The funny papers: the comics sections of newspapers

Just to name a few: While some are gone (Our Boarding House, They'll Do It Every Time, Apt. 3-G, etc.), others have continued with what many would call inferior art (Mark Trail, Gil Thorp, even Prince Valiant) and/or somewhat updated protagonists (Mary Worth, Rex Morgan). Others seem to have devoted fanbases which cling to them and preserve their atmosphere, to the bewilderment of newcomers (Luann, Crankshaft, Beetle Bailey). Aside from the quality of the comics themselves, one factor is that in some print editions of newspapers they have shrunk the panels so much that often you can hardly tell what's going on or what's being said. The fact that the ones meant to be funny aren't is a mystery which has occupied the leading philosophers and scientists since Lascaux.

Part of the problem is that comics creators work for so long what they do becomes hackwork after a while--they run out of ideas. So probably the first time Jeffy in "The Family Circus" was sent on an errand and a dotted line showed how he wandered all over the neighborhood people thought it was funny, but Bil Keane kept doing it several times a year for decades; same with Cathy Guisewite's Cathy trying on a swimsuit and being horrified how bad she looked in it.

Ack!

I used to love the comic section of newspaper. Whenever I'd travel to a new town, I'd always make a point of buy that town's newspaper to see what comics it carried.

Comics are still in the newspapers. You just have to view the print edition online to see them.

However, most papers seem to carry significantly fewer comic strips that they used to. And when I do view the print edition online, there aren't that many comic strips that I read.

I stopped reading the comics when I stopped buying the print edition.

Occasionally, I'll look at GET FUZZY online mainly to see if Darby Connolly has drawn the main character, Rob Wilco, shirtless. Rob has a hairy chest you see.

"The Family Circus" was also meant to be charming and familiar. Few Sunday comics were LOL funny.

As a kid some of them seemed odd and mysterious to me: Dondi, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy with the bizarre characters.

The only ones I really liked were Dennis the Menace and Peanuts (before Snoopy took on human characteristics)

Blondie and Dagwood always had something complicated and unfunny going on.

I looked forward to our family getting the big Sunday paper and me pulling out the funny papers section.

The Far Side, Peanuts, Funky Winkerbean, and Calvin and Hobbs were my favorites.

I also would make sure and read Nancy and Family Circus just because I always thought they were so stupid and unfunny. I liked to "hate read" them. The lazy Family Circus panels showing one of the kids' long and meandering paths through the house just to retrieve something were the worst.

Who hated “Family Circus”?

“Ida know!”

“Not me!”

I also hated Cathy and For Better or For Worse.

The Dysfunctional Family Circus was hilarious!

I would complain about how insipid Nancy was, and my mom would say, "Back in my day, it was very funny."

In what era was something like THIS ever considered funny?

I thought Garfield was brilliant when it debuted in 1978. Couldn't wait to read it each day.

But somehow over the years, the humor became stale and ultra repetitive. By the time the strip was 20 years old it was forgettable.

My local paper eventually dropped Garfield entirely, which is ironic because it was readers demanding to see the Garfield strip that forced the paper to add it soon after it debuted.

The Family Circus also had a routine with dead grandparents appearing as ghosts that was just. Plain. Weird.

So many of these strips were quite good when they began. In the 2000s, many volumes of some of these strips early years were printed and the differences were amazing.

Family Circus was much funnier at the start but devolved into cutsieness after a couple years.

Blondie’s early years are a revelation. She was a ditzy blonde flapper type. Dagwood was from a wealthy family who threatened to disinherit him if he married her. Dagwood went on a hunger strike which was BIG news. They did marry, he did lose his money which is why they ended up in suburbia. And it was well written and funny.

Gasoline Alley was another weird one. And apparently it's still going. Are there still people alive who enjoy these strips?

R14 Yes, I remember those. Like the ghost of grandma in a rocking chair or Dolly sitting on grandma's ghost lap.

R12 While it's not "ROTFLMAO" funny, it's cute nonetheless. You seem like that curmudgeonly banker, only without the capacity to enjoy simple pleasures.

R18 It's not funny, either remotely or closely.

As a child I was fascinated by "They'll Do It Every Time," which was supposedly a collection of humorous observations about human behavior, but was written in an extremely dated "folksy" style that might as well have been Martian.

Oh, my sides.

When I was little my Dad always read the funnies to me. I remember Pogo and Gasoline Alley, Peanuts and Skeezix.

