> As far as I'm concerned, C&H is the best comic strip of all time.

If I were forced to answer, I'd probably say C&H, too. It's hilarious, and the artwork is phenomenal (unheard of these days).

Of the other modern strips, I also like Dilbert (so hysterical it makes up for the poor artwork) and Rose Is Rose (fantastic artwork and real warmth -- this is what Family Circus would approach if it were the least bit *good*). I like For Better Or For Worse for its humanity. I really like the Far Side for its riotously twisted humor.

For older strips, I like Li'l Abner almost as much as I like Calvin & Hobbes. If you like comic strips and haven't read this one, I suggest you find one of the books immediately. The Kitchen Sink Press began a project some years ago where they would publish the *complete* Li'l Abner in something like 38 volumes. I know they got quite far into it, and I assume they finished. Each volume has a *TON* of commentary and photographs and anecdotes in the beginning. This strip is hilarious. It also maintains a story line over many successive strips -- I'm not sure I'd have liked it as much if I had to read it day-by-day back when it was running, but reading them in book format, where you can read the entire stories at your own pace, it's great. This is a brilliant strip. It was also the inspiration for the Redneck dialect on the Dialectizer page. The main characters are from a southern hick town, and they all talk like that.

Another great oldie is Krazy Kat. It's an acquired taste for those of us raised on modern strips where the standard formula of setup-build-punchline is subconsciously required in each comic strip. The humor in Krazy Kat is, to use the word yet again in this post, hilarious, but by today's standards it's highly unconventional. On the face of it, it's obvious and overbearing (one of the characters is a mouse that likes to throw bricks at people's heads), but the "real" humor is the subtlety just underneath the surface. Some of the strips remind me of the type of humor in old New Yorker cartoons, but I'm not sure how far that analogy can carry. Anyway, in terms of artwork, it may be the greatest strip of all time. Bill Watterson named it one of his greatest inspirations.

Then there are strips that used to be great but aren't so much anymore. Blondie and Charlie Brown come to mind -- I can't tell you how many decades these strips have been around. In their present form, they are only just "ok." In their heydays, wow.