Caption:
Ghost newspapers
Alt text:
COMICS / Deathnuts / Dunesburied / Blondie and Deadwood / Ricky the Roadkilled Squirrel / Barstuffed / The Other Side / Marmadead / For Deader or Even Worse / Family Disasters / The Deadhorns
Remember newspapers?
Back in the day, daily editions would have a page of comic strips. with extra large strips in color on Sundays.
When I read newspapers in the 80s, most of the strips nationally syndicated
In my local paper, the SF Chronicle, we had a national-turned-local strip Travels With Farley, then later just Farley
Today’s strip parodies several syndicated strips that were popular at that time:
- Deathnuts / [email protected]
- Dunesburied / Doonesbury
- Blondie and Deadwood / Blondie (and Dagwood)
- Ricky the Roadkilled Squirrel / (not entirely sure what this was parodying, although there was a daily Bullwinkle comic strip based on the popular Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, featuring Rocky The Flying Squirrel that ran from 1962-1965)
- Garstuffed / [email protected]
- The Other Side / The Far Side (self reference, You Are Here)
- Marmadead / Marmaduke
- For Deader or Even Worse / For Better Or For Worse
- Family Disasters / Family Circus
- The Deadhorns / The Lockhorns
A lot of these were just unfunny, particularly IMO Blondie, Marmaduke, Family Circus, Lockhorns. And much of Garfield.
They are worthy of much deserved parody [email protected] Dysfunctional Family Circus and so forth…
I hear a lot of those long-running strips had some merit when they first came out, but became shit over the decades of publication, changing artists, etc. You can read about these in their respective Wikipedia entries.
Garfield was never meant to be an amazing strip, Jim Davis has said he just wanted to create a comic strip that would make him rich, and it succeeded at that goal. Older Garfield still has its moments though, as @[email protected] noticed:
https://discuss.online/post/18096043
Since then, I’ve noticed the laziness too in the newer strips, like this one that’s 3 identical panels:
Thank you for this. I was trying to guess the names of the comics. The one you typed as Barstuffed is supposed to say Garstuffed.
I was just copying the text that the OP had posted, but you’re right that is a “G”
And I was just copying it from the alt text on the original image 😄 The quality of the alt text has not been great, but worth posting IMO. One of Wednesday’s strips wouldn’t have really made sense without it, since they removed the text in the drawing for some reason:
He put a lot of work into those alternative titles, and they’re all good! I like how he included his own.