I loved some of the names. "Lord Plushbottom" "Moon Mullins." Even the name "Sluggo" still brings on gales of laughter. When I got older it was Doonesbury and Bloom Country and Arlo and Janis.

I can't even remember the last time I saw a comics page.

I never saw it in the paper but I liked reading Little Orphan Annie online. Swashbuckling stuff.

Many years ago I read a quote by "Zippy the Pinhead" creator Bill Griffith about Cathy Guisewite's drawing abilities that was so cunty I never forgot it:

"It looks like she drops string on the floor and Xeroxes it."

The last great era of comics was when we had “The Far Side”, “Bloom County”, and “Calvin and Hobbes” all running at the same time.

Mostly the unfunny comics like "Ziggy" and "Cathy"existed so "The Simpsons" and "SNL" could make fun of them.

[quote] While it's not "ROTFLMAO" funny, it's cute nonetheless. You seem like that curmudgeonly banker, only without the capacity to enjoy simple pleasures.

Agreed. The Nancy cartoon at R12 is very sweet.

I loved Brenda Starr when I was young. The drawings were always fun. Brenda's butch buddy, Hank, was a hoot and more manly than Basil St. John, her mysterious lover from Black Orchid Island. I remember one Sunday strip, where Brenda is asleep and dreaming of what she would look like with different hairstyles, which was apparently, a ploy for the artist/writer (Dale something?) to goof off by showing Brenda in a variety of looks. I loved it! My dad, a very smart guy, would laugh out loud at Snuffy Smith, who I didn't much like. These days, I think Pickles and Zits are pretty good and I actually like the retro Family Circus because it takes me back in time.

[quote] But I was fascinated by the really terrible ones. "The Family Circus" was the most infamous because it was so unfunny

My little brother had a routine that grew more and more slapstick every week. He would bwahaha and ask if I had read Family Circus, it's so hilarious! (Of course it wasn't.) The following week same thing, only he might fall off his chair, "no seriously, Family Circus is REALLY funny this week!!

I miss him.

I miss Winnie Winkle.

They really milked the Blondie property. Created in 1930. Still running today.

There were 28 (!) Blondie films. A long running radio program and two TV sitcoms. One in 1957 and one in 1968 (with Will Hutchins terribly miscast as Dagwood). Both only lasted a season.

The 1957 TV series.

Funky Winkerbean took a really weird turn in 1992 and went from a lighthearted, silly high school strip and jumped forward in time four years and suddenly it became dramatic and they milked this story about a woman named Lisa and her cancer for over twenty years, even after she died.

I always like For Better or For Worse but it was funnier in the earliest days when the mother would really get pissed pff and you could almost guess when she had PMS. It began to build a universe and became more of a dramedy than a punchline a day.

But I’ll always love it for the storyline where Mike’s best friend Lawrence came out. And they used a character who had been around since he’d been a child and wasn’t just brought in for the story.

[italic]Ballard Street[/italic] was one I consistently enjoyed (but many couldn't tune in to its vibe).

R28 I really got into BRENDA STARR circa 1993 when I was in middle school and the storyline revolved around a young pampered movie star diva who ended up being Brenda's long lost daughter or something.

I also loved CALVIN & HOBBES and THE FAR SIDE and was saddened when they both suddenly ended in 1995, which coincidentally was also the year that Farley the sheepdog from FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE died of a heart attack after saving the youngest girl, April. Talk about a bummer of a year!

Despite its Bob Mackie wardrobe, Brenda Starr was not well served on the big screen.

Growing up I loved Peanuts, and later, Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side. Now, I’ll only check Arlo and Janis when I read the paper… it’s not hilarious but it can be amusing.

R33, that coming-out story was so well done, especially for its time and for being a comic strip.

I found For Better or Worse so damn sanctimonious.

"Rhymes With Orange" is often very funny & I think it's drawn by 2 lesbians.

DOROTHY: "Apartment 3-G"? Oh, I haven't read that in YEARS.

BLANCHE: Well, let me catch you up. It's later that same day . . .

No one else read Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury? For several decades it was a seven day a week strip, it's now Sunday only. In the early years, the strip was often tres controversial, venturing into politics, Zonker smoking dope, Walden University, much much more. I read it religiously, have three collections of the strip sitting on a shelf.

R40 I forgot about that one. It had tinges of The Far Side, but it was less edgy.

