Copyright © 2005 Stephan Pastis
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I have never looked at "Frazz" in my daily comics perusal, but this drum beater for "Calvin and Hobbes" overlooked one of the great contemporary comic strips: "Pearls Before Swine." The guileless Pig, the cynical Rat, the rational Zebra, and the wacko Crocodiles (Zebra's next-door neighbors) are creations of sheer genius. I laughed out loud at this AM's strip (above). Run, don't walk, to this Web site — "Pearls Before Swine". If this is (fair & balanced) lunacy, so be it.
[x Slate]
Calvin and Hobbes: The last great newspaper comic strip.
By Chris Suellentrop
Ten years ago Bill Watterson, the creator of "Calvin and Hobbes," left newspaper cartooning for painting. Since then, no new comic strip has matched the quality, longevity, or cultural dominance of Watterson's daily drawings about a boy and his tiger. There remain good strips, such as Jef Mallett's "Frazz;" acclaimed strips, such as Aaron McGruder's "Boondocks;" and venerable strips, such as Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury." But these days, the best-selling comics books tend to be either graphic novels or hardbound anthologies of the greats, such as Fantagraphics Books' The Complete "Peanuts". Peanuts invented the newspaper comic strip as we know it: Charles Schulz scrapped big, colorful melodrama and substituted a tiny series of boxes featuring spare drawings of characters who tell jokes and muse on the meaning of life. With October's publication of the new—and best-selling—23-pound, 1,440-page hardback anthology The Complete "Calvin and Hobbes," it's become apparent that, just as Charles Schulz was the first master of the modern newspaper comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes' Bill Watterson was likely the last.
Chris Suellentrop, a writer in Washington, D.C., is a former Slate staffer.
Copyright © 2005 Slate
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