Comic Strip Survey: For the First Time, We Check Out the Baltimore Sun

Greetings to our blog readers in Hong Kong, Turkey, and Germany........

This week for the first time in the eight-year history of this blog, we look at Sunday comic strips from "The Baltimore Sun." We were hoping to see "Zippy the Pinhead," and as it turns out, yesterday Bill Griffith's comic strip was truly a piece of art. Today, he made vintage fun of Donald Trump; even Bao Bao, the panda at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., isn't such an easy target.

Omigosh, we just made a major faux paux as it is considered rude to mention Washington, D.C., when one is talking about Baltimore. Fortunately, when I briefly met John Waters, a cult film director from Charm City, in 2002, I did not make this mistake. But, I only talked to him for about eight seconds, which is how long I spent talking to Willie Nelson backstage at a Farm Aid concert  around that same time.

"The Baltimore Sun" features several comic strips which we don't see in the other newspapers we survey, like "The Washington Post" (whoops again!), including "Mother Goose and Grimm," "The Middletons," and "One Big Happy." All three of those strips made our big list.

First place goes to "Foxtrot," which features the family going out for a Sunday picnic at a state park in a place like The Humpback Bridge State Park in Covington, Va., and they encounters all sorts of natural elements likes ticks (top image), poison ivy, and snakes. Of course, in Florida, they would also have to worry about alligators.

Third place goes to "Speed Bump," in which a judge (center image) tweets his verdict, somehow we can't imagine Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas doing such a thing (ahhh, that's the third D.C. reference).

And, in sixth place, we have "Mother Goose and Grimm," which ironically has a nursery rhyme themed strip (given its title) as Humpty Dumpty falls off his great wall. We actually didn't get the Obamacare gag (and, that makes four), but we liked the strip enough as it is.

Now, let's give this list which you can perhaps read on the Metro after you've come back from seeing that new Woody Allen movie at the Landmark E-Street Cinema...........now, we are up to five!:

1) Foxtrot

2) Pearls Before Swine

3) Speed Bump

4) Dilbert

5) Get Fuzzy

6) Mother Goose and Grimm

7) The Middletons

8) One Big Happy

9) Garfield

10) Zits

http://www.baltimoresun.com/

http://baltimore.org/

http://www.visitmaryland.org/

http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot