Bastardization Edition (May 4)

Worst:
One of the problems with Hagar the Horrible, and there are many, is the willingness of Chris Browne to jettison the historical context to make bad jokes. I Got Mine is a 21st century catchphrase which seems jarringly out of place here. What's the point of a Viking strip if the joke would have worked just as poorly in Blondie or Rhymes with Orange or Barney Google and Snuffy Smith?

Runners-up: Argyle Sweater, Baldo, Blondie, Dennis the Menace, Garfield, Opus

Best:
The pidgin English bit for the crocs can get a bit tiresome sometimes, but I think it worked well for their bastardization of things Charlie Brown might say. Me Kick Football is a great line in this context.

Runners-up: Agnes, Candorville, Cul de Sac, Get Fuzzy, Watch Your Head

And You Thought Pearls Before Swine had Dark Humor Edition (Apr. 19)

Worst:
So we have a nagging mother-in-law who attacks through he daughter, a wife who takes her mother's criticism and uses it as a reason to nag her husband, an alcoholic husband who would rather drink than be with his family, and a relationship with no healthy, viable communication. What fun.

Runners-up: Baldo, Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Close to Home, Daddy's Home, Dennis the Menace, Family Circus, For Better or For Worse, Frank and Ernest, Garfield, Mother Goose and Grimm, Prickly City, Red and Rover, Rhymes with Orange, Speed Bump

Best:
Agnes' bizarreness was enough to win on a fairly weak day.

Runners-up: Lio, Mutts, Pooch Cafe, Single and Looking

Living in the Future Edition (Apr. 13)

Worst:
Here we have a strip ostensibly set around the year 1000 AD portraying stereotypes of gender relations from Eisenhower's America. It's rather astonishing how many comic strips cannot move past the 1950's in various ways, a list that includes Dennis the Menace, Blondie, Hagar the Horrible and the Family Circus. How long does it take an editor to realize that these strips are completely irrelevant.

Runners-up: Baldo, Beetle Bailey, Garfield, Zits

Best:
What appealed to me the most about this strip was the bottom line montage of the shot settling onto the back of the rim. I just liked the use of small panels within the larger panel. It's nice to see cartoonists move outside the box a little bit.

Runners-up: Candorville, Cul de Sac, Family Circus, Get Fuzzy, Mutts, Sherman's Lagoon

What the Heck is That Edition (Mar. 29)

Worst:
I am really starting to loathe Hagar the Horrible. It presents a completely bleak picture of marriage, it bends the setting and characters for bad jokes. The first problem with this strip is Helga's unhealthy approach to marital problems. Josh Fruhlinger, of the Comics Curmudgeon, had a great take on this strip. He points out the second problem, which is the poor art. Hagar is absolutely weird looking.

Runners-up: Baldo, Close to Home, Frank and Ernest, Mother Goose and Grimm, Red and Rover, Rhymes with Orange, Speed Bump

Best:
I loved this strip.

Runners-up: Agnes, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, Frazz, Get Fuzzy, Lio, Pearls Before Swine, Sherman's Lagoon, Zits

Ripping Off a Bad Comic Strip Edition (Mar. 22)

Worst:
This is basically a Marmaduke strip. If you are going to rip off an idea from a strip, why the heck would you choose Marmaduke?

Runners-up: Beetle Bailey, Dennis the Menace, Family Circus, For Better or For Worse, Frank and Ernest, Garfield, Mother Goose and Grimm, Piranha Club, Red and Rover

Best:
So true.

Runners-up: Doonesbury, Lio, Non Sequiter, Pearls Before Swine, Pooch Cafe, Sally Forth

Passive Aggressive Edition (Mar. 15)

Worst:
The comics have an interesting take on families. Apparently, most comic strip artists think that unhealthy marriages and poor parenting are funny. Helga uses a passive-aggressive approach to solving her problem. Her needs are not getting met so she threatens to withhold something that Hagar wants. This interaction has descended into a contest to see if Helga can control Hagar. In a healthy relationship, the two partners would be able to discuss their needs maturely and come to some sort of compromise. All this would piss me off less if the joke was funny.

Runners-up: Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Curtis, Family Circus, Garfield, Mother Goose and Grimm, Red and Rover, Rhymes with Orange, Speed Bump

Best:Pierce often gets on my nerves. He is supposed to represent wild teenagers and is just a stereotype without much depth. This time, he was funny though.

Runner-up: Frazz

Doh! Edition (Mar. 14)

Bad pacing, worse message.

Runners-up: Big Nate, Brevity, Curtis, Dennis the Menace, Family Circus, Mother Goose and Grimm, Red and Rover, Rhymes with Orange

Best:
Doonesbury has an off kilter take on family life in this strip. Doonesbury has great characters.

Runners-up: Dilbert, Pickles, Pooch Cafe, Watch Your Head

More or Less Awkward Edition (Mar. 7)

Best:
I don't read to the comics to think about sex, that's what the rest of the internet is for. Any joke based around a character having sex, even a dog, has little margin for error.

Runners-up: Beetle Bailey, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, Curtis, Family Circus, Mother Goose and Grimm, Tank McNamara

Best:
Frazz goes back to back. The image of a train driving into Lake Michigan entertained me. It's a nice touch that this would happen if the train went any direction from Chicago that approximated East.

Runners-up: Agnes, Big Nate, Candorville, Dilbert, Pearls Before Swine, Pooch Cafe

Comics of the Day

Worst: Wins a close race over Rhymes with Orange (terrible pun) and Family Circus (just plain annoying). I did not like the static nature of this strip, with three panels of almost the same art in a row. The joke doesn't seem to make sense either. While a castle certainly has a higher reward, it is also a lot more difficult to sack. I would imagine the Vikings would at least pay some attention to an easy target, in case there were some hot peasant women or cheap peasant beer around.

