Take Five: Cool Comics Websites

[Take Five. Every Friday, Fire on the Mountain picks a category and lists five cool things in it. It's up to you, dear reader, to add your own in the Comments section. Just click on the word "comments" at the bottom of the piece and you're off to the races.]

I like funny books. I like daily comic strips in newspapers. I like editorial cartoons. If you have not the slightest interest in any of these, this Take Five will not set your heart to going pitty-pat. Better luck next time…

The less mature and cultured readers here will doubtless enjoy the following websites, if you don’t already know them. And please add your own recommendations in the comments section.

TAKE FIVE

Keith Knight

A while ago, FotM featured a cartoon by the excellent Keith Knight. If you didn’t bother then to go to his website, The K Chronicles, or if or did so and forgot to bookmark it, here it is again. With the teeveefication of Boondocks, Keef is, for my money, the best Black daily/weekly cartoonist working.

Superdickery.com

This amazing site is a compendium of real comic book covers (and a few panels, like the one illustrating this post), mainly from the ‘50s and ‘60s which are unintentionally hysterical. The site’s name comes from the dozens of covers in which Superman disses or ignores danger looming for Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and others, leading to the official site motto: Superman Is A Dick.

Comics Curmudgeon

Originally this site was titled “I Read The Comics So You Don’t Have To.” The dedicated blogger here, Josh, reads the daily strips and comments on them in a splendidly cranky and enjoyable style. You may think gunning down the likes of Marmaduke and Mary Worth is shooting fish in a barrel, but you’ll gain new insights here, trust me. With this kind of frequency, there’re bound to be some duds, but if you read the comics everyday, you should check this out.

Doonesbury

You can loathe Doonesbury all you want. For starters Garry Trudeau is insanely successful and popular, which makes him easy to hate. For another, he’s a damn liberal—and some would say that’s only on his good days. His cartooning style lacks the skill and the close observation of character that, say, Lynn Johnson brings to For Better or Worse.

Against that I’ll put two things. First, his strips comprise a fascinating political and social history of the US over the last 35 years. In the early ‘80s I started to assemble from tag sales and the like a complete run of the Doonesbury books, but the cost went up as the number of strips went down and now you can evidently get the whole archive online for 17 bucks a year. The only thing comparable is Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd books from the ‘30s and ‘40s (to learn more, read the comments toward the end on this blog post).

Second, his strips featuring first BD and then a whole crew of troops sent to Iraq, some now struggling with rehab for wounds and PTSD, have won him a loyal following from troops in the Middle East. His website features a letters column called “The Sandbox” which offers a real window on what the occupying army is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

comics.com

With the decision of Bill Watterson to retire Calvin and Hobbes at the end of 1995, comic artists lost their most powerful advocate in the struggle with daily newspapers. Since then, the space allocated to strips in the daily papers has continued to shrink and reruns of old chestnuts like Peanuts take up space that newer artists lust after. While the Internet threatens the future of newspapers themselves, how it will treat the comic form is as yet unclear, though this website offers one possible future. You can (with a little patience) follow your favorite mainstream strips for free, and sample some that haven’t made it into your local paper yet.

Read more!