10 comics your newspaper should carry (part 2)

All right, let's wrap this thing up. Last night's entries mean absolutely nothing, because these are the five comic strips that every newspaper should take a look at!

5) The Duplex

When I first stumbled upon The Duplex, I thought it was by one of the Shoebox greeting card artists. I'm still not convinced it isn't, but the humour is better than what my first impression of it was. Very good at the sort of strip where you enter the final panel with no idea of what the punchline will be.

4) Frog Applause

I'm going to call the Frog Applause style of humour 'postmodern'. I'm reasonably sure it isn't in fact postmodern, but it gets the idea across nicely. 90% of all FA comics follow this trend - a character (there's roughly a dozen regulars) offering up one line of dialogue in their trademark manner. It's something I've never seen before, and it's pulled off very well.

3) Brewster Rocket: Space Guy

'Idiots in space' is not exactly a new theme - think Buck Rogers, Mars Attacks! or even Captain Star. However, it's pulled off very well here - the incompetence is divided among everyone equally. Bonus points for having a recent week dedicated to Cliff mediating a dispute among the donut people - the glazed were fighting with the powdered.

2) State of the Union

This is what I was talking about yesterday, when I mentioned 'no more serious political comments'. There a 50% chance that SotU is in fact the right-wing answer to Candorville, Doonesbury and the like. However, there's also a 50% chance that SotU is in fact a brilliant parody of what such a strip would look like - the right-wing rhetoric is so strong at times that I can't fathom anybody seriously believing it.

1) Hubert and Abby

Hands down, the funniest comic strip I have ever stumbled across. Abby is an overworked nurse, Hubert is...nobody's sure what he is, but he has a five-year-old's sense of not knowing how the world works (i.e. 'we should start a family business and live off the profits' is considered solid retirement planning), and Turtle is a turtle. That's really all you need to know.

There you have it - the final five comic strips your newspaper should carry, according to me. Maybe you haven't learned something, but at least you got a laugh or five out of it.

--Ryan