All right everyone...I want to hear your top 5 funny comic selections - web-based, syndicated, or otherwise! Narrative strips allowed as long as they're mostly comedic. Go!
For me:
1. Sinfest - Tatsuya Ishida - This one gets the tops from me for its wonderful art, relative consistency, and the willingness to take on tough subjects like philosophy and sex almost every day. I particularly love the Dragon.
2. Penny Arcade - Tycho Brahe (Jerry Holkins) and Jonathan Gabriel (Mike Krahulik). It's only three times a week, they're not as consistent as Sinfest, and they don't range outside the gaming area too much, but just on the basis of pure funny, Tycho and Gabe have made me laugh at times harder than anyone else outside an actual live stand-up comedy routine. (See <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?d ... es=l">this strip</a> for an example.)
3. Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson - Inspiring and hilarious, I think a lot of modern comics may owe a debt to this strip, with great art at times at the end of its run. I think it was one of the first strips (after Walt Kelly's Pogo) to really boast some serious artistic quality, but my comics history isn't too good so I may not be right about that.
4. Bloom County/Outland/Opus - Berkeley Breathed - My absolute favorite strips involving political humor. Funnier than Doonesbury, in my opinion, for all of Gary Trudeau's political respect. But it's only political some of the time, and the rest is good too. Funny and well-drawn.
5. Asterix and Obelix - René Goscinny (stories) and Albert Uderzo - Supposedly most of Europe has read an Asterix title at some point, and I think in France (where it's from) it's just wildly popular, but it never really caught on here. From the issues I've read, I think it may be partially because of the language barrier, as I suspect a lot of the original French jokes are wordplay puns that have to be retranslated or even replaced in the U.S. The only narrative-based strip in my top 5 - some funny stuff.
Honorable Mention: FoxTrot (Bill Amend), The Far Side (Gary Larson), Ph.D. - Piled Higher and Deeper (Jorge Cham), Garfield (Jim Davis), PvP (Scott Kurtz), and Carl Banks and Don Rosa's Scrooge McDuck comics.
Kupek, I really think you ought to check out Ph.D. (www.phdcomics.com), which is purely topical to grad school and still hilarious. I'm not even in grad school and I enjoyed it very much. There's an archive on the site.
Also, I would be extremely remiss if I didn't bring up Little Nemo in Slumberland by Windsor McCay in this discussion. This was a VERY old-time strip (like around the turn of the century to a little later) but boasted some of the most beautiful art I've ever seen. It's not exactly primarily comedic, or it would have been somewhere in my top 5, but there are wonderfully funny and surreal (as well as some wonderfully dark) things there. Most people don't seem to have heard of it. Those who played the NES game made in the late 1980s based on it, my apologies - it doesn't really do the strip justice.
For me:
1. Sinfest - Tatsuya Ishida - This one gets the tops from me for its wonderful art, relative consistency, and the willingness to take on tough subjects like philosophy and sex almost every day. I particularly love the Dragon.
2. Penny Arcade - Tycho Brahe (Jerry Holkins) and Jonathan Gabriel (Mike Krahulik). It's only three times a week, they're not as consistent as Sinfest, and they don't range outside the gaming area too much, but just on the basis of pure funny, Tycho and Gabe have made me laugh at times harder than anyone else outside an actual live stand-up comedy routine. (See <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?d ... es=l">this strip</a> for an example.)
3. Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson - Inspiring and hilarious, I think a lot of modern comics may owe a debt to this strip, with great art at times at the end of its run. I think it was one of the first strips (after Walt Kelly's Pogo) to really boast some serious artistic quality, but my comics history isn't too good so I may not be right about that.
4. Bloom County/Outland/Opus - Berkeley Breathed - My absolute favorite strips involving political humor. Funnier than Doonesbury, in my opinion, for all of Gary Trudeau's political respect. But it's only political some of the time, and the rest is good too. Funny and well-drawn.
5. Asterix and Obelix - René Goscinny (stories) and Albert Uderzo - Supposedly most of Europe has read an Asterix title at some point, and I think in France (where it's from) it's just wildly popular, but it never really caught on here. From the issues I've read, I think it may be partially because of the language barrier, as I suspect a lot of the original French jokes are wordplay puns that have to be retranslated or even replaced in the U.S. The only narrative-based strip in my top 5 - some funny stuff.
Honorable Mention: FoxTrot (Bill Amend), The Far Side (Gary Larson), Ph.D. - Piled Higher and Deeper (Jorge Cham), Garfield (Jim Davis), PvP (Scott Kurtz), and Carl Banks and Don Rosa's Scrooge McDuck comics.
Kupek, I really think you ought to check out Ph.D. (www.phdcomics.com), which is purely topical to grad school and still hilarious. I'm not even in grad school and I enjoyed it very much. There's an archive on the site.
Also, I would be extremely remiss if I didn't bring up Little Nemo in Slumberland by Windsor McCay in this discussion. This was a VERY old-time strip (like around the turn of the century to a little later) but boasted some of the most beautiful art I've ever seen. It's not exactly primarily comedic, or it would have been somewhere in my top 5, but there are wonderfully funny and surreal (as well as some wonderfully dark) things there. Most people don't seem to have heard of it. Those who played the NES game made in the late 1980s based on it, my apologies - it doesn't really do the strip justice.
