) and the other strips never quite jumped the shark. I also find the rampant commercialism disgusting.

Despite that, I’ll never forget Linus telling us the true meaning of Christmas or eternal loser Charlie Brown’s attempts to kick a football.

Sorry Charlie, but you didn’t quite make the cut.

#10: The Far Side (1980-1995) by Gary Larson

Absurd, surrealistic irony is possibly the only way to describe the Far Side. When this strip did it right, it made you feel really sorry for humanity, and when it completely missed the mark, at least it made you chuckle with it’s nonsensical gags that occasionally bordered on non-humor.

The strip’s strange way if looking at the world inevitably produces a love-it-or-hate-it effect: If you love it you like to point out how clever it is, and apparently other people think you’re smart for being able to “get” the strip.

If you hate it, you just think it’s too stupid and out-there.

The fact is, the strip’s comedy came from how extremely depressing it was. Its misery was the key to your happiness, because let’s face it, almost the entirety of the strip featured morbidly obese people making stupid decision after stupid decision. Either that or it featured anthropomorphic fruit, furniture and animals insulting humanity.

The truth about the strip though, is that no one ever really got every single joke. Even Gary Larson.

#9: Dilbert (1989-now), by Scott Adams

The precursor to Mike Judge’s Office Space, this strip is about, ostensibly, the title character’s miserable office job.

After a while of Dilbert’s stupid inventions, the strip finally settled into a vicious satire of office jobs with deadpan dialog that typically avoided punchlines; the humor was mostly found in the exaggeration of the environment, while still realizing the sad truth.

In recent years the satire has started to delve into dark comedy: A recent arc had the Pointy-Haired Boss being killed and used as a hand puppet. Needless to say, for most miserable cubicle workers this strip became something of an catharsis.

Dilbert’s musings, Dogbert’s dry comments, and the Boss’s wanton cruelty have become iconic in recent years. What a great strip.

#8: Fritz the Cat (1965-1972) by Robert Crumb

Screw Zippy the Pinhead, this is the real counterculture comic. One of the original comix written by the beatnik rejects, this comic was originally distributed in head shops because censorship and the Comics Code had such a stranglehold on the industry.

Aside from being a satire as well as a very pointed attempt to offend any Comics Code enforcers within an eighty-mile radius, Fritz was a smart, suave feline in a turtleneck sweater who was very lucky with the ladies. The strip also delved into the psychedelic visions that R. Crumb endured.

The strip’s humor was very low-brow but the jokes were occasionally clever. That wasn’t the point anyway. The truth was, though, the strip was really funny.

Ralph Bakshi made it into a psychedelic mess of a movie (that everyone should see at least once), and R. Crumb was so disgusted with it he ended the strip by murdering Fritz with an ice pick.

#7: Non Sequitur (1992-present) by Wiley Miller

This strip used to be a fairly generic Far Side rip-off, but soon advanced into a political, viciously satirical strip with a decidedly liberal bent.

The most popular character is Danae Pyle, and she is frequently the lead. She’s also my favorite character, because she is the one used to attack everything with pointed satire, sarcasm, and cynicism.

Unfortunately, this strip isn’t quite as recognized as it should be, despite having been around for so long. It’s fantastic and definitely worth taking a look at.

Nowadays, it’s not quite as pointed as it used to be (it was so political that it got moved to the editorial section in some papers, similar to Doonesbury) and it’s format is fairly standard nowadays, but it’s still extremely hilarious.

#6: Pearls Before Swine (2001-present), by Stephan Pastis

Another fairly recent addition, this comic sometimes seems to exist solely for the purpose of insulting bad comics, but is frequently one of the funniest comics around in its own right.

It’s about Pig, Rat, Zebra, and Goat. These animals are really cute, sweet, and funny, which makes the dives into black (and I mean BLACK) comedy, including strips where Rat’s friend Satan comes a-calling, all the funnier.

The strip also employs shaggy-dog or shoot-the-shaggy-dog stories; long-winded dialog-heavy arcs with either no conclusion, a conclusion that leaves the characters in the same state or an even worse state than they were before, or even character death, are common.

That’s not even mentioning Bush’s plan to bomb Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii, Osama bin Laden living with the Family Circus, or “desperasexuals.”

#5: Krazy Kat (1913-1944), by George Herriman

This cat is the only person in the world who would interpret getting a brick hurled at his head as an expression of love. Basically, this comic is about a naive cat who is in love with a cranky mouse named Ignatz (the gender of Krazy Kat is never known, by the way), as well as Offissa Bull Pup, who hates Ignatz and wants him thrown in jail for throwing bricks.

This comic is about as surreal as it gets; in one memorable strip, Ignatz gets his tail hooked on a branch and completely unravels (ironically, Krazy Kat actually warned him about it– strangely, Kat also knew that Ignatz would unravel. Viva la insanity).

This strip is so classic E.E. frickin’ Cummings wrote the intro to the book collection. It’s impossible to overstate the influence that this strip has had on nearly every comic strip in the past half-century. Also, it’s worth noting that this strip was probably a nice relief during World War II– nothing diminishes reality like a heavy dose of unraveling mice.

This strip was the biggest iconoclast of its time, and completely rejected the unofficial comic strip rules. It also pioneered self-referential humor, and, even better, the dialog was phonetic, alliterative, and poetic, bringing an entirely new sensibility to the simple boring hillbilly comics that were around at the time.

#4: Pogo (1948-1975) by Walt Kelly

Walt Kelly is cooler than Walt Disney.

What this strip did was take the entertaining slapstick jokes of kids’ comics and mix them with the wordplay, wit, and satire of a sophisticated adult comic.

The strip was also edgy as hell, taking on Senator McCarthy at the extreme height of his power and viciously berating political figures and human nature.

Though the characters were innocent and likable enough they all represented some human fallacy or another that would allow Kelly to use it to make a point about politics.

Despite the political fascination and Kelly’s satirical skill, the main focus of Pogo above all was making people laugh, which it did constantly. Kelly would randomly create and discard characters at whim– he only needed them to be funny or make a point, after all. An estimate of every character to appear in the strip is well over 1,000.

However, there were several really cute characters, which Kelly would use to trick newspapers into running his most controversial strips– he called the innocent strips the “bunny strips,” appropriately enough.

One of the funniest aspects of the strip was how Kelly, with his great ear for language, created the “swamp-speak” vernacular for the strip and proceeded to make up random words and phrases for the purpose of laughter. You can probably see how influential that was.

#3: Bloom County and its spinoffs (1980-1989, Outland: 1989-1995, and Opus: 2003-2008) by Berkeley Breathed

Few strips have been so funny as Bloom County yet so pointed. The breathtaking work of art that is Bloom County gave birth to Milo Bloom and Opus the Penguin, two of the most iconic comics characters of all time, and the strip was funny enough that its satire was extremely well-received.

The original strip took place in a small town, but the rest of the expanded universe has introduced such a wide range of characters that it’s probably no longer confined to it (even though it pretends it is).

It’s about a bunch of crazy people and pets living in a boarding house in a small, middle-American town.

The original main character was Milo Bloom, who at 10 years old is probably the smartest of all the characters in the strip. He’s also a newspaper reporter and his parents own the boarding house where the action takes place.

Of course, the naive penguin with a herring addiction who pined for his mother, Opus, quickly became the most popular character and took over the strip as well as Outland and Opus.

Don’t forget other weird characters like Bill the Cat (“Ack!”) who became a replacement for Garfield after the end of the strip when all the characters got fired and looked for other comic strip jobs.

Then there’s the Charlie Brown parody, Michael Binkley, who obsesses over pop culture and has his very own “anxiety closet.”

Or one of my favorites purely for his name, Milquetoast the Cockroach.

Classic.

#2: Life in Hell (1977-now) by Matt Groening

What started as an attempt to explain living in Los Angeles to his friends ended up as one of the most beloved yet the most cynical comics ever made.

And yes, it’s made by the guy who made the Simpsons (funnily enough, originally he was going to pitch Life in Hell as a cartoon series but then he didn’t want to merchandise it, so legend has it he made the Simpsons up in the waiting room).

He sold it at Licorice Pizza, a punk record store (awesome!) for two bucks a copy, and then it got picked up by the Los Angeles Reader where it got really popular in the underground.

Matt made fun of school, work, and love in pre-Generation X fashion and the subjects of the comic were deceptively cute bunnies. Two of them, Akbar and Jeff, were gay lovers, and then there’s the main character, Binky, who is depressed and thus normal. Binky’s illegitimate son Bongo shows up every once in a while, as well as his girlfriend Sheba.

Bart Simpson occasionally shows up in the background as a joke, but usually it’s just confined to cute, self-hating bunnies.

And it is hilarious.

And the number one comic strip of all time is…

#1: The Family Circus!

Hah, just kidding

#1: Doonesbury (1970-present) by Garry Trudeau

Revolutionary is the only way I can possibly describe this strip.

Portraying characters in real time? That might not be influential, but it is so original it’s amazing. Also, it’s so liberal that it got moved to the Op/Ed section of the newspaper to avoid complaints from old cat ladies who read the Sunday funnies.

The commentary is wry, dry, and ironic, and the characters are decidedly quite deadpan. The political commentary (I agree with Doonesbury about many things) always is right on time. In fact, they did a Watergate strip in the 70s and then when Nixon died in the 90s he reran it (slightly edited) to mock the way media was representing him now.

Also in the very early 70s, there was one strip that had a very upfront weed reference, and Garry got in a lot of trouble for that.

One of the funniest things I think is that when Garry sent out strips predicting that Obama would win, a McCain spokesperson said that “We hope that the strip is predictive as it is lame.” I’m good at noticing when other people making stupid mistakes, so if they were implying that the strip was lame, then were they hoping Obama would win? And if they were implying they hoped McCain would win, would that mean that they didn’t think Doonesbury was lame? Eh, politicians are idiots.

Either way, definitely a fantastic comic strip, and the greatest.

I love this joke.

Wait, wait, wait, Milo.

Aren’t you forgetting something?

I don’t think I am.

No, I’m pretty sure there’s a large elephant in the room.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yes, aren’t you forgetting to mention–

Shut up!

CALVIN AND HOBBES!!!!

I love Doonesbury but screw it, the greatest comic strip of all time is Calvin and Hobbes (1985-1995) by Bill Watterson.

This is the sweetest, most imaginative, most artistic, most clever, and FUNNIEST comic strip ever made.

The comic strip medium doesn’t even deserve something as good as this strip.

The comic was always funny even from the beginning, but let’s face it, the the late 80s weren’t as good as the comics early-to-mid 90s heyday. That’s when the art got really good, the characters were cemented into their personalities, and the strip started to write itself. The sight gags got sharper, and the dialog got a lot smarter. Overall, Calvin and Hobbes was the smartest comic strip of all time, and it’s the funniest. It’s also the sweetest– several strips almost made me cry.

I really wish I could say more about it, but words fail me.

I’ll just say that Calvin, Hobbes, Susie, Mom, Dad, Rosalyn, and even Moe and Ms. Wormwood all have special places in my heart.

As do Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man, and Spaceman Spiff.

As do the Transmogrifier, the Duplicator, Good Calvin, the Snow Goons, the Time Machine, the Transmogrifier squirt gun…

Man, this comic is just too good! G.R.O.S.S., “2+7 is against my religion,” “But don’t you go anywhere…”

“It’s a magical world, Hobbes, old buddy… let’s go exploring!”

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