Sunday Comics Survey from Feb. 8th Roanoke Times: Pastis Goes for the Punt

Greetings to our blog readers in New Zealand, Croatia and France.......

And, our deepest condolences to the friends and families of the three Syrian Muslim college students who killed in their Chapel Hill, NC, apartment yesterday.

On a lighter note, here are our ten favorite comic strips from the most recent edition of "The Roanoke Times," the daily newspaper of Roanoke, Va.

For starters, "Pearls Before Swine," a Stephan Pastis comic strip, makes fun of Norwegian lemmings one of whom goes for a pass thrown by another lemming and well, you can guess the rest. One of the surviving lemming says (SPOILER ALERT) that he will not be going to Disneyland. Our top image of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who won his fourth Super Bowl, is used for the strip, though he is not mentioned in 'Pearls.'

Third place goes to the single-panel gem "Speed Bump" which has a male angel being presumably nagged by his wife about reading a novel instead of going to bed. For this, we chose the late Daniel Foster Wallace novel "Infinite Jest," (pict. center) which is over 1,000 pages long! Perhaps, an inmate at Red Onion Prison in southwest Virginia is reading the novel. If so, they may actually finish it. A literary major at Brown University in Rhode Island, conversely, may not get to the end!

And, fifth place goes to "Agnes" who is questioning her teacher about the overload of homework (bottom image: an algebra calculator).

Here is our survey:

1) Pearls Before Swine

2) Doonesbury

3) Speed Bump

4) Get Fuzzy

5) Agnes

6) Garfield

7) Jump Start

8) Dilbert

9) Zits

10) For Better or For Worse

For last week's "Roanoke Times" comics survey, go to our sister blog http://www.nocturnalguy38.blogspot.com

Top Ten Comics from Sunday, Jan. 25th Roanoke Times: Get Fuzzy Finally Comes in First

Greetings to our blog readers in Estonia, Wales and India.

The images above are of 1) Jeb Bush (for "Doonesbury) ; 2) Danny DeVito (the boss) and the late Andy Kaufman on the '70s sitcom "Taxi" (for "Pearls Before Swine) and 3) Warren Beatty as "Dick Tracy" (for "Funky Winkerbean").

Kudos to Stephan Pastis of "Pearls Before Swine" for having the guts and gumption to make fun of his boss comics syndicator John Glynn!

"Get Fuzzy" usually takes places second place in our comics survey, but today, it finally made it to the top slot.

Here is our top ten from the latest Sunday edition of "The Roanoke Times:"

1) Get Fuzzy

2) Doonesbury (made fun of Jeb Bush)

3) Pearls Before Swine (made fun of Big Boss Man)

4) Speed Bump

5) Dilbert

6) Funky Winkerbean (featured 'Dick Tracy')

7) Agnes

8) Garfield

9) Jump Start

10) Red and Rover (featured Snoopy from "Peanuts"!)

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http://www.gocomics.com/explore/comics


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Our Favorite Sunday Comics from the Jan. 18th Roanoke Times: Sorry, No Hi and Lois

Greetings to our blog readers in Germany, Thailand and Ghana..........and to those of you who reside in Cong. Tim Huelskamp's (R-Kansas) congressional district, which is most of Kansas (not an endorsement)..................

Here are our ten favorite comic strips from the most recent Sunday edition of "The Roanoke Times," the daily newspaper for Roanoke, Va. As usual, "Hi and Lois" didn't make the cut, but some comic strips that we usually rank very low actually made the top ten!

The images are of 1) an octopus for "Speed Bump," this week Dave Coverly's single-panel strip focused on octopi flirting; 2) Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat" for "Zits," which got a surprisingly high third place from us, in this week's strip the teenage title character is wearing something akin to a Dr. Seuss Hat and 3) Rain, which correlates with Stephan Pasits' "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip where (SPOILER ALERT) it starts to rain as Rat is showing Pig how accurate iPhones are; we imagine if the late Steve Jobs were alive, he may have liked this strip.

Here is our top ten, as has been the case for many weeks in a row, "Get Fuzzy" finishes second:

1) Speed Bump

2) Get Fuzzy

3) Zits (highest ranking so far)

4) Pearls Before Swine

5) Agnes (highest ranking so far)

6) Mutts (highest ranking so far)

7) Garfield

8) Dilbert

9) For Better or For Worse (it made the top ten)

10) The Family Circus (it made the top ten too!)

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Top Ten Comic Strips from Sunday Dec. 28th Washington Post

Greetings to our blog readers in Singapore, Nepal and Taiwan..........

