I was thinking about how awful webcomics are the other day, when I was suddenly struck by a great idea. "Say", I thought, "Why don't I go and read some newspaper comic strips? They're done by professional writers and artists, and overseen by editors who demand the very best in quality from their daily cartoons! They have to be better than the dreck on the web!"
Well, anyone who's read a newspaper comic strip knows how that idea held up. Newspaper comics suck. They suck on a whole new level to webcomics, possessing the kind of sheer, preturnatural awfulness that can only be obtained by a mediocre strip stretched over decades of increasingly lax standards. They're terrible to the point where reading them for too long actually causes a migraine, and reading them for much longer makes blood spray bodily from your ears.
So, in order to warn people off making the same mistake I did, here's a look at some of the worst comic strips polluting the paper today. The lowest of the low. The direst of the dire. Gaze upon their works and despair.

DENNIS THE MENACE:

                                                                       

I think it says something when someone’s comics only become funny when someone else fucks around with it. Case in point: Dennis the Menace, one of the blandest and least interesting comics of all time, and which only ever had one good strip: the result of a newspaper slipup resulting in the original caption being switched for a Far Side one which read “I see your tiny, petrified skull, labelled and resting on a shelf somewhere.” That was awesome. Otherwise, though, this is a deeply mediocre strip featuring the kind of ‘family friendly’ saccharine lameness you’d expect to see in a Precious Moments figurine. It’s also a misleading title, since I’ve checked out quite a few DTM strips and have yet to see ‘menace’ in any form. The web of lies surrounding this comic sickens me. I think as an emergency measure, all Dennis the Menace comics should have their captions replaced by random Far Side ones. It’s the only way to be sure.


MUTTS:

The late Charles Schulz apparently loved this comic, and Matt Groening compared it favourably to stuff like Calvin and Hobbes and Krazy Kat. For the sake of my own sanity, I’m going to assume that they were ridin’ high on the Crystal Meth Express for that one, since Mutts is fucking awful. It’s like the generic ‘pet humour’ strip, except with the actual humour replaced by cutesiness. Check it:

                                               

I actually had to re-read that one a couple of times, because I was anticipating a level of snarkiness that just wasn’t there. At first I thought they were mocking the butterfly for the inefficiency of it’s flight pattern, but then I caught the punch line: “Is he flying or dancing?” Jesus Christ, it’s a comment on the natural beauty inherent in even the tiniest of god’s creatures, as expressed in a painfully cutesy way by some small fluffy animals. I mean, if you want to do some kind of inspirational message thing then fine, but at least have some sort of fucking tact or subtlety about it instead of just making the whole thing as diabetes-inducingly sugary as you possibly can. And on the rare occasions the strip does have conventional jokes, they fall flat:

                                                

I’ll grudgingly admit that the artwork is quite nice, however… Mainly because it looks like a cheap Krazy Kat ripoff. Presumably the author of this strip thought the appeal of Krazy Kat was in cute little animals, thus showing that he should never have been allowed within 50 miles of a fucking comic strip in the first place.


AMAZING SPIDER-MAN:

Much as I hate to diss Stan Lee, I think he’s taking this newfangled ‘decompression’ thing a bit too far:

                                                        

                                                        

                                                         

And that’s not even the end of the series. There’s at least four more day’s worth of ‘Spider-Man sits in bed and recovers from flu’, and still no Vulture. Just Spider-Man, sitting in bed, arguing with his wife. For a whole week. Having the same argument each strip. It’s like some fucking Beckett play or something. I don’t think anyone reads the Spider-Man strip, though, so I doubt anyone notices. For all I know this same storyline has been going on for the past twenty years.


MARMADUKE:

                                                                       

Man, I hate these “humorous animal” comics. It’s a dog! He’s comically oversized! He irritates his owners! Wow, this is such an imaginative and well-realised concept that I can easily see why it’s been going strong for over 50 years. 50 years. Imagine writing 50 years of Marmaduke comics. Imagine reading 50 years of Marmaduke comics. I can barely stomach the one. Anyway, using such an, um, elegent concept for over 50 years is bound to lead to a surfeit of jokes, a problem Marmaduke neatly dodges by never having any jokes in the first place. Just look at this strip:

                                        

I’m genuinely uncertain of where the humour is meant to come from in this strip. You’d think it’s the phrase “Believe it!”, but that doesn’t fit as a punch line no matter how you look at it. Maybe it’s the fact that the woman’s being dragged around by the dog, but in that case the preceding panels are all made superfluous, and don’t act as a set up for this punchline. Also note the godawful ‘true story’panel thrown in at the end, because, I don’t know, people want to read stories about a 7-year-old’s dog? My brain is beginning to hurt just thinking about this.

                                                                       

Incidentally, the above strip is a pretty much exact representation of how I think Marmaduke gets made: the cartoonist shuffles out, shouts some demented inanity at his bewildered dog, then realises no-one is listening and lurches back inside to write it up in comic form. Then the next day he does it all again, all the while silently praying for the merciful release of sweet, sweet oblivion.


GIRLS & SPORTS:

Time for a little game of “Webcomic or Newspaper Comic?”:

                                            

The answer is newspaper comic, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise: after all, Girls & Sports manages to hit all the traditional webcomic buttons like having shitty artwork, being massively unfunny to the point where it almost seems like some deliberate avant-garde statement, and having a creepily hateful and misogynistic undercurrent. Girls & Sports is barely a blip on the comic-book radar, however, so let’s just ignore it and move on.


Mallard Fillmore:

                                                      

I’m going to take the high road here and avoid just mocking Mallard Fillmore for its conservative political leanings. There are plenty of other reasons to hate it, anyway:
1. It’s lazy as fuck: You see the strip above? There were something like sixteen different variants of it in the first few pages alone of the archive I checked. It’s just the same formula over and over with a few changes:
Random guy: I disagree with Obama.
Media: OMG Racist!
*Duck stares wearily from page*
Or
Random guy: I disagree with Clinton.
Media: OMG Sexist!
*Once more, duck stares wearily from page*
2. It needs huge footnotes to explain the jokes:

                                             

Hey comic writer guy, if you need a footnote that’s twice as long as the actual comic before anyone can understand it, then it‘s a pretty fair bet you‘re doing something wrong!
3. The guy writing it has a tendancy to do stuff like put Bible quotes in the strip and then have snide notes saying “If you don’t see this strip, it’s been removed by cowardly secular liberal scum.” It’s like he honestly sees himself as some sort of crusading moral vigilante, striking fear into the hearts of liberals wherever they may lurk and tirelessly bringing… THE TRUTH… to the adoring masses. It’s equal parts hilarious and pathetic, so I’m just going to go ahead and say it’s hilariously pathetic.


MOMMA:

                                          

There’s always the temptation to read too much subtext into stuff, but when it comes to Momma it’s not so much subtext as… text. Drawing a comic about your hateful, controlling mother is a little weird, but keeping it up for almost 40 years is frankly mind-boggling. I don’t even want to think about the bottomless pits of repression and loathing in that relationship. I feel kinda cheap just saying “haha, this guy sure hates his mother!” but I honestly cant’t think of any other way to interpret the fact that someone could spend so long churning out this stuff.
Anyway, this is another one of those comics which survive for years on the basis of their inoffensiveness and which then become ‘a morning ritual’, meaning they’ll continue to be published for the next hundred years. It’s basically ‘The Wizard Of Id’ as written by Norman Bates, except not nearly as awesome as that sounds.


BC:

                                           

There’s not much to say about BC, except that all the jokes sound like they were found in a Christmas Cracker and they’ve been reusing the same ones over and over for the past forty years or so. Seriously, I found an old BC book in my grandmothers house that dated back to the Fifties, and the strips in it are completely indistinguishable to the ones today. Except back then they were funny, I guess. Oh, to live in a time where ‘knock knock’ jokes were the highest form of comedy and ‘irony’ was the name of a lovable child-rescuing dog with his own line of  movie serials! Truly, it was a golden age.
Speaking of golden ages, I recently came across something that actually made me look at BC in a whole new light… The idea that BC does not actually take place in the prehistoric past, but rather in a grim post-apocalyptic future world where all civilisation has been wiped out save for a few brain-damaged mutants who continue clinging grimly to existence. It certainly explains all the dated pop-culture references, anyway. Looking at the strip with this in mind changes it from throwaway crap to pathos-drenched drama, as the burnt-out remnents of the human race dimly contemplate a past glory of which they have no true understanding. Horrifying stuff.