What I enjoyed about FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE was that the characters aged in real time.

You saw the two older kids age from preschool/kindergarten to college/workforce.

You saw the youngest being born and grow until middle school.

Farley went from being a puppy to a mature dog.

You experienced one of the beloved grandparents' death.

And so on.

I haven’t thought of so many of these in decades. There was one, I think it might have been one panel, about a husband and wife who absolutely loathed each other. I can’t think of the name. Love Is with the little naked couple was so weird to me, why were they naked? There was a cottage industry of figurines and other crap that must be filling thrift stores and landfills everywhere.

The creator of Funky Winkerbean was from our town, and he modeled a character on our grade school science teacher. He drew him to look just like him.

R45, most likely you are thinking about “The Lockhorns”.

Some of these legacy strips are so awful and boring that the only reason they still exist is that they are part of a package deal so if you want to run one strip, you have to buy all the others.

R45, the creator of Funky Winkerbean must be a huge asshole in real life. He exploited women suffering & dying of breast cancer in hopes of winning a Pulitzer Prize, then did the same thing several years later with retired football players committing suicide as a result of CTE. Good for the Pulitzer committee denying him a reward for using people so badly. I'm glad his stupid strip was finally pulled & he was forced to retire (except for Crankshaft, which is also dumb but at least not exploitive).

I love Doonesbury, The Far Side, and Calvin and Hobbes.

I've never liked Peanuts or found it appealing.

Homer Simpson, to a feuding Kirk and LouAnn van Houten:

"You know what you two need? A little comic strip called 'Love Is.' It's about two naked eight-year-olds who are married..."

I used to love the comics section, mostly on Sunday when it was in color.

My family called the section “the funnies” - leaving me with the false promise that all the strips were all comedic.

Then I’d get to Mary Worth and read it over and over in attempts to uncover the joke. I’d bring it to my mom, who waved me off with “that one is really for grown-ups,” which I took as a challenge, as I was certain I could appreciate the adult humor, leaving me to pore over it even more studiously.

When I realized it was a serial, I was even more perplexed, as i found it simply awful.

I still recall the Simpsons episode when the Comic Book Guy talks up a mint Mary Worth “in which she advises a friend to commit suicide.”

I loved Peanuts. I was the class artist as a kid and would draw the characters for everyone. Charles Schultz was a genius.

I liked when Chris Griffin put Nary Wirth’s face on Silly Putty and stretched it, saying, “Look what I can do to Mary Worth’s smug sense of satisfaction “.

Im revising about Funky Winkerbean. The cartoonist I was thinking of did a strip in collaboration with Tom Batiuk called John Darling, about a hapless TV reporter, that ran in the 80s. Batiuk wrote, and Armstrong drew.

I liked early Peanuts when they had the huge heads. The first strip where the boy says he hates Charlie Brown is hilarious.

I stopped reading it long before it ended but many people say the strip was energized its last few years with Rerun taking center stage more and more.

Apartment 3G had a mercy killing. The artist was ancient and he could barely draw any longer and the things that the characters were talking about were not even depicted. Margo apparently awakened from a coma several times.

I liked PEANUTS but not the title.

I never understood why it wasn't called SNOOPY or CHARLIE BROWN like the TV specials.

Schulz hated the title too. It was not his decision.

As an obsessed fan I stopped reading Peanuts when it jumped the shark by giving Snoopy a pool table in his doghouse. Snoopy's comings and goings were a mystery reflecting how we won't ever know and can only imagine what animals are thinking about and doing, so turning it into a cheap laugh was disappointing.

I loved how the strip only showed the legs of adults and they were never portrayed as serious authorities, just blah blah blah, incomprehensible noise and shoes.

It’s threads like this that make DL worthwhile.

R26, your link took me through Andy Samberg as Cathy and delivered me to an 18-minute reel of the Best of Jiminy Glick. God, I needed that. Thank you.

I wonder if Apartment 3G was a desirable one. It was probably on the boring East Side.

There should have been a murder mystery climax where the roommates were all trying to kill each other because the place was under rent control.

Anyone remember "The Dinette Set"? It was a single-panel comic about flyover fraudom.

This is the subtle humor that somehow Schultz knew kids would understand.

I am a big fan of the comic strips. Everyday I read 'Pearls Before Swine' and 'Breaking Cat News'.

Gasoline Alley had stunning artwork in the 1930s and 40s.

