Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

June 4, 2013

I’ve gone on record about my love of comic strips. Classic strips like Popeye and modern strips Peanuts, I love them all. We are living, in fact, in somewhat of a modern golden age of comic strips. Yes, newspapers are dying, but the daily medium has in our era produced some of the best of the genre: Mutts, Peanuts, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, and Bloom County, among others. In no particular order, those are some of the best strips ever written and sterling examples of the art.

Which is why I was so happy to see this recent Mutts strip:

Aside from comic books, Mad Magazine was one of the prime influences of my youth- and truth be told, my adulthood as well.

But why else do I love that Mutts strip? It brought back to me one of my favorite Peanuts strips. In this arc, Charlie Brown had been hit on the head with a baseball during one of his team’s games and he was experiencing some… side effects.

I love Mad Magazine. In fact, in this very blog, I was the subject of my very own MAD Magazine tribute, The Mad Magazine Three-Minute Interview.

Alfred E. Neuman is, no doubt about it, as big a cultural icon as Mickey Mouse or Superman, as recognizable as Popeye or Bugs Bunny, and equally likely to stay forever in our collective consciousness. You can argue (as both myself and Allan Keyes would) that Mad is no longer even a shade of its former self, but you cannot argue the impact Mad Magazine has had on our culture. And as long as modern classics like Mutts are around, it is not going to fade away any time soon.

Tags: Alfred E. Neuman, bmj2k, bmj2k.com, comic strips, comics, Mad, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. BTR, Mutts, Peanuts, Saturday Comics, What me worry?