Dumb-as-Dirt Dogs and Creepy Cats

I'm going to assume almost everyone reading this grew up reading comic strips. My sister and I used to lie on the living room carpet on Sunday mornings, propped on our elbows as we read both sections and then exchanged them, our fingertips getting all smudgy. (I was older and read faster, so I usually had to wait, impatiently.) This is just a little jaunt down Memory Lane (or Freeway, if you're as old as I am) to remember what I hope are some of your favorites and also think about some that are more recent. I'm ranking these 16 strips strictly by how much enjoyment they gave me and, in some cases, still do.

Note: Notice there aren't any superheroes, detectives, or career women listed (Superman, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr, etc.). I've always gone strictly for the laughs.

16. Beetle Bailey (Mort Walker): I enjoyed Beetle, but if I forgot to read it, it wasn't the end of the world.

15. The Wizard of Id (Johnny Hart): Not as funny to me as B.C., Hart's other strip, but always delightful. (“Sire, the peasants are revolting!” “Tell me about it.”)

14. Blondie (Chic Young): I suppose if Dagwood's home life had been better, he wouldn't have spent so much time napping on that couch. Life at the office with Mr. Dithers wasn't much of an improvement, either. I related to him as an eternal underdog. Also, it's been interesting watching Blondie herself grow over the decades into an independent woman.

13. Hi and Lois (Mort Walker & Dik Browne): I enjoyed this family a little more than the Bumsteads. They first appeared in Walker's other strip, Beetle Bailey, then got spun off. One of my favorite comic relationships back then was between baby Trixie and her sunbeam.

12. Dennis the Menace (Hank Ketcham): I liked Dennis because he was even worse than I was. News of a TV version got me really excited, but I thought Jay North was just OK as Dennis, not quite what I imagined. Joseph Kearns, though, was a perfect Mr. Wilson.

11. B.C. (Johnny Hart): I laughed out loud frequently over this one, more than The Wizard of Id. The whole gang – B.C., Peter, Wiley, Clumsy Carp, and the rest – represented a screwy, offbeat wit I couldn't get enough of. In B.C.'s last few years, Hart's Christian faith seeped into many of his characters' exchanges. I'd never seen a strip reflect that. (People will say of a guy, “At least he died doing what he loved.” It was true in Hart's case – he died at his drafting table.)

10. Archie (Bob Montana): Boys in my grade school would get together and talk about Betty and Veronica – who was cuter, who had the fewest cooties, etc. I used to read these strips as a kid and wonder if being a teenager in Riverdale would really be like that, but I grew to realize that they reflected more of an Andy Hardy lifestyle than what teens in the 1960s were going through. Time caught up with the gang, though – last year, in Life with Archie, a separate strip chronicling the adventures of Archie as an adult, the freckled redhead was gunned down while trying to protect a gay friend from an assassin's bullet.

9. Doonesbury (Garry Trudeau): The best of all counterculture strips. The only strip I know of to be relegated to the editorial page by some papers after proving to be too controversial for the comic page. The only one I know to be dropped in some cities when it was treading on issues that were too sensitive (or maybe it was the editors who were too sensitive). The anti-Pogo, as liberal as that strip was conservative (though I think Pogo was funnier). The strip I liked because it was the first time I saw characters say something after the punch line to add an extra zing to the sendoff. So many comic characters do that now.

8. Get Fuzzy (Darby Conley): This one took just a little getting used to before I got on its wavelength. It's about a hapless young guy (Rob Wilco) who lives with what hands-down have to be the world's stupidest dog (Satchel Pooch) and most conniving cat (Bucky Katt). Satchel is sweet just because he's so hopelessly, helplessly dense, and Bucky's machinations are in hilarious contrast with the fact that he's basically just a little furball. My favorite moments are when this little terror is cut down to size, such as when he's making threats while strapped into an infant car seat.

 

7. Bloom County (Berkeley Breathed): Opus, the penguin with the major schnozz, is one of my all-time favorite comic characters. His glass is always half-full, even when he should know better. But what sets Bloom County apart is Bill the Cat, so hilariously repellent in appearance that he is, for a comic feline, refreshingly and historically “uncute.” Gack!

6. MacDoodle Street (Mark Alan Stamaty): I don't know what Stamaty was on when he drew this stuff, but I want some. His urban landscape constitutes the busiest, craziest panels I've ever seen. I was attending college in New York City when I discovered his work in, I think, the Village Voice. It was funny, subversive, and unsuited for mainstream papers first and foremost because his rich detail would be lost in the small spaces comics are cramped into now. In his larger canvases, you could look at the picture for half an hour and still be finding funny things you didn't see before. One of my favorite discoveries – a tiny advertisement in a subway car: “f u cn rd ths, u prbly cnt spl.” (His subsequent strip, Washingtoons, did for (or to) Washington what MacDoodle Street did for New York.)