Runners-up: Baldo, Family Circus, Garfield, Prickly City, Red and Rover, Rhymes with Orange, Tank McNamara, Zits

Best:

About the only thing that can save a pun is if it is really clever and contains cultural references. Jef Mallet's two part pun in Frazz qualifies.

Runners-up: Agnes, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, Candorville, Cul de Sac, Doonesbury, Foxtrot, Get Fuzzy, Opus, Pearls Before Swine, Pickles, Watch Your Head

Comics of the Day

Worst: I chose this as the worst strip for Saturday because it relies on negative stereotypes, which is problematic on two levels. First, stereotypes are rarely good comedic fodder in a comic strip because they show up often. Once you've read several hundred strips about women nagging or men being bad cooks or doctors constantly playing golf, they start to lose all of their humor. Second, stereotypes are often very harmful. Not all women are nags, and to propagate this myth in a strip does a disservice to women.

Runners-up: Close to Home, Family Circus, Garfield, Pickles, Rhymes with Orange

Best: I am a sucker for clever word play. The slope between clever and the Family Circus is a slippery one though.

Runners-up: Baldo, Blondie (loses points for the pop culture reference, but I like punch lines that leave you hanging. Just what was Dagwood's tragically underinspired plan?), Curtis (bonus points for good parenting, which is rare in the comics), Dilbert (the Elbonians are among the few characters with any interesting features left in this strip), For Better or For Worse (anything that makes fun of the baby boomers is okay by me), Frazz, Lio (almost unseated PBS today, my stuffed animals would get jealous of each other if I paid too much attention to a particular one, so I can kind of empathize), Pooch Cafe (we've all known, and probably been part of, groups whose collective intelligence goes down when they get together), Speed Bump (I'm kind of a prude, so holding hands with a girl is still a pretty big deal to me), Zits (I think the Jeremy romance story is kind of sweet (I don't know how I feel about agreeing with Connie though). I think Viral has added a lot to the strip. It's easy for an artist to add a new character in an attempt to bring some life to a struggling strip, but Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman have done a good job creating a new, interesting character without overwhelming the other characters or seeming desperate to change something for change's sake)

Comics of the Day

Worst: All the white space makes this very unappealing visually. Couldn't they have drawn some trees or bushes or something to break it up? And the joke isn't good either.

Runners-up: For Better or For Worse, Mother Goose and Grimm, Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!, Garfield

Best: This might be the upset of the year. I normally hate Brevity (and all the one panel comics for that matter). This one made me smile though. It's cute, it's a little funny, and it makes sense, any one of those would make this better than normal for Guy & Rodd, but all three make it a winner.

Runners-up: Get Fuzzy, Prickly City, Candorville, Pooch Cafe, Baby Blues

Comics of the Day, Thursday

Worst: The set-up for this joke is terrible. I can't imagine anyone ever speaking the dialogue Hagar speaks in the first panel. And no one would ever tell their wife that they were flirting with a cute girl, except in some sort of anxious confession. I guess it fits because Hagar is supposed to be rude, but really, this joke fails on a lot of levels.

Runners-up: Close to Home, Red and Rover, Prickly City (Republicans are pure and virtuous, and Democrats are evil, I get it already), Mother Goose and Grimm (another bad joke with an awkward set-up)

Best: First, I enjoy the thought of a bewildered flamingo conservancy, so the baseline of humor in this strip is high. I like that Agnes fraternizes with some random drunk guy. I like Agnes' complete lack of a clue. I like Trout's complete lack of surprise at Agnes' lack of a clue.

Runner-up: Baby Blues

Comics of the Day Catch-up Post

So between Christmas decorating and work, I'm a little behind on my comics of the day. I'm going to try to catch up today.

Worst:

As usual, a joke about technology falls flat. What does Tigger have to do with text messaging? What does TTFN stand for (I'm only 27, and I don't know)?

Runners-up: Frank and Ernest, Blondie (I still don't understand the joke), Baldo, Brevity, Red and Rover

Bonus Visual Runner-up:

Hagar the Horrible might be consistently the worst strip in the Post. It's become one of those strips that uses a one off joke each day. The characters have no personality to drive jokes with. The jokes are often incongruous with the setting. This strip really has no redeeming features to it right now, and it's probably time for it to be put out to stud.

Best:

Pastis does a good job explaining the human condition (although he probably just wanted to draw a rat with a napkin on her head). It's not a nice place inside any of us, and dealing with that is one of the major questions of human existence.

Runners-up: Watch Your Head (love the third panel), Candorville, Zits (I like that Connie comes out on top of this technological interaction for a change), Frazz, Big Nate (my little love huntress is a great, great pet name), Mutts

Bonus Visual Runner-up:

Today's Lio is a good example of what makes a strip work. The joke is driven by the character's personalities. The father has typical dreams of living vicariously through his son's athletic pursuits. Lio needs to deal with a monster. Another great thing about Lio is the question of fantasy or reality. Mark Tatulli, like Bill Watterson in Calvin and Hobbes, never resolves the question of what reality is. We are left to speculate whether the monster in the third panel is real, or solely in Lio's imagination.

Random Comic Note:

I work with kids, and this strip illustrates well one of the challenges of managing kids. Barry makes an inappropriate comment, but the father reacts to Curtis' reaction. Obviously, Curtis' reaction is inappropriate, but if the father had disciplined Barry for his comment, Curtis would likely be satisfied that justice had been served and could temper his reactions.