How come I'm not happy?
Yesterday DailyInk launched a few new strips in its vintage line. It seems to be a mixed bag so far.
- Big Ben Bolt
- Heart of Juliet Jones
- Radio Patrol
- Barney Google & Snuffy Smith
- Jacky's Diary
- Mandrake
- Quincy
- Katzenjammer Kids
- Little Iodine
I'll go through them all over the next couple of weeks. But don't worry, I'll throw in some extra laughs too. I'll even put them at the top this week!
Bizarro was just plain funny today.
Too Much Coffee Man, which seems to have been partially renamed "How to Be Happy," is one of my favorites. It's not daily, so I had to "cheat" and use yesterday's. I liked this one.
This is from yesterday too.
What's with the rainbow "Ahhhhh!" ? Is that a sign?
And today:
The sprinklers are that powerful? Really? And he has extra clothes to change into stashed at his part-time library job? And the library has no bathrooms? Something's up with Gunther.
Now the vintage stuff.
I'm a little surprised at how well-drawn Barney Google and Snuffy Smith was back in the day.
The idea of them in the city seems interesting too.
Compare that strip to this:
The vintage isn't the funniest strip so far, but I'm guessing it will pick up speed — and it's hard to believe it'll be any worse than the new stuff.
Vintage Mandrake was a surprise too. Take a look at how it compares to the current strip.
The newer Mandrake reminds me a little of the simple art style of the golden age Superman. I had no idea the original was so different!
I will say this for the new ones: I never expected to get a laugh from Mandrake. "Roughshod?" "Doctor Hi-5?" "Club Dubious?"
Big Ben Bolt is a tad quirky.
We're getting a history lesson!
Quincy is a great looking strip. Nice action as a background to the kids talking and nice backgrounds in general.
Eric the Dog Trainer Guy signing off. More next week!
2 comments:
The reason many newspaper comics were drawn better and with more detail back in the day is, of course, that they were printed larger. Comics drawn with that much detail would be impossible to read at the sizes they're printed at today.
This is exactly what Bill Watterson and, particularly, Berke Breathed were complaining about back in the 1980s. And it's only gotten worse.
The newer Mandrakes tend to have one or two stand-out moments of hilarity and wackiness, then sort of peter out. Like, the first storyline I looked at for my site contained a panel where a chubby Asian man told us that the only way you could defeat a volcano was with dynamite.
Also, it seems this current storyline is moving along at a greater pace than the previous ones. Things are actually happening at a pace of more than once per week, at least.
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