This week, we look at our top ten favorite Sunday comic strips from "The Washington Post;" once again, Stephan Pastis did brilliant work for "Pearls Before Swine," a comic strip which only ran in a few newspapers when it first started and is now even in "The News and Advance" in Lynchburg, Va. (we love making fun of Lynchburg here at 'The Daily Vampire').....In the latest Sunday strip, Pastis has Goat telling his mutual frenemy Rat that he can in his house as his house if getting painted. SPOILER ALERT: But, Goat has so many attached conditions that Rat just decides to check into a hotel anyway, hence the reason we have an image of an old motel postcard from Joplin, Missouri (top image). "Pearls" wins this week's comics survey for this amazing strip.

In a close second, we have "Lio" where the little boy who is the title character attempts to return a dragon in a long line for Christmas returns at some Sears or Target or Wal-Mart or Best Buy (you get the joke, I hope)......btw, a dragon from Wales is featured here in our middle image...

In third place, Scott Hilburn's "The Argyle Sweater" ponders what would happen if a fisherman working for Red Lobster found one of Spongebob Squarepants' friends (bottom image)....

Here is our top ten, that we are typing up as we listen to Peter Gabriel's great 1992 album "Us" which would listen to more of instead of vegging out to Billy Idol (forgive the Gen X humor)....

1. Pearls Before Swine

2. Lio

3. The Argyle Sweater

4. Foxtrot

5. WUMO

6. Dustin

7. Brewster Rockit: Space Guy

8. Reply All

9. Sherman's Lagoon

10. Prickly City

For this week's "Roanoke Times" comic strips survey, go to our sister blog's link here: http://www.politicscultureandotherwastesoft.blogspot.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/

http://www.gocomics.com/

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Comic Strips Survey from Sunday Roanoke Times (Oct. 19th edition)

Greetings to our blog readers in Australia, Uganda and Finland; and to our domestic friends in New Jersey, Utah, and Florida.

This week, we resume our look at our favorite comic strips from the Sunday, Oct. 19th edition of "The Roanoke Times," for our favorite strips from last week, visit our sister blog at http://www.politicscultureandotherwastesoft.blogspot.com

Our favorite comic strip of the week was "Pearls Before Swine," by Stephan Pastis which did a brilliant take on the Abbott and Costello (top image) skit "Who's on First," but in this satire, Rat asks Goat "Which band did Keith Moon play for?"; the answer is The Who, and all the shenanigans roll from there.

"Dilbert," which has substantially jumped in our rankings in recent weeks, features an office visit from a robot (center image) who actually doesn't speak in Scott Adams' strip, which finishes second in our survey this week.

The bronze medal goes to East German ice skater Katarina Witt (we were just trying to see if you were paying attention). Actually, the third place finisher is Dave Coverly's "Speed Bump," a single long panel strip that has some Tennessee raccoons (actually, we have no idea what they are from) digging up trash through backyard garbage cans as well as community recyclable bins that one might find in a hip college town like Boulder, Colorado.

Here is our top ten:

1) Pearls Before Swine

2) Dilbert

3) Speed Bump

4) Get Fuzzy

5) Non-Sequitir

6) Zits

7) Agnes

8) Doonesbury

9) Garfield

10) Jump Start

http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine

http://www.dilbert.com/

http://www.gocomics.com/speedbump

http://www.gocomics.com/getfuzzy

http://www.boulderweekly.com/

Top Ten Comics from the Sunday Roanoke Times: We Like the Censored Pearls Before Swine

Today, comic strip artist Stephan Pastis said the latest edition of his strip "Pearls Before Swine," which made fun of extreme political correctness (the example he gave was when stewardesses starting being referred to as flight attendant), was not shown in "The Washington Post" yesterday.

But, the strip, which is hardly as political as "Mallard Fillmore" on the right or "Doonesbury" on the left, was our top pick before we knew that the strip was removed. While we noticed two different strips for "Pearls Before Swine," we suspected that it was something Pastis had deliberately done himself.

At any rate, here are the top ten strips from this past week. They include not just 'Pearls,' but also Dave Coverly's "Speed Bump," which asked what it would be like if inmates at places like the Dan River Correctional Facility in Yanceyville, NC, had yearbooks, a "Doonesbury" swipe at the right-wing dogma haunting the GOP and a satire of workplace politics in "Dilbert," where the big boss man proclaims: "The key to success is ignoring the people who say it can't be done." The boss is immediately questioned.

Here is our top ten:

1. "Pearls Before Swine" (the reason for the vintage for the Turkish Airlines flight attendants photo at the top)

2. "Speed Bump" (the reason why we have a scene with Clint Eastwood from "Escape from Alcatraz.")

3. "Doonesbury" (the reason for the Republican boxer shorts)

4. "Dilbert"

5. "Funky Winkerbean"

6. "Jump Start"

7. "Get Fuzzy"

8. "Agnes"

9. "Zits"

10. "The Mutts"


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http://www.doonesbury.com

http://www.dilbert.com

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http://www.roanoke.com