Opened my morning paper to the entertainment section, and saw this: http://imgsrv.gocomics.com/dim/?fh=6df4727acf8b5371416d8f9e04cc332f&w=900.0 Awesome. Go get 'em, Tatulli!
Reminds me of when a bunch of webcomic artists all posted syndicated newspaper versions of their comics, like this one by Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content and this one by Hijinks Ensue.
Lio satirizes the other comics, especially the older ones, fairly frequently. I love Lio-- it's probably my favorite comic now, and one of my all-time favorites-- but sometimes I find the strip unnecessarily harsh toward the Classics.
But are they really "classics" when they keep appearing, sometimes repeated, sometimes ghostwritten, as is the case with B.C., Doonesbury, etc? That Hagar and Doonesbury still get printed is a disgrace, and while I don't have any particularly harsh feelings towards Peanuts, I wouldn't mind not seeing it for many years. The "funny" pages is indeed a zombieland.
That's what I thought. I don't deny that most daily comic strips play it pretty safe, but I hardly think Doonesbury qualifies as that kind of comic strip. Okay, it might be safe in terms of form, but certainly not in content.
D'oh! I meant Dagwood, who appears in the Lio comic, from Blondie. Sorry! Doonesbury is one of the four or five strips I respect.
My favorite skewer of comics is Stephen Pastis of Pearls Before Swine. He has a passionate hatred of those strips that have been around for 80 years and have been recycling the same jokes for 75.
^^ Yeah, that's another of my favorite strips and he's guilty of it, too. I don't see what difference it makes if a strip is ghostwritten or reassigned when somebody leaves or dies. That's happened a million times. Dan Barry was just as good, possibly better, than Mac Raboy on Flash Gordon-- and worked with other writers, such as Harry Harrison, during his tenure. BC, another of my all-time favorite strips, went downhill rapidly once Johnny Hart went bananas; and from what I've seen, it's in pretty decent shape now. I'm not going to go into a long digression about which of the older strips are good and which aren't-- there's a range of quality just like with contemporary strips-- but there's a meanspiritedness to the satire (and also among the readership) that turns me off. I suppose it's the result of the shrinking space available to Comics these days, which I also deplore. The young guys resent the use of resources by the olders guys so they want to euthanize them. It's understandable that they want the chance to be successful themselves, but it's still no excuse.