My all-time favourite is Krazy Kat. A gender fluid Kat who mistakes the bricks a mouse beams at his/her head for an expression of love.

I admit it—I loved Dondi when I was a kid. I also had to read Winnie Winlle every day, but I found Brenda Starr too much of a sexpot, though like many on this thread found Basil St. John stirred deep, at the time unnameable feelings.

The Chicago Tribune turned me into a homo!

Loved The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. Brenda Starr on Sundays was fun too.

I grew up with the Washington Post, which had comics daily and a great color comics section on Sundays. When I moved to NYC 20 years ago, I switched to NY Times, which doesn’t have any comics. I miss them

Dondi was made into a film in 1961 with David Janssen, Arnold Stang, Gale Gordon! The actor who played Dondi is still with us. He apparently didn't have much of an acting career.

This is Dondi's lovely theme song.

Who else remembers using Silly Puty to take an imprint of the color comics pages?

Rex Morgan's medical career ended when they found out he did gay porn.

Reading the comics on Comics Kingdom is fun because the comments section is way better than strips themselves. I swear I see some DLers there.

Major Hoople was a scream!

When I was a kid and into my teens in the 70s and 80s, I dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. I won a cartoon contest in a local paper, and about a year later I won another one in a much larger metropolitan newspaper. Around that time I wrote to Charles M. Schulz with a list of silly questions. He was incredibly kind and encouraging. He sent me a handwritten letter, included a small drawing, and even gave me a list of syndicates I could send my portfolio to. I believe my step mother threw everything out at some point... but that's another story. haha

I never ended up pursuing it, and I don’t have any regrets, but I’ve always held Schulz in the highest regard. A few years ago I finally made a trip to the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa and spent hours exploring. I even went ice skating at the rink and had a meal in the little café where Schulz used to have breakfast every morning. If you've never been and are in the area - it's worth a visit.

R21 - not much different from now.

My god...Andy Capp is still going? How many thousands of times can you milk the same unfunny joke?

Gordo's daily strip most of the time was a continuation of a long story. For the Sunday version "Gus" Arriola would go on a riff. That could be anything from character discussing dietary fiber to something like animal character Barishnifrog doing a dance.

There was another strip where the spouses hated each other called The Better Half.

Blondie has been modernized to suit the current day. Dennis the Menace is drawn by different people and doesn't look the same.

Ditto for "Dondi," R65.

Li'l Abner

Terry & The Pirates

Dick Tracy

Smilin' Jack

Beetle Bailey

Broom-Hilda

Mother Goose & Grimm

Akbar and Jeff

Where the HELL is ElderLez?

Have you seen Mary Worth lately? She used to look like a typical old lady/grandma and now she looks like an executive VP.

I loved The Girls in Apt 3G in high school…the Professor…a writer who carried a teddy bear? It all seemed very glamorous. A bunch of the strips are online in an archive.

The Jackson Twins was in the daily paper but not the (different) Sunday one. Every so often their hairstyle would get updated.

There was a paperback kicking around the house which was a compilation of one-panel cartons called Bobby Soxer. Drawn in the 50s, it featured Emmy Lou, a scraggly pony-tailed teen whose life revolved around babysitting, semi-formal dances, corsages, and monosyllabic boyfriends. I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

No one has mentioned Hagar the Horrible. I like that one which was man vs/ woman theme as I recall.

I'm also seriously SHOCKED to find Family Circle in such low regard. That was the first comic I could read as a little kid. I remember it often didn't have words or very few, so learning to read it was the first one I looked at, and I always had a good feeling toward it.

Most of it is unfunny, old-fashioned crap. I don't care about any of it.

I recall reading the comics section of the newspaper as being one of the highlights of the weekend because the comics section was in color, not the small black & white section that ran during the week. Even then, a lot of them read like some kind of tired dad joke kind of stuff.

I loved “the funnies” on Sundays when I was a kid. I got a book for Christmas one year that was a history of comic strips and I devoured it. I would check out all the comic strip collections they had at my local library. I loved trying to draw the characters. I was really into Garfield as a tween then graduated to Bloom County (I was obsessed) ,but sort of lost interest in strips other than reading Calvin and Hobbes sometimes. I haven’t looked at comics in years, but I was really into Get Fuzzy for a couple of years.

