Once Original Now Common / Comic Strips

• Some comic strips from the 19th century and early 1900s and 1910s rely a lot on slow-paced Slapstick and running gags that are quite low-brow for someone in search of anything more meaningful. Not to mention a lot of stereotypes about women and ethnic minorities that nowadays come across as horribly offensive. And yet, they were the first, and thus, opened the path for other newspaper strips many years later to follow.
• Before Blondie (1930), suburban humor was practically unheard of (in the 1930s however, suburbs themselves were still in their infancy).
• B.C.: When it started in the late 1950s, its use of blatant anachronisms was fresh and original. Characters used modern slang and Stone Age equivalents of modern technology, and this was a source of much of the humor. Over the decades, this approach became the fallback for comic strips set in the past, which hurt B.C.'s reputation. The strip's legacy became even more obscured in The '80s, during which the cartoonist became a born-again Christian and began using the strip as a soapbox for his fundamentalist religious beliefs.
• Cathy, during its final years in The '90s and The 00s, was criticised as being "generic", running off of stereotypes, and being the subject of mean parodies. Never mind that the strip was originally created in The '70s — very few characters who were single and working existed in fiction, and Cathy was a figure many single women could relate to, much like The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The fact that the strip was also actually written by a woman who had work expierence, was also something that was practically unheard of at the time.
  • To put it into perspective, at one point, Cathy comic strips were as common a sight on office walls as Dilbert.
• Doonesbury: Many subsequent comic strips have imitated its dry wit. Indirectly if not directly, it had more influence on web comics than anything other than manga.
  • Doonesbury was the first newspaper comic to regularly have two punchlines in the last panel: a primary joke, and a secondary one which built off the first. It was special at the time. Now almost every comic does it, making those old strips seem run-of-the-mill instead of groundbreaking.
  • In 1985 (after Garry Trudeau returned from a sabbatical), the strip took a Darker and Edgier turn. One decade later, many strips centering on (or simply made by) "boomers" underwent Cerebus Syndrome, like For Better or for Worse, Bloom County (and its sequels, Outlands and Opus), Funky Winkerbean and even Calvin and Hobbes late in the strip's life. Didn't help that most "boomers"' lives had turned quite sour by then.
• Because geeky webcomics like Penny Arcade are omnipresent on the internet today, it's easy to forget how unique FoxTrot's relatively frequent forays into geek and pop culture in the early 1990s were, especially in comparison to what was in the funnies at the time — even before the strip hit Reverse Cerebus Syndrome and turned the nerdy references up to eleven, it still had a great deal of nerdiness for a "middle-class suburban family" strip.
• The Far Side by Gary Larson. The comic strip's format has been imitated so much and so badly over the years that it's kind of hard to appreciate his originals and just how groundbreaking they were.
  • And controversial as well. The Black Comedy in it that seems extremely tame today? That was extremely uncommon in newspaper comics at the time, and got a lot of bad reactions from the Moral Guardians. Nowadays, even the rejected strips seem mild compared to what you'd see on TV or the internet in later years.
  • The humor doesn't even seem as surreal anymore as it was at the time but only because so many humorists were inspired by it and have taken the weirdness still further.
• Garfield. Yes, believe it or not, some of the style of the strip was considered risky at the time, and the published books of the series were some of the first to utilize the 'mini-sized' formats that many newspaper comic collections use today. Oh yeah, and quite a few of the strips in the early years actually were controversial, and Jim Davis received many complaints for one of the gags he pulled. ("Shake it, Annette," for instance.) A lot of younger people would think you were joking if you told them this fact.
• Bloom County: While it's still considered one of the best comic strips ever, the many creator-driven strips done since then (Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Non Sequitur, Zits, Get Fuzzy, Liō, Pearls Before Swine and Red and Rover) have made it look rather passé nowadays.
  • Subverted. Its incredibly large amount of references didn't have much effect on the funny pages, but most popular TV and film comedies nowadays are full of these.
• Calvin and Hobbes. When it first appeared in newspapers in 1985, it was rare both in comic strips and in popular fiction generally for parents to be portrayed as anything more than slightly exasperated at the antics of their children. Many readers wrote in to complain that Calvin's parents' attitudes toward their son made them mean, perhaps even abusive. Ten years later, creator Bill Watterson could remark with some satisfaction that TV sitcoms with smart-mouthed kids with many being more mischievous than Calvin and sarcastic parents had become the norm - and Calvin's parents now looked tolerant and even loving.
  • One thing to keep in mind, which puts almost everything on this page in perspective: in his 10th-anniversary collection and its DVD Commentary, Bill Watterson remarks that he was the first newspaper cartoonist ever to get away with using the word "booger".
• Similarly, Adam@home is usually considered to be a copycat of According to Jim (it doesn't help that Adam and Laura look pretty much like Jim and Cheryl). Ironically, the strip had been exploiting this premise for over a decade by the time the TV show premiered.
• Peanuts was innovative in two ways: Because of the limited space, Charles Schulz had to rely on an ultra-simplistic art style with exaggerated facial expressions. He even developed an emotional shorthand, most famously the "eye parentheses" representing shock. A few decades later, newspapers would run so many comic strips that pretty much every cartoonist had to make his illustrations understandable in the few square inches he received. The second innovation was that Peanuts was one of the darker portrayals of childhood at the time: All of the children in the series were dysfunctional to some degree and fought frequently among themselves. Comics like The Family Circus were the main competition during the series' early years, making Peanuts something of a South Park of its time.
  • Peanuts was also a pioneer in the trope of children thinking and talking like adults. Without it, no Calvin and Hobbes, Simpsons or South Park, among many others. (Given how old-fashioned Charles Schulz was, one has to wonder whether he would consider anything approaching that a good thing, though, given the Menace Decay with Animated Shock Comedy boy characters.)
• For Better or for Worse might look like just another strip starring an angst-ridden mother who's overwhelmed by seemingly endless housework and cursed with an oaf husband and needy children who seem to live in fear of admitting that she's a person, too. But back in 1979, it was pretty much revolutionary to admit that yes, happy homemakers were anything but content with the rut in which they found themselves. In addition, it averted Comic-Book Time. Most comics even today do not do this. Along with Funky Winkerbean, this made For Better or for Worse really stand out.
  • Additionally, the strip touched upon topics such as divorce, homosexuality, child abuse, growing up, how the First Nations people are treated by Canada (which is something Canada still largely sweeps under the rug), sexual assault, deformity, cancer & chronic illness, strokes, and even death. These issues were largely ignored in most comic strips which mostly kept the "G" rating. Since then, arcs that are A Very Special Episode are commonplace in comics, making For Better or For Worse look somewhat melodramatic or Narmy.
    • To put one other thing into perspective, one early strip (in 1980) depicted a doctor wearing a yarmulke. Johnston mentioned she got a lot of letters of praise for that, as well as a lot of letters of criticism. Most people these days would ask what the issue was, though some might think the fact the person was a doctor might be the issue.
  • Some of the early strips depicted John and Elly fighting over petty things, and neither side being in the right. Sometimes, arguments broke out because of John being insensitive (and not just Innocently Insensitive), or Elly overreacting. These days, a modern audience would prefer for both sides to have some kind of a point, and would view this as World of Jerkass.

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