I'm really easy to please when it comes to comic strips. I will read just about any of them, and enjoy maybe 80-90% on average. On the other hand, I rarely laugh aloud at any comic strips in the newspaper, and there are very few that tickle me intellectually. After my recent blog about certain comic strips' popularity in Texas, I realized that I haven't really paid a lot of attention to strips in a long time. So I thought I'd link to some of my favorites, and explain why I like them.
First off, I managed, with some difficulty, to set up an interesting page using Houston Chronicle's custom comics feature. I think to use my link, you might have to register, and you will definitely want an extremely speedy internet connection. But this is a page of all their on-line comic strips. I learned from looking at the whole range available there that there were quite a few comic strips I have never seen in Seattle, and a couple of those quickly became favorites.
The best one I found was Heart of the City. Heart lives in Philadelphia with her single Mom and her babysitter Mrs. Angelini. Her best friend is Kat, but Dean, an utter "Sweek" (Star Wars Geek), also competes for her affection. The adventures of Heart are interesting, touching, and very often have references to classic works. The one that really caught me was a fantastic Sunday strip that had artwork based on the Denslow Oz illustrations. It was that strip, in fact, that made me get the book for my hubby-Eric (who is, as you no doubt know, a big Wizard of Oz fan).
I don't know what it is about Between Friends that I indentify with, but there's definitely something there. It's strange, I don't fit any of the characters, but I often hear myself thinking, "That's right!" as I read the strip. This strip and Heart of the City are the only two I've ever written fan letters to.
Rose is Rose is actually about Rose, the Mom in the strip, although Pasquale, his guardian angel, the family cat Peekaboo, and Jimbo the Dad all make major appearances. I indentify with Rose in many ways. She's timid, but has a wild side. And Pasquale's frequent excursions into dreamland via his dreamship also make me quite happy, especially when there's a theme of LEGO or jigsaw puzzles.
Any fan of comics must know about FoxTrot, so there isn't a lot to go into on this one. It's nicely topical to the fan world and yet covers the main family archetypes. And I like the little background in-jokes that often pop-up. Leapy the Lemming. Heh.
I mentioned that Get Fuzzy can be difficult to get into. I originally didn't like the art at all, but once I got used to it I found I enjoyed the characters enough that it didn't matter. Bucky is the truly nasty cat, Satchell the innocent dog, and Rob is the hapless human. And they are strangely compelling when thrown together.
The Seattle Times picked up Frazz and it instantly became a hit here. Frazz is a young school janitor who's in love with a first-grade teacher. He also happens to be one of the best teachers in the school, which is important because some of the students need challenging. I've known a great many school janitors, and lots of them were educators in their own way. There was even a guy in my dorm at college who was taking a massive pay cut: he was training to be a teacher because he loved kids so much from being around them as a janitor.
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