SALLY FORTH:

                                         

I have no idea what this is, but I stumbled across the above strip and was instantly consumed by rage that someone wouldn’t just namecheck Vampire fucking Weekend, one of the most painfully terrible and wholly overrated bands out there, but would also do it in such a ridiculously obvious way that it feels like the entire point of the strip was to drive home how ‘hip’ and ‘with it’ the writer is. Fuck you, douchey writer guy. May you choke to death on your own Yo La Tengo albums.


CATHY:

                                            

When I think of how Cathy comes into existence, I always imagine it’s like one of the HYDRA bases in early Marvel comics… With dozens of green-suited henchmen scurrying about while a gigantic brain sits in a tank in the middle of the room and bellows instructions like “FOOLS! In today’s strip, Cathy is comically worried about her weight! In tomorrow’s strip, Cathy is obsessed with shoes while her husband is obsessed with sports! This shows the humorous difference in interests between men and women! HILARITY ENSUES!” And all the little green-suited henchmen chant “All hail MONAK, The Living Brain!” before viciously whipping whichever Korean sweatshop workers actually draw the strip.
OK, I admit that I’m kind of hedging for this one, but jesus christ you try writing about Cathy and see how easy it is. I mean, just look at the above comic. “Wow, life sure is scary, we’re lucky there’s shoe-shopping to give some semblance of meaning to our lives!” The only thing funny about Cathy is the fact that for a strip written by a woman, it’s pretty much the biggest threat to feminism ever conceived, and even then it’s more the-irony-is-killing-me-funny than actual ha-ha-funny.


FAMILY CIRCUS:

                                                                       

While the other comics here just irritate me, Family Circus is the only one that actually offends me… Offends me on a deep, gut level, because it seems profoundly wrong to me that something so mediocre, so bland, so worthless and utterly, irredeemably shitty could be so popular. It’s the most well-syndicated cartoon in the world! The books have sold thirteen million copies! I don’t even like thinking about this, since whenever I do it feels like I’m standing on the edge of some Lovecraftian pit of mind-boggling cosmic horror.Who knows what evil truly lurks in the hearts of men?

                                     

Not me indeed, Jeffy. Not me indeed.


GARFIELD:

                                        

I admit it, I’ve lost track of all the different postmodern variations on Garfield. Let’s se, there was the one which randomised the panels in a strip, the one which randomised panels from all strips, the one where Garfield’s dialogue was removed, the one where Garfield himself was removed, and because there’s always someone who has to take things one step further, there’s probably one where the entire strip is removed and which consists entirely of blank panels. The point is, though, that no matter what you alter about a Garfield strip, it suddenly becomes much funnier. It’s like it exists at a sort of comedic absolute zero, where it literally cannot get any worse so every change is a huge improvement. I’m getting freaked out at the very thought, so I think it’s best to just say that this strip is some sort of ungodly freak accident and move on.


ZIGGY:

                                                                       

Ziggy is often just dismissed as just another blandly saccharine ‘feelgood’ comic which appeals only to idiots, Alzheimer’s patients, and people who consider humorous fridge magnets to be racy. I disagree, though: there’s a strange sense of pain and rage dwelling beneath Ziggy’s seemingly placid exterior that makes the strip quite interesting. Just look at the above strip: sure, it seems like a generic “technology sure is crazy!” joke, but there’s an undercurrent of frustration and despair in Ziggy’s forlorn expression that raises it above its peers. This malformed, pantsless homunculi is the everyman made flesh, a hapless pawn being buffeted helplessly by forces he cannot control. He’s Charlie Brown taken to the nth degree and turned into an absurdist symbol of the dehumanising alienation at the heart of society, as written by a stroke victim who apparently can only express his mind-destroying pain and loneliness as a series of painfully bland, humourless tableaus with artwork that would seem amateurish to a handicapped eight-year-old. In a way, are we not all Ziggy?
                                                                       


I think I’ll end this article on that sobering philosophical question. If you know any terrible comic strips I’ve left out, please post them!