Basket.

Rumours that this space will no longer be updated are without factual basis. Life has simply been a tepid routine over the past couple of weeks. At least teaching threw up new, although not always (or often) pleasant, surprises most days.

I've been thinking about the last time I actually laughed at a newspaper comic, and I realise that it has been a goodly number of years. In fact, our newspaper comics were probably never funny - just that once upon a time I was unthinking enough to find mirth in them.

Casting an eye on the Life! section on any given day of the week (Sundays excepted), we find the (allegedly) funny pages a polyglot collection. We have Non-Sequiteur, Bizarro, Baby Blues, Peanuts, Stone Soup, Foxtrot, Get Fuzzy and Garfield. Two are already re-runs (Foxtrot and Peanuts) and one is written by, in my opinion, a complete hack who tries and fails with equal consistency at being amusing (Bizarro). Garfield was, sadly, last funny about a decade ago (I'm old enough to remember its glory days) and Stone Soup is at best tepid. That leaves as the best three Non-Sequiteur, Baby Blues and Get Fuzzy - the only ones able to get an occasional chuckle out of me.

On Sundays, our selection is broadened. At least weekend Foxtrot is something new, Zits is pretty good, Lio always delivers traditional but excellent absurd-situational humour and Sherman's Lagoon rarely fails. But crap like The Fifth Wave (an extremely cheap Far Side knockoff), Pickles (which rarely has a joke at all, never mind a half-decent one), The Wizard of ID (what the fuck is that trash) and our very own painfully unfunny Chew on It are mere wastes of space.

If anything, The New Paper is even worse at it. Weekdays offer just three strips, The Concrete Jungle, Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes - whose author stopped creating new strips in 1996. Beside these comic strips is a very dubious humour section often consisting of rehashed jokes that began making their rounds via chain email when email was the new digital medium. On weekends, we get, oh joy, For Better or For Worse, which once upon a time was actually fairly decent but is now sappy and limply unrealistic.

All in all, it is a dire collection. At least Cathy, perhaps the worst comic ever created (nothing is good about it. Not the art, not the dialogue and definitely not the pitiful attempts at humour) is gone, but that sort of consolation is tantamount to telling a deaf-mute with painful cancer that at least he doesn't have AIDS. It doesn't fucking help one bit.

What I find most infuriating is actually the re-runs. Especially Peanuts. I know it was a popular comic, and still is, but I've never seen the point to it. I have never found it funny, it has never touched me, and I have never ever been able to relate to it. And I have been coming across (note: not actually reading) Peanuts since the early 1990s. I'm not American and I never will be, I find baseball one of the stupidest sports ever invented with American football a close second, I do not fly kites and am not interested in doing so ever and I find little point in a dog pretending to be various historical pastiches. Nor has the simplistic art ever impressed me. In short, I've never found Peanuts a good comic. And yet, for fifteen years now it has been in the papers. When the fuck is that going to change?

Calvin and Hobbes, on the other hand, is a slightly different case. Because I love that comic. I grew up reading it and I think it is a great loss that the creator has decided not to produce anymore. It was a truly great comic strip that could be slapstick-funny, ironic, sardonic and touching. The last strip, in particular, is uforgettable (it was the one I posted for New Year's this year). But to see it continue every day in the papers is a glaring sign to me of SPH's laziness. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have read every single Calvin and Hobbes strip ever publicly published. There are not that many, unfortunately. Yet rather than find fresh material, SPH simply recycles by now at least decade-old strips. It is appalling, ad unbecoming of basic journalistic standards.

Garfield, though not re-runs, is a similar case. It is another comic I grew up with, and I have to say that Garfield strips these days are a very pale copy of what they used to be. While old strips used to have very varied settings with actual interesting developments and visual humour, Garfield these days usually consists of Jon posing an insecure personal question to his cat and Garfield giving a weakly witty comeback that is occasionally a pun. It is utter crap, especially compared to what it used to be. The creator just seems to have gotten lazy and is coasting on the undoubtedly immense profits from nearly thirty years of unbroken popularity.

Then we have the utter abominations. Bizarro fucking sucks. It makes me really angry to think that people are making money off it because it is so crap that only Cathy is worse, and that is saying quite a bit. Pickles rarely even contains a joke. I don't even know how they get away with that. Likewise the Wizard of ID. Chew on It offers occasional poor satire and very little real amusement; but TalkingCock is miles better. For Better or For Worse - less said about that, the better. I guess I will stick to webcomics.

While I understand that newspaper comics tend to have more restrictions placed upon them than webcomics, the gulf is still incomparably vast. S*P is head and shoulders above even the very best our newspapers can offer, although that isn't actually saying much. Sad to say, it is much better drawn, too. Scarygoround does a superb job of the traditionally British impossible-situations-in-mundane-small-town-life absurdist humour, and PBF fills surrealist needs. None of the newspaper comics offer anything even close.

Then again, I wonder, who the fuck reads newspaper comics anyway?