-
RSS
The Sunday mornings of my childhood were regularly spent sprawled across the sun-draped carpet of our living room, scanning through the six pages of comics that came with the local newspaper. The first strip on the front page of the Funnies was Charles M. Schulz’s undisputed classic, Peanuts, chronicling the adventures and insecurities of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the gang. I never considered it a very funny Funny, but it was charmingly drawn and thoughtfully written.
On January 1, 1980 the uproariously brilliant Gary Larson brought The Far Side to the world, and my love of absurdist humour was born.
Five years later, Bill Watterson combined the charm of Peanuts and the hilarity of The Far Side to create what I consider to be the greatest comic strip of all time: Calvin & Hobbes.
When I started attending university (where every professor’s door is scotch-taped over with choice selections from The Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes), I naturally began reading the comics featured in the campus newspaper.
By this time, in the early ’90s, Larson’s single panel style had been widely usurped by pretenders to the comic throne, so I was not surprised to see several such examples within. One comic, in particular, was so poorly drawn and so not funny, that I incorrectly assumed it was penned by one of my fellow students. As it began to spread in national syndication, I realized that Steve Moore’s In the Bleachers was actually an indicator of the sad state of the contemporary comic strip.
(I did not maliciously seek out an especially unfunny example of Moore’s work to buttress my argument, by the way. This is today’s installment.)
Though I find the artwork amateurish, and the writing’s never elicited even a smile from me, In the Bleachers has inspired me. After all, I can’t draw, and I’m very often not funny, so what’s to stop me from having my own comic? Thus premieres tomorrow Yorkies, bereft, like In the Bleachers before it, of any redeeming artistic or amusing qualities. I hope you won’t enjoy it with me for many years to come!
-
Support Barack Obama
