Favorite Illustrated Humor

Place to talk about your favorite pieces of illustrated humor. Have a jones for The Far Side? Enjoy a little Edward Gorey with your morning coffee? Toothpaste for Dinner? The Book of Bunny Suicides? Then let's hear about it.

The classic Al Capp is excellent but sadly much of is difficult to get hold of. Dilbert can be amusing, although sometimes it almost seems to be a work of nonfiction for those of us who work in the same environment.

Being Scottish I would also have to recommend Oor Wullie and The Broons.

All of Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.

and I do like that Gary Larson's comics show up in my non-fiction recommendation lists...

Pogo is brilliant, if a trifle dated.

I'm also a fan of Girl Genius and Ozy and Millie...

I love Mutts. Specially Mooch's (the cat) expressions, it's so like the real ones :)
Calvin and Hobbes, of course!

I know I have mentioned it in another thread but I love the Liberty Meadows stuff by Frank Cho. Great drawing and very funny.

I'm a long-time lover of Pogo, Krazy Kat, Calvin & Hobbes, Opus (Bloom County) and Mutts, et al. But I've discovered the collections of Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley lately and put them up there with the foregoing. Also have a big collection of H. Allen Smith. Oh, and here's one from outta right field: Idries Shah's Mulla Nasruddin stories...check 'em out! Cheerio...

In French: Le Génie des Alpages by f'murr. Quite a big part of the dialog is lost on me, but they're still very funny and surprising.

And Mutts, yes :-) Do you know their daily archive?

thanx for the tip on the daily archive. great!

One I've enjoyed fairly recently is David Rees and his Get Your War On collections. The comics are pretty simple: clip art office workers complaining about politics. The simplicity is like a clothsline on which Rees strings incredible livid diatribes on current political situations. It's like watching a boiling fountain of rage and frustration poor out on the page.

Heady stuff, and very funny.

If any of you are Gary Larson fans, there is a new calendar out for 2007 which repeats cartoons from his previous calendars, but all the author royalties will fund Conservation International's work to protect wildlife and ecosystems in trouble. I never get tried of Larson, so old cartoons, new cartoons, it doesn't matter. The ISBN is 0740759248 if any of you are interested.

P.S. On your recommendation, I bought Toothpaste for Dinner. I couldn't quite talk myself into the Bunny Suicides, though I did laugh at the one using the CD drive of the computer.

Order of the Stick. Even with my small knowledge of D&D, it's very funny.

Is this just too square? I like Norman Rockwell pictures. They tell a whole story with no words. Of course my vote is in for Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, and Get Fuzzy.

If you are a teenager, or have a teenager in your home, Zits is good.

Dr. Suess, guys!!! And how about those books of fruit and vegetable sculptures by Joost Elffers? For kids, but real clever I think.

For the grown-ups, Rhymes With Orange. Also Roz Chast of the New Yorker (and Time, I think).

Of course Calvin and Hobbes but also the older Bloom County.

Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine, and Calvin and Hobbes (of course!). I also like Mutts; it has some truly touching moments. I used to do volunteer work at our local ASPCA, so the subject is near and dear to me. We take in has many homeless animals as is legal at our house.

I love Lio, and any New Yorker cartoon anthology.

Though there is no published collection of them (though there is t-shirtee goodness), I want to give a shout out to xkcd.com. Nerdy science jokes, oddball obsessions, and stick figures. Good times.

There's an EXTREMELY vulgar, offensive and juvenile cartoonist named Johnny Ryan that just gets me. His stuff is so unabashedly obnoxious that I just have to laugh. Again, it is very, very dark, foul, disgusting stuff, I'm not going to give his stuff an unqualified thumbs up -- it just makes me laugh.

I also really enjoy New Yorker cartoons, so go figure.

The old Wallace Wood movie satires from the early days of MAD are absolute masterpieces of visual gags.

I'd say that http://pbfcomics.com/ is really enjoyable as a Web comic.

I also love Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. But who wouldn't ?

I have a giant paperback of classic Charles Addams cartoons. Dark. Insidious. Cruel. Hilarious.

My childhood home had a bookcase of cartoon paperbacks outside the bathroom door - Dad's reading material for the "library". Some of the classics I've kept from that stash: very early B. C. by Johnny Hart; early Wizard of Id by Hart and Brant Parker; and Stan & Jan Berenstain - before the Bears they did some really smart, cosmopolitan books such as Bedside Lover Boy, The Facts of Life for Grown-Ups, and Flipsville - Squaresville. My favorite newspaper strip is Non Sequitur by Wiley - don't know if he has any collections out yet.

Classic illustrated undergrounds such as:

Cheech Wizard (Deadbone) by Vaughn Bode
Dorman's Doggie or Jesus comics (Jesus joins the Army, etc) by Filbert Sturgeon (Frank Stack)
Just about anything by R. Crumb

More Mainstream:
Mad Magazine's Don Martin

More Recent:
Bongo Comics line (Simpson's creater Matt Groening)
Bone by Jeff Smith
Ren and Stimpy by John Krisfalusi

The list goes on...

Dolph, Wulffmorgenthaler, and (of course) The Far Side are my personal top three faves.

Indeed, The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and other stories by Nicholas Gurewitch is hilarious. I bought the book after discovering the web comic.

I'm with MrsLee above:
The Far Side
Calvin and Hobbes
and Get Fuzzy

Get Fuzzy puzzled me at first, until I got to know the characters. Now they are one of the few comic strips that can make me laugh out loud!

I like Thomas Hood's punning cartoons and started a talk about such within the Word-play Umbrella group (see the group illustration for one of them).

Bunny-Suicides Andy Riley also did a set of strips that are in the book roasted about a cynic that works in a coffee shop.

Cyanide and Happiness is also darkly funny.

I'd add thirdings on Perry Bible Fellowship, WulffMorgenthaler and Order of the Stick too.

Madam and Eve from South Africa is wonderful, and the political cartoonist Zapiro is also incredibly talented. I used to like Fred Basset, everything by Giles and a cartoon strip in Private Eye called Celeb about rock star Gary Bloke.

Charles Addams is one of my favourites. I just bought an excellent new book called The Addams Family: an Evilution, which follows the development of each of the characters. It contains several previously unpublished cartoons, too.

I also like Lynn Johnston's For Better or for Worse series.

Since "Calvin and Hobbes" is gone, I'd see "9 Chickweed Lane" as the superior newspaper comic.

It's funny in a sophisticated way that can lapse into slapstick at any time, and the setting in the ballet/music world is really nice, but mostly the art is a continuing revelation. Sundays are usually devoted to some sort of art abstraction with final panel punchline, often involving cats. And the story lines can be very gripping, indeed.

http://news.yahoo.com/comics/9-chickweed-lane#id=/comics/110227/cx_chickweed_ume...