5. Pearls Before Swine (Stephan Pastis): My current favorite strip. Pastis gave up law to become a cartoonist, and I'm so glad. His adventures of a simply drawn pig (named Pig) and rat (named Rat) are screamingly funny. Pig is naïve and trusting like Satchel Pooch, only moreso, if that's possible. Rat is so dastardly he makes Bucky Katt look like a saint. So often I shake my head and think, “How did he come up with that?” Pearls features some of the worst puns ever to shame the English language, but it knows this, and often in the last panel following a particularly egregious one, Rat will stand on Pastis' desk and tell him, in one form or another, that he really needs to stop it. Two of the reasons I can't get enough of this strip: (1) The crocodiles who live next door are constantly conspiring to eat various neighbors, only – and this seems to be a theme with some of the best comic characters – they're too dumb to live; and (2) Pastis, who was friends with Bil Keane, once had Rat suddenly find himself inside the panels of Family Circus, a much nicer, gentler strip that Pastis completely turned on its head – to Keane's delight, amazingly. You remember those dotted lines that used to follow the Family Circus kids as they traipsed through the neighborhood? When Pig and Goat wonder what's become of Rat, we see him lost in this maze of dotted lines muttering censored expletives.

 

4.  The Far Side (Gary Larson): Larson is the Steven Wright of cartoonists. His ideas are so outrageous, so hilarious, that I often wondered how one mind could come up with so much brilliance. When I just now pulled up some of the strips (or panels – it was always a one-panel joke) so I could find the funniest one and quote it here, I couldn't, because I was laughing at everything. Larson once said that his most controversial cartoon was a panel called “Cow Tools,” which showed a cow standing before a bench with some crudely crafted tools on it. He got so many letters from people, incensed because they couldn't figure out why it was supposed to be funny, that he had to issue an explanation. It's funny, he said, because this is what tools would like if a cow tried to make them. I have to be honest and say I also didn't figure it out, but then I wasn't particularly outraged, either.

3. Pogo (Walt Kelly): In an earlier list of favorite music videos, I ranked “Hurt” (Johnny Cash) third under two I liked more, although I conceded that it was, objectively speaking, probably the best video of all. I'm ranking Pogo third, but I really do think it's unparalleled. Pogo Possum, Albert the Alligator, and all their pals and assorted other characters (Wikipedia lists at least 40) live in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, where they swap tall tales, devise schemes, and allow Kelly to skewer public figures (mostly political) through the gang's perfectly innocent filter. In the same way that Rod Serling used The Twilight Zone to address issues and make statements that a straightforward drama probably couldn't get away with back then, Kelly used Pogo and his friends to skewer headlines and personalities deemed too hot to handle. (Joseph McCarthy was a frequent target.)

2.  Peanuts (Charles Schulz): Could this be the comic strip of the Baby Boomer generation.. I'm thinking yes. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Sally, Snoopy, and all the rest have been part of the cultural landscape as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure Charlie Brown was the first neurotic character to join the Sunday funnies (hence, Lucy Van Pelt's Psychiatrist Booth, which never did him much good). This is truly iconic stuff-- that booth, Lucy holding the football, Sally's crush on Linus, the kite-eating tree – and kids today must enjoy it almost as much as we did, otherwise who's been watching all those specials every year? Just their parents? But you know, I think Peanuts started compromising its vision when Woodstock came along. Snoopy had always been a loner and a dreamer. His flights of fancy – especially in his aerial battles with the Red Baron – were an essential part of his character. He was a canine Walter Mitty. But then Woodstock came along, and not only did Snoopy have a buddy to play with, but he was a cuddly-wuddly buddy, too, better suited for something as mindless and one-dimensional as those “Love Is” panels. (Oy, “Love Is.”) The good news – he came along too late to ruin A Charlie Brown Christmas.

 

1.  Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson): From 1985 until 1995, I was graced with the presence of Calvin and Hobbes in my newspaper and on my bookshelf. The adventures of Calvin, the incorrigible little dreamer, and Hobbes, the stuffed tiger that came to life in Calvin's imagination when no one else was around, gave me more joy than just about anything else at that time. These two best pals were so funny together, so profound and so deeply bonded, that it was a wonder Watterson could create them and still come up with so many funny ideas (such as the cardboard box Calvin called The Duplicator, in which he cloned himself) and draw such beautiful images (some of his Sunday panels, especially when Calvin is daydreaming at his school desk, were superior to anything else on the page). Watterson's integrity is such that he never wanted his name or characters to be commercialized in any way. So when you see Calvin urinating on the back window of someone's car, it's a crime.

I'd really like to know your favorite comics strips now, so feel free to tell me. Oh, and also, I promise not to make fun if one of them turns out to be the one strip not even therapy has been able to erase from my brain. One day, perhaps. In the meantime, though, sometimes, late at night, I'll still see those faces and wake up screaming.  Damn you, Nancy and Sluggo!