Most Overrated Comic Strip:

The American comic strip once swam proudly through the central currents of twentieth-century popular culture, but it has by now been reduced to little more than a guppy floating in a media food chain with Hollywood sharks at the top. At the dusk of the twentieth century, very few even know or care about the medium enough to overrate it. In fact most of the desultory comic strips fighting for air in the cramped ghetto of today’s comics pages are barely worth rating at all.

Take Dilbert , for example. Scott Adams’s drawing has been politely described as minimalist, but he obviously doesn’t hold a candle to such past comics masters of minimalism as, say, Crockett Johnson ( Barnaby ), Otto Soglow ( The Little King ), and Jules Feiffer. Adams’s art is soulless, bankrupt, and incompetent. In that respect I suppose it might be argued that form follows function, since those are the subjects of Adams’s strip. It’s not the drawing that has made Dilbert popular. I guess it’s the humor (which I personally find formulaic and as flat as the artwork). More precisely it’s the strip’s tone, a flat, depressed whine that strikes a responsive chord in office drones. It safely transmutes the reader’s anger at stupid bosses from revolutionary impulse into a perfunctory laugh that allows them to continue on in quiet desperation. All too often popular culture is more interesting as sociology than as art, and Dilbert is hardly worse than Cathy or Garfield . All are symptoms of the sorry state of today’s newspaper strips.

In a more interesting and more interested world, one might better pin the tag of “overrated” on another embattled wage slave, Dilbert’s distant cousin Dagwood Bumstead. Chic Young’s Blondie , one of the longestlived and most popular comic strips in history, also tended toward formulaic humor after its earliest continuities, and Young also made a career out of offering his middle-class readers momentary feelings of superiority along with a chuckle of recognition. Young’s gag sense and drawing were models of machinelike efficiency and craft, but though he was awesomely competent by today’s standards, his drawing hardly came up to the cartooning virtuosity of some contemporaries like Billy DeBeck ( Barney Google ), Frank King ( Gasoline Alley ), or Cliff Sterrett ( Polly and Her Pals ), and his humor was hardly ever as surprising as, say, Elzie Segar ( Thimble Theater ) or Milt Gross ( Nize Baby ). Still, the patina of time serves Chic Young’s work well; the strip towers like a monument of wit and artistry over most of today’s offerings.

Most Underrated Comic Strip:

My reservations about Blondie have to do