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Calvin and Hobbes! They live on, in the books! And speaking of discontinued comics,--Pogo.
I still read Doonesbury. Zits is my next favorite. But Peanuts is at the top of the list of the ones still in the Sunday funnies. I don't know how the strip keeps going, with Charles Schulz gone. Somebody's doing an awfully good job of impersonating him!
I am not a comics guy, but this question reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend many years ago. We were talking about how unfunny the comics page in the newspaper was. We went down the list... Momma...lame Beetle Bailey...lame Blondie...lame Zits...lame Garfield...lame Herman...lame For Better or Worse...lame Hagar the Horrible...lame
Frankly, the comics page bored us to tears. The same hackneyed gags over and over. It irritated us that such hacks were collecting paychecks... My friend indicated B.C., and remarked "lame..."
Actually, as a kid, I had some anthologized B.C. strips in a set of paperbacks that I thought were pretty funny (I was a kid, after all)... I remarked, "B.C. had a golden age, from around 1962-1966, but I agree it is lame now." This blew his mind; he couldn't comprehend a universe in which B.C. was actually funny. I added: "Mind you, it wasn't a laugh riot, but it was amusing and had a few decent continuing storylines. Just like Peanuts used to be funny sometimes, say, from 1958-1968 or so" I proffered a theory that a good, fresh, original comic strip has about a three-year span of actually being funny, and then another 40 years of being...well, lame.
"So, you mean Family Circus was funny once?", his eyes wide in utter disbelief, color draining from his face.
"Naw, that one was always lame, like Dennis the Menace." Not every comic strip gets a golden age. But when they do, three years seems to be the limit, with a few exceptions...
My favorites are Calvin and Hobbes, the Far Side, both drawn by cartoonists who kept them going as long as they were fresh, and ended on a noble note when the inspiration ran out.
Others that had a golden age that I was fond of, but have since become kinda lame: 70's-era Doonesbury, (early) Life in Hell, (early) Dilbert and (very early) Zippy the Pinhead (which once even contained a real shoutout to me, by (real) name in a 1989 strip, believe it or not... That's when I knew it had jumped the shark)...
[Apologies to anyone I might have offended with this post; I wrote it before noticing all those lame comics have been nominated as favorites on this thread... I was young when I dissed all those strips... Now I never see a newspaper, so I never even see comic strips anymore]
Local paper - some of those editorial cartoons are cute
Local weekday paper:
Some days one or two of those listed here are better than the others
Garfield
Blondie
Beetle Bailey
Bound & Gagged
For Better or For Worse
Mutts
Lockhorns
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