I hated the serials like Mary Worth or Apartment 3G. I think I recall another one that was in our paper that my mom followed. I think I should try to read some vintage Doonesbury. It was over my head when I was a kid.

I worked at newspapers for years and the one thing that will whip readers into a frenzy is changing the comics. My first employer got death threats for dropping Mary Worth.

Vint and Skeeter are having breakfast and reading the morning paper. Vint has the funnies first because he can't start his day without reading "Little Lulu." At some point, Vint becomes upset and sad as he's reading, Skeeter says: "What is it honey, the ozone layer, world hunger?" Vint: "Noooo, Mr. Dithers fired Dagwood again."

There was a comic strip that ran in our paper for about five years in the 80s. It was called “Elwood” and was about a high schooler and his band. It was funny but I have never seen it mentioned anywhere else.

Those late 19th/ early 20th century strips were gorgeously rendered. The Yellow Kid, Gasoline Alley, Little Nemo…

Too bad newsprint is so fragile and many are probably long gone.

I was born in 1947. Weekends, my parents liked to sleep in -- I woke up early, so they let me go downstairs & turn on the radio if I kept the volume low. Sunday mornings, a guy would read the comics to his audience (me & who else?). I remember him reading "The Lone Ranger" -- "Hi Ho Silver, Awaaaaaay!" We didn't get a TV until I was 5 & that became more exciting than listening to the comics read on the radio.

For r86:

I guess it was an attempt to bring teenagers back to comics in the mid-eighties.

I was that market and I might have followed it, but nmby that time, I’d long quit looking at the comics.

We read the New York Times. No comics.

On Sundays, we used to get The New York Times and The Daily News. I always went for the funnies first thing. Loved the usual -- Peanuts, Hagar, Beetle Bailey. Then started to read Brenda Starr and Winnie Winkle. Of course, had to Doonesbury later. When I lived in DC, the Wapo had Prince Valiant, Mark Trail, Dick Tracy, and Mary Worth.

Only the NYT now, but I subscribe to comics kingdom.com, where I read all (except for the defunct Brenda and Winnie), plus The Phantom and classic comics like Mandrake the Magician and a few others.

Terry and the Pilots (?) was a strip before my time, but have seen some of it, and I would do Terry in no time.

'Terry and the Pirates' r91. It was my dad's favourite when he was a kid in the 1930s and 40s.

"We read the New York Times. No comics."

It may not have had comics, but the NYT publishing shit like "we travel to a greasy spoon diner in Bumfucke, Ohio and speak to all the toothless meth addicts there to get the real pulse of America" is pretty damn funny.

That’s not the one, R89.

I found a reference to it.

Do they still have comics in newspaper?

Do they still have papers?

Back when blogs were the big thing I used to read one called The Comics Curmudgeon. Each day he'd pull a selection of strips from the newspaper websites and make fun of them. He made the soap opera strips fun with running gags about the characters and story lines. B.C. and The Wizard of Id were regularly skewered for their anachronistic Christian messages. He had a special disdain for the self-righteous Patterson family from For Better or Worse. And I still can't read a Nancy strip to this day without thinking of his insistence that artist Ernie Bushmiller created them with a collection of rubber stamps.

I can't defend the staleness of the zombie evergreen strips, but I think the attempts to modernize them are even worse. The updated Nancy strip can be kind of cute, but the millennial version of Popeye is downright creepy.

They printed the first volumes of “Blondie” that was supposed to reprint everything g but it stopped after the second volume which is too bad as the next volume would have shown the introduction of the neighbors and Dagwood’s job.

Was “Pogo” really as good as they say?

HOMER SIMPSON: (reading the comics, giggling.) "Oh, Andy Capp! You wife-beating drunk!"

In the 70s, I read Dick Tracy (the NY Daily News ran the strip) and my mom found a hard cover collection of "The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy" from the the 30s and 40s, which was a Xmas or birthday gift. I devoured the book. I still have it on a shelf. What characters, what names... Breathless Mahoney, 88 Keyes, Flat Top, Prune Face and more. Many of them were then in that truly crappy Dick Tracy movie with Warren Beatty.

I mean, Madonna as Breathless? Many Patinkin as 88 Keyes? Breathless as a night club singer? God, it was so b-a-d.

"Look at the new Dick Tracy character. Accordion Head."

If you want read a comic that makes you just shake your head check out Six Chix, especially Tuesday Chick, Bianca Xunise.

