Worst Insult Ever Edition (May 8)

Worst:
Pathetic Meow Sack? Not a very compelling insult.

Runners-up: Baldo, Blondie, Curtis, Family Circus, Hagar the Horrible, Non Sequiter, Pooch Cafe, Speed Bump

Best:
Lots of good stuff in this one. Uncool Canadians, Marco Polo, coolishness. Darby Conley just blows away the competition on his good days. Kudos for the threepeat too.

Runners-up: Agnes, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, Lio, Pearls Before Swine, Rhymes with Orange, Watch Your Head

Lazy Edition (Apr. 21)

Worst:
Jim Davis' writers obviously ran out of ideas. It's not cool when you reference your own strip in a joke.

Runners-up: Argyle Sweater, Baby Blues, Blondie, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, Dennis the Menace, Family Circus, Frank and Ernest, Mother Goose and Grimm, Non Sequiter, Pickles, Red and Rover, Rhymes with Orange, Sally Forth, Speed Bump

Best:
Not a really strong day. Imagining the sound effects was kind of fun.

Runners-up: Pearls Before Swine, Single and Looking

The World Turned Upside Down Edition (Mar. 19)

Worst:
Problem One: basketballs are really hard to pop, and probably could not be popped by a cat's claws. Problem Two: Cat claws are retractable and therefore would be retracted if a cat did play basketball.

Runners-up: Blondie, Brevity, Curtis, Family Circus, Hagar the Horrible, Mother Goose and Grimm, Piranha Club, Rhymes with Orange

Best:
I love Pig.

Runners-up: Agnes, Doonesbury, Get Fuzzy, Lio, Mutts, Speed Bump

Free Food Edition (Mar. 11)

Worst:
This is just a bad visual joke.

Runners-up: Baldo, Close to Home, Hagar the Horrible, Mother Goose and Grimm

Best:
Lio has all the coolest toys.

Runners-up: Baby Blues, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, Pooch Cafe, Speed Bump, Zits

Terrible Pacing Edition (Mar. 9)

Worst:
Problem One: It takes Garfield five panels to eat an apple. This strip could have been condensed down to three panels. It's an incredibly boring strip. Problem Two: What is up with the worms? Garfield features spiders and mice, but suddenly we have worms on the counter? Problem Three: The joke makes no sense and is not funny.

Runners-up: Dilbert, Family Circus

Best:
Cul de Sac is one of my favorite strips. Alice is perfect as a four year old. She shows a great amount of insight combined with utter cluelessness. The strip mines her absurd take on the world for great effect.

Runners-up: Baldo, Big Nate, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, Prickly City, Sally Forth, Watch Your Head, Zits

Metanote: Last Sunday marks the end of when I had chosen Best and Worst for each day and simply not posted them. Now I need to go back to the last week of papers and choose the winners. So that's all for tonight. I'll try to finish up tomorrow, but I need to be not lazy.

Comics of the Day

Worst: Probes, in this context, are not something I want to think about. Also, when you need to explain what is going on in the first panel, you're doing something wrong.

Runners-up: Blondie, Close to Home, Frank and Ernest, Hagar the Horrible, Mother Goose and Grimm, Pooch Cafe, Prickly City, Speed Bump

Best:

The Garfield strip needs to compensate for poor drawing with an awkward exposition in the first panel. Lio, of course, suffers no such problem. Most comic strip artists could learn from Mark Tatulli's ability to express things without words.

Runners-up: Agnes, Beetle Bailey, Candorville, Frazz, Non Sequiter (I like this strip based on the conflicts inherent in the characters' personalities. When it does not feature that, it often falls flat.), Pearls Before Swine

Comics of the Day

Best: Any allusion to Jon having sex is best avoided.

Runners-up: Blondie, Family Circus, Mother Goose and Grimm, Pooch Cafe, Prickly City, Red and Rover, Rhymes with Orange

Best:

Andy is one of my favorite incidental characters; he's just so cute and pathetic.

Runners-up: Agnes, Dilbert, Lio, Piranha Club, Sally Forth

Comics of the Day

Worst:
Making fun of people's names is so first grade.

Runners-up: For Better or For Worse, Family Circus

Best:Stephan Pastis cracked me up today. I'm concerned that the run-away winner of best was an ironic, cynical take on a strip aimed at children.

Runner-up: Get Fuzzy, Agnes, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, Cul de Sac, Frazz, Lio, Mutts, Opus, Prickly City

Bonus Visual Runners-up:
I had a hard time choosing today's worst strip. Garfield had an absolutely atrocious joke. For Better or For Worse had verbal child abuse. Family Circus had disgusting treacle beyond even its usual level of disgusting treacle. All three were terrible, terrible strips, so I wanted to highlight them so they could receive their share of ignominy.

Comics of the Day

Worst: Barely from outer space? Pretty weak punchline in my opinion. Garfield's random change of expression seems out of place too. Shouldn't he be cynical in the last panel instead of shocked? I feel like it would make more sense that way.

Runners-up: Brevity (What does the Energizer Bunny have to do with the Rolling Stones?), Dilbert (Dilbert used to be clever, now it always follows the same set-up: statement, counter-statement, insult), Hagar the Horrible, Mother Goose and Grimm (how many times can you punish a strip for using the same dumb joke? As many times as they use it.), Mutts, Red and Rover, Rhymes with Orange

Best: Lots to love in this one. Poncho's end around attack in panel one. Chazz's misguided decision to take his dog's side instead of his wife's. Carmen's irrational response. His appeal to Poncho for help, and Poncho's completely backwards way of going about it. I enjoyed pretty much everything about this strip. Definitely one of the best to come along in a while.

Runners-up: Agnes, Beetle Bailey, Dennis the Menace, Doonesbury, For Better or For Worse (FBOFW is usually very platitudinous, but sometimes it reaches the level of profound), Get Fuzzy (would of won many days, but Paul Gilligan hit a home run), Pearls Before Swine

Worst:

The joke is lame; Garfield is a cat, of course he takes Jon's stuff. But what really sets this apart is the artwork, or lack thereof. Jim Davis (or his lackeys) have done is move Garfield's arms. There is no background, no change of expression, no effort at all to create any sort of interesting visual.

Runners up: Non-Sequiter, Piranha Club, On the Fast Track, Curtis, Hagar the Horrible

Best:


A surprise win today. It's nice to see one of the Foobs showing some sort of spirit. And April makes a good point about the composition of the crowd, and the self-important bubble the Mike and the other Pattersons live in.

Runners-up: Pooch Cafe (the relationship between Chazz and Carmen is really sweet), Agnes (I like the thought of Communists on the mean streets)