My Best?
Our Boarding House with Major Hoople
Bringing Up Father (Maggy & Jiggs)
Flash Gordon
Little Nemo
Pogo
Calvin & Hobbes
Steve Canyon
Worst
open the nearest bird cage liner
Thing about syndicated strips is, they’re SUPPOSED to be the same thing every day, more or less. Newspaper comics have always been a kind of OCD ritual, a daily fix of bemusing fixed points in a chaotic world. Some cartoonists do it with breathtaking style, other sophisticated and subtle humor, others with characters that look in their underwear and pull faces. Don’t really matter. Most comic fans like a mix of these constants. Funnies, for me, were almost never funny. But they were fascinating as hell, especially the ones that used to be popular, and reflect old times and lost worlds, like Our Boarding House.
Egad! If I wanted funny, I read Mag Magazine.
Best would have to be Calvin and Hobbes.
I do like Arlo and Janis, Big Nate, Luann, Jump Start, Ham Shears, Scary Gary, Pearls before Swine.
Sometime I read the old Peanuts cartoons which I grew up on.
Yes, some great strips were and are funny.
Dilbert is funny. Calvin and Hobbes were funny. The difference in their styles couldn’t be more stark, but as an unknown cartoonist, I tip my hat to both. Beyond them, 1950s Peanuts could be funny. Nancy and Henry were just so freaking strange, they could be funny too, like Smokey Stover.
I just realized no one has mentioned DICK TRACY! I followed him for years, till he got silly and found people on the moon.