Newspaper Funnies (and Unfunnies)

Looking up cartoon takes on gophers for the, Other//half comic thing, I found a couple of really, interesting, newspaper comics (terrible; the word I'm looking for is, so bad-it's-bad-it's-good.)

Just stare into this thing's soul for five minutes and see if you can figure out what the heck is going on.

https://www.cartoonstock.com/cartoonview.asp?catref=smb090801

This one took a while. Turns out it's, not just a total non-sequitur, two unrelated comics mashed together; it's actually apparently part of a longer story arc about Moby Gopher, and Steve Moore has just never seen a gopher and draws them like bears I guess. This is what I was trying to avoid in looking up reference.

Also, there's this guy, Ambrose Quintanilla, who runs like three strips and none of them have an ounce of, heck it it's Christmas and I don't like saying mean things in the first place, but his comics are

just.

so.

hypnotically.

bad.

that I can't even. And his comics are collectively known as Gopher It I guess which is why that stuff showed up during my search as well.

But it's Sunday and Sunday funnies and so I've been thinking about the topic lately anyway.

For some reason (and I just found the strip in question on both washingtonpost.com and gocomics.com and it's not doing it so it must just be my kindle) today's strip of BC is... nuttily meta. It's like a joke about their repetition of the same type of gag over and over, take the familiar and strip context, anything that makes any individual floating-tablet-correspondence strip unique. It was beautiful. I cried.

Actually no, it's just some, bizarre, maybe they sent out the wrong, incomplete file or something, mistake.

Onto other newspaper comics from today, getting onto ones I enjoy unironically now and believe may be the salvation of the medium and all that.

Darby Conley may be the new Walt Kelly. I always knew that he's very, very good, and that he's got a flare for super super super elaborate puns, possibly even more so than even Stephan Pastis, but today's Get Fuzzy just took my breath away with, let's face it that is exactly the kind of punnage that would show up in Pogo any given weekday.

Mr Conley please don't let us down.

Other newspaper comics I'm quite taken with: Brewster Rockit is consistently alright, everybody knows this, la-dee-dumm... oh, the Lockhorns may be, like, about as bland as any other comic strip created in the 60s, but Bill's widow Bunny and her collaborator John Reiner (whom I'm presuming to do the artwork for the series now, with Bunny primarily on writer's duty, but they collaborate enough I can't really tell if Bunny doesn't also do art) that Reiner guy, and/or Bunny Hoest, really knows how to draw. So, you know. That's good.

Red and Rover is something you really don't see much anymore; I like it. It's like Mutts, which also remains awesome and also hearkens back to really early comics tradition. Neither are very funny very frequently, but both are consistently lovely and wonderful.

Prince Valiant is awesome. Drawn nowadays by Mark Schultz, the Xenozoic Tales guy. Hope he stays around a while. Think I've talked about this before.

Oh, uh, today's Garfield is actually way funny; it's always nice when that's the case...

That's probably it. Not the only funnies I enjoy, but the ones I've had feelings about specifically today.