Back in college, a friend of mine who used to sketch “I, Argus Aardvark” for the Harvard Crimson
figured out why Dilbert’s Sunday strips suck harder than they do the
rest of the week: they’re basically a 4-panel strip with 4 filler
panels to get them into standard Sunday format.

Try this sometime: Cut out every other panel from a Sunday Dilbert.
Same strip — better, in fact — for half the price. (In the case of today’s, snip panels 1, 3, 6, and 7). Why can’t Adams
take only what he needs, one row, the way Get Fuzzy does? I guess Breathed wasn’t completely right about the future of the comics: more page share = better marketing for the merchandising = more profits for the syndicate.

Watterson was absolutely right in bucking the constraints of the
Sunday pages. Today a handful (but sadly, only a handful) of strips
like Zits and Non Sequitur
have benefited from his rebellion. Too bad, on the flip side, we can’t
shove Dilbert back into the smaller amount of space he actually
deserves.

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Coincidence of the day: Garfield and Mother Goose & Grimm have very different takes on the pet-owner question, “Do you love me?” Not to belabor my Garfield-bashing,
but Jim Davis, or whoever/whatever’s responsible for that waste of
color ink, can’t even keep his characters in-character. (Perhaps not a coincidence? A commentator here identifies the inker for Garfield as the same as MG&G.)

Like many folks, I like to read the “funnies” first thing in the
morning, because there’s no better way to wake up than to have your
intelligence insulted. As everyone knows, the mass retirement of Bill Watterson, Gary Larson, and Berke Breathed left the comix a wasteland of insipid banality, with few exceptions. This morning’s Sunday Globe slammed me in the face with back-to-back Janet “jokes” from Doonesbury (who stopped being funny when Reagan stopped being president — I think the ’89 retirees had something there) and Foxtrot. This, after several weeks of being bombarded by references to the Superbowl non-event from strips ranging from Jump Start to Mallard Fillmore (surprise).

Dear comic strip “artists”: “wardrobe malfunction” jokes stopped being
funny sometime around 5pm, February 2. Yes, I know it takes longer to
turn around your Sunday strip. Maybe that’s why you shouldn’t do
current events? Thanks.

To finish up today’s roundup of the Globe’s Sunday comics:

• Ironic that Dilbert and the revived Opus (which the Globe kindly does not preface with a title and author) should be next to each other, considering Breathed’s kind words
  for Adams. I’m still holding my breath (er, no pun intended) for Opus
  to break through with the kind of humor Bloom County was famous for.
• Garfield must die. Die. Die. Die.
• Jeffy of “The Family Circus” turns seven. Again. At this rate he’ll hit puberty in 2130 and this undead comic strip from hell will finally be laid to rest.