I’m too young for the Doonesbury heyday but did live Bloom County—so smart and funny

Sometimes the comics would be the right hand page and on the left would be Uncle Al Nugent's FUNLAND, with puzzles and word games.

I liked the Lockhorns, had a crush on Prince Valiant, and always read Hagar the Horrible because my dad was Danish. When my mom died and was cleaning out her things, I found a collection of Bloom County, Mother Goose and Grimm and Calvin and Hobbes, neatly cut out in stacks and rubber-banded.

Remember the endless teasing of Winnie Winkle’s revolutionary dress design? They milked it for weeks. This babygay was thrilled.

Mom read "The Teenie Weenies" to her three little boys every Sunday morning. I was maybe 2 or 3 so that is about 80 years ago. Remember it like it was yesterday.

My grandma used to sometimes wrap our birthday presents with the color Sunday funny pages. I don't know if that was some remnant of her childhood in the Depression, but I always thought it was fun. This was in the 80s-90s, but I imagine she had done it for decades.

I remember my grandmother complaining about Doonesbury back in the 80s because "it just wasn't funny" and he didn't know how to draw females - all the characters look like men! I seem to recall a lot of newspapers moving it to the politics/opinion page from the comics section because some readers were offended by the liberal political bent.

I do really miss the comics pages. I miss reading a newspaper front to back, which I did almost every day from the age of 5 until I was about 45 or so.

I always liked Mr. Boffo but it seems like it's not very well known

[quote] I seem to recall a lot of newspapers moving it to the politics/opinion page from the comics section because some readers were offended by the liberal political bent.

In the 80s the Reagan supporters became incensed at the sheer gall of Doonesbury for being critical of America and some newspapers moved it to the Editorial section.

The editorial page is where I used to read Doonesbury in the Washington Post. My favorite Doonesbury episode stars Andy and Joanie. Joanie brings Andy the newly released CD of Pet Sounds. First we see they're listening to "God Only Knows," and in the penultimate strip, we see Andy has died as "Wouldn't It Be Nice" plays.

Yes, this was my favorite comic strip of all time. I also enjoyed Nancy, Calvin & Hobbes, Henry, They'll Do It Every Time, Grandma, and a bunch of others in my childhood.

R113, I must have stopped reading Doonesbury by '89 when Andy was sick with AIDS. I should look for those strips, sounds like Trudeau handled the storyline well.

I do remember meeting Joanie in the strip... she had runaway from her husband and daughter (isn't the daughter Mike Doonesbury's first wife?).

Deep-dive baby, deep-dive

[quote]I never ended up pursuing it, and I don’t have any regrets, but I’ve always held Schulz in the highest regard. A few years ago I finally made a trip to the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa and spent hours exploring. I even went ice skating at the rink and had a meal in the little café where Schulz used to have breakfast every morning. If you've never been and are in the area - it's worth a visit.

The Santa Rosa airport is also named after Schulz.

Even as a child, I always loved "Henry."

He seemed like such a cute, nice boy. Not a whole lot to say for himself, though.

[quote]Mom read "The Teenie Weenies" to her three little boys every Sunday morning.

Triggered.

I heard Beetle Bailey was involved in the Tailhook scandal.

Mutts was great and the cartoonist knew when to call it quits, just like the guy who wrote The Far Side. Both of those strips are up there with Peanuts as classics to me.

R120, the Mutts comuc strip by Patrick McDonnell is still published 7 days a week.

I love the shlurring the petsh shlip into when when shpeaking in "Muttsh."

“Cul de Sac” was a good recent one but cut short by the artist’s death.

“Lio” is another great recent classic.

[quote]I heard Beetle Bailey was involved in the Tailhook scandal.

Fun fact, Beetle Bailey's sister is Lois, of 'Hi and Lois'.

I loved the Dysfunctional Family Circus panels that floated around for a while.

R126, there’s one of Billy and Jeffy leaning against a tree and Billy is saying, “Well, it ain’t gonna suck itself.”

I'm not sure if he was published in newspapers, but in college we would read the collected books of B. Kliban. I still remember laughing at "The callous sophisticates laughed at Judy's tiny head."

My sister had those. Lots of cats.

I had Kliban books, cat mugs, a cat apron. My cat was frequently mistaken for a meatloaf.

I had Kliban cat bedsheets & pillowcases. He was a hell of an artist.

I have a set of Kliban books but didn't know about the other merchandise.