Top 5 Tuesday: comic strips

I love comic strips -- always have. In fact, some of my most frequently-read books as a kid were comic collections. Surprised? I suppose I should, as an English prof, maintain the fiction that "on my tenth birthday, looking into the new vistas of double digits, I realized that Tolstoy was now too childish for my tastes ..." or something.

Not so much. I still read the comics obsessively, as you might guess by the link I have on my blog to "GoComics" ... my morning ritual involves coffee, email, and comics. I don't read all of the ones there mind you, or just any comics that cross my view. There are, after all, some pretty inane ones out there. Family Circus comes to mind as something that needs to be put out to pasture, and Dagwood, and Beetle Bailey (I still have a bit of an odd affection for Hagar for reasons passing understanding, given that it stopped making me laugh when I was about eight).

Well-written and -drawn comics are truly an art form ... one of the things I love about them is their economy of storytelling: they have very limited space to achieve maximum effect, and when done well can make a pithy point more eloquent than wordy op-eds or essays (I imagine this acc0unts, at least in part for my fascination, never having been able to be particularly pithy or concise myself -- as regulars on this blog will attest!).

And so today's top five: my all-time favourite comic strips. As usual, I want to hear other people's favourites ...

1. Bloom County. Hands down, no contest, everyone else pack up and go home. It was a sad sad day when its bizarrely-named creator Berkely Breathed retired. I discovered Opus and the gang while in grade school, and was immediately a devotee based on a comic I saw in which Opus sang a very offensive love song while accomanying himself on the tuba. I was hooked. And nowhere else will you find such a beautifully absurd cast of characters: Milo and Binkley, the sleazy lawyer Steve Dallas, the mangy Bill the Cat, and the assorted woodland creatures who regularly recreate episodes from Star Trek. And of course dear dear Opus.

2. Doonesbury. You've gotta love a comic strip that is still going strong after thirty years of being on top. Not only do the characters grow and evolve, but they propogate: the second generation of Doonesbury is now college-age. It's a rare talent to take a medium so generally considered, well, cartoonish, and make it not only a laser-like political commentary but a genuinely engaging series of narratives with characters we feel real empathy for. A telling story: when Gary Trudeau was thinking of having one of the veteran characters B.D. lose his leg in Iraq, he did research by interviewing soldiers who had lost limbs there. He was understandably nervous about what they might have to say about him portraying their trauma in a comic strip, and was surprised at how they reacted in horror -- "You can't do that! Not to B.D.!"

3. The Far Side. Cows. Bears. Large women in cat-eye glasses and beehive haircuts. Birds of prey wearing sunglasses. And did I mention cows? Truly the most inspired absurdity ever. And also a sad moment when Gary Larson retired. What is it with these comic strip artists that they need early retirment? Is there some kind of stress involved that they just don't advertise to the public at large? Learn the lesson of longevity from Gary Trudeau, people!

4. Calvin and Hobbes. Really, what can I say? Bill Waterson hit on a magical formula with this comic, one that appeals to the fabulist and non-conformist in all of us. If Doonesbury is all about evolving and changing, Calvin and Hobbes is all about stubbornly refusing to stop being a kid. And like most little kids I've known, he has a pretty clear-eyed view of the world, one uncluttered by the illusions adults willfully deceive themselves with. I suppose that's one of the lessons: who's delusional here? The kid who imagines an intelligent, loving close friend for himself, or the adults who wish to burden him with the bullshit of the world?

5. Non Sequitur. While the preceding four are all comics that have been with me for years, Non Sequitur is a relatively new discovery (courtesy, I might add, of GoComics). It alternates between general commentaries, frequently political, and the travails of a single father of two girls -- the elder of the two, Danae, being now one of my all-time favourite comics characters (I'd had the thought of doing a top-five favourite comic strip characters, but we'd be down to number four or five before leaving Bloom County).