:milhouse: :pigmask-off:
I liked Pearls Before Swine back when I was a kid reading it in the paper. One of the few that I actually wanted to read.
I've been to a live show once and he was pretty funny. He's got a few "father i cannot click the book" takes but overall pretty good.
I don't think he is, I've read his comics for at least a decade. Dry boomer humor.
Remembering one that was something like "A vegetable stand run by a farmer that idolizes italian fascists, 'pro Duce produced produce'"
god what did funny pages artists even make jokes about before they all became addicted to twitter?
Yeah I haven't kept up with him, I just used to read his stuff in the comic section of the local paper.
He seems like a fairly average guy, seems like he's pretty lefty economically by American standards. Has some reactionary takes on PC culture, which is about where I'd assume the average American lands.
That was the moral crusade of Gen X. For PC culture prior to 1995 and then super reactionary towards it right after
Sorry, the post WW2 baby boom actually lasted until 1987, they're boomers now.
Not to respond too seriously to the joke, but I used to read the comics regularly, and his stuff was some of the least boomer stuff in the paper. Like, a huge number of them seemed actively resentful of the fact that the internet exists, and it was him and like 2 other comics that felt like they were written by actual human people. Pearls before Swine, the shitty political comics (not political cartoons, I'm talking about doonesbury and the like) and the comic by the guy who kept referencing anime were, along with sheer inertia, the only reason I kept reading the comics. Although I guess a lot of the comics were actually silent generation, which might be worse.
I used to read a lot of newspaper comics as a kid as well I even had a very close friend tell me my personality is best summed up by "Calvin and Hobbes and also Far Side". Pearls Before Swine wasn't carried in any papers when I was growing up. Foxtrot was also pretty good. I'd like to read Doonsberry the whole way through cause as a kid it was that surprisingly well drawn one with stuff I didn't understand in it.
Doonesbury is a fairly standard liberal comic politically, mostly noteworthy for the fact that it's a syndicated newspaper comic in the funny pages where you can find political commentary that might have been interesting or funny three weeks before the comic was released, when it was written. But it has some stuff that works, as well as a whole bunch of very funny comics about Trump from before he ran for president for real. (Funny in the sense that they exist mostly, though some are good for a chuckle.) Although I don't actually remember too much of it, so I might be being too harsh.
I loved Calvin and Hobbes and the Far Side, but I mostly experienced them through the collectors books, so I didn't mention them. I still have one of those books I bought at a library sale. Also I somehow completely forgot Foxtrot existed, which is impressive considering how important it was to my gender growing up. (There was an arc where Jason turned into a girl and started to like it, and though it wasn't the first time I'd seen that in something, it was the first one to make me start looking stuff up online.) Also I considered mentioning Dilbert, but considering Scott Adams' turn I decided not to.
I vaguely remember that foxtrot arc. I'd be more I terest in Doonsbury cause it's an insight into a very specific kind of lib that I bet going through the whole run would actually yield some interes insight.
I never cared for Dilbert even prior to it turning out Scott Adam's is a chud. Never worked in an office
Doonesbury would probably be interesting to read through, I just don't remember much of it.
Yeah I didn't care about Dilbert, but I could believe that it bore some relationship to reality as I might one day live it. Unlike Family Circus or whatever.
Actually I had a game in school where I'd click random page on wikiquote grab the first quote off the page and replace the caption of a random Famil Circus comic. Got some neat stuff
I just remembered the name of the other politics based comic I was thinking of, Candorville. Which I remember feeling a lot more radical than Doonesbury, if only by virtue of having multiple black main characters. Now I'm curious to see what they both said in 2020 about BLM.
Google says that's a type of mattress. Now I'm sad there isn't a podcast breaking down Doonesbury over the years, like a couple months at a time, because that would be exactly the kind of shit I'd listen to. I'm reading some of the controversies on wikipedia and it's fascinating.
A funny thing about the last gasp of the Print version of the Washington post, like from 1995-2005, was how incredibly opinionated the readers were about the comics page. It ended up taking up 3 1/2 pages, plus Dilbert and Doonesbury in separate sections, just because whenever they tried to remove a strip, there would be an uproar.
This was the comic strip series that got my little brother into comics so I will always have a soft spot for it.
I loved reading Pearls Before Swine growing up. It kind of formed my sense of humor (dark slapstick mostly).
