Hey guys--I was taking a break from getting ready to prepare for beginning my neuro paper, sipping on Seattle's Best and reading the Cornell Daily Sun, when I came across the comics section. At Cornell we enjoy:
1. The Boondocks, by Aaron "Heavily Oppressed" MacGruder
2. Doonesbury, by Garry "I Never Actually *Draw* the President So Technically I Could Be Describing Something Else" Trudeau
3. Dilbert, by Scott Adams (a nod from the Daily Sun to Cornell engineers who don't work in cubicles and thus can't really relate to the strip at all)
4. (some other, forgettable strip?)
5 and most importantly!. Mr. Gnu, by Travis Dandro. Sometimes including Read It And Weep, also by Travis Dandro.
There's a fairly obvious political slant here, but that doesn't really bother me. I've already been indoctrinated into Ivory Tower liberalism and I don't notice it anymore. What *does* bother me, more than basically anything else in my life right now, is the continued publication of Mr. Gnu and Read It. Thus, the quick question I wanted to ask: have you guys even heard of this? Is Mr. Gnu a nationwide waste of trees that would have better served us by continuing to produce oxygen, or does he exist only at Cornell? (If you haven't seen it, the title links to an example strip. Ha ha! The meats are escaping! Thanks Travis.) Meanwhile, Read It And Weep is the same frame of a sad boy and squirrel staring at each other, following the format: Frame 1. Boy says something depressing. Frame 2. No words. Same picture. Frame 3. Squirrel says something equally depressing, or on good days, identical to Frame 2. I didn't link a comic because I don't want you to see it. Anyway, I used to complain back home that Grand Avenue or Garfield were among the worst comic strips I could even conceive of, but I guess college really expands your horizons. Travis Dandro is probably the reason my school has that reputation for depressed kids--visitors read the Sun and extrapolate.
End Note: By the way, if you're also procrastinating, feel free to post your comic lineup too, because I'm pretty curious, and it might take the edge off this bitterness. In fact I kind of wish people who haven't posted for a while would just check in and say how they're doing because I haven't heard from a bunch of you in months. Ken out.
8 comments:
Despite the fact that I actually paid $12 to get a number of comics sent to my e-mail for the next year, I can't remember the last time I read them.
At any rate, I've never heard of Mr. Gnu or Read It. But the worst comic strip is Curtis, and I think we all know this.
Nah man, Family Circus takes the cake. But before we were relieved of it, Cathy made me hate humanity every morning.
Our newspaper doesn't run syndicated cartoons, we just have two student made ones. I think they're pretty impressive, don't know what JB thinks.
C'mon Ken, Mr. Gnu isn't that bad... Okay, maybe it is. But there are some days that aren't horrible...
so i wanted to see what you were complaining about so i read all of the ones on the mr. gnu that were listed on that site, and its true most are horrible, but there were a few occasional ones that made me laugh, such as ordinary man:
http://www.mr-gnu.com/web/gnucomics_ordman.htm
And i also read all of the "Read it and Weep" and surprisingly enough i thought that most of them were funny in some sort of way...not everybody's peice of cake but some were pretty funny, 1) because of the fact that its the same picture just diffrent wording the entire time, and 2) some of the stuff they say is so completely random that you just have to laugh. but that was my two cents
as for the worst comic strip i think Family Circus, Curtis, Elderberries, Sally Fourth, Safe Havens, and Ziggy are among the worst
the best would probably be Fox Trot, and i cant really think of any other great ones right now...
p.s. can you tell that i am procrastinating?
okay, elderberries is gold, and you have to love safe havens because the kids are 1) actually progressing thru life rather than trapped in a time warp and 2) our age and have moved from grade school thru high school and onto college exactly as we have
and I don't know what I'm doing, because I think it ceases to be procrastinating when the deadline came and went seven hours ago. but it's okay, because the last time I pulled an all-nighter was like, two whole nights ago.
Box 1. Cathy: "If I eat another potato chip, I won't let myself go to the beach."
Box 2. Pause
Box 3. Fifty empty bags of potato chips
Box 4. Cathy: "I hate men"
Actually, I think I just topped every single strip of that pathetic cartoon. Maybe Dr. Gorman was right and I should be a cartoonist (which was not the most confidance-building thing to hear with an electricity and magnetism AP test coming. Chris Pozzi, you would do well at an investment firm. John Burke, patent law. Michael Rhoads, missile technology. Ben, I think you'd be a good cartoonist.)
I knew it. "Travis Dandro" is just another one of Alex's pseudonyms. I just didn't want to say anything.
And come on, Rachel. Sally Forth is much, much better than Cathy. Plus, she's not submissive at all, she has a real job and she often says dry, witty things to her husband Ted. It might just be my thing where I'm attracted to women married to guys named Ted though.
This isn't really related but I also have a crush on Kim Possible. There, I said it.
ken, who doesnt have a crush on Kim Possible? I also think that the wife in Hi and Lois (lois then?) is pretty cute. Blondie aint all that bad either...
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