By one definition, “4th wall comic refers to a comic book where characters become aware of their own fictional existence and address the audience directly. This concept, known as the Fourth Wall, separates the characters from the readers, allowing them to comment on the narrative and its limitations.” By that definition, not all of these fit. In some of these, it’s that the cartoonist lets us acknowledge the cartoonist’s existence, while the characters remain unaware. Is there a separate term that should be used for that?
It’s interesting that the white character in this comic from 1976 is named Nate. Much later, Nate Bargatze will have a similar theme in this now well-known SNL skit:
On a serious note, it is always worth pondering the end of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Speech:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Dirk the Daring sends this in: “I had to go to the comment because I didn’t understand it, fortunately it seems to be explained there. The old phones I get, look at the date, but the “Ewww” didn’t make much sense.”
Cleats is in reruns; this comic appeared on July 4 some years ago.
Flagging the third one as a comic fan’s OY, but need to do two earlier ones in the series as a setup:
Mitch4 sends this in:
And while we’re on the subject of Freud, Mitch4 also sends this:
Freud’s unconscious cravings had more to do with sex, if I recall correctly, but there are other unconscious cravings.
JMcAndrew sends this in: “Why does he have the giant poster of a fly to begin with? Is he going to start eating anything vaguely associated with fruit? This isn’t a comic I normally read.”
JMcAndrew sends these two in. “Not only does this comic end with a rabbit about to hook up with a shoe but it also manages to slip in a joke about the title character from the movie “Babe”in a relationship with “Oscar Mayer””
“There’s also this one suggesting a relationship between Madonna and Sandra Bernhard and OJ Simpson with Lorena Bobbitt”
The first “Peanuts Day” retrospective ten weeks ago seemed to be reasonably popular, so here is another collection of Peanuts references and parodies, in honor of what would have been Charles M. Schulz’s 102nd birthday.
… This “Cleats” strip was published early in the 2004 season, back when Kevin Brown was still a popular new acquisition for the Yankees, months before he became the notorious losing pitcher in game 7 of the ACLS (which at one point the Yankees had led 3:0). Kevin Brown retired just 16 months later, before the start of the 2006 season; I think Charlie Brown would have understood how he felt.
… Only one of those three characters on the wall is actually missing.
Mark Parisi frequently references Peanuts in “Off the Mark“. To his credit, he produces extremely accurate renditions of all the characters:
Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it:
Various cartoonists seem to enjoy letting Charlie Brown have his moments of retroactive glory:
Snoopy finally gets his due as well:
If Charlie Brown had only known what was really happening:
Today we honor the memory of comics that are gone, but not quite (yet) forgotten, and especially those that faded away (not with a bang, but with a whimper). Some of these may not be completely dead, but all of them are at best only shadows of their former selves. Happily, none of them has been turned into a zombie.
The image above the headline was taken from “The Comic That Has A Finale Every Day“, about which Maggie the Cartoonist once asked, “I just don’t get the concept here. Who would read this? Why would a strip run a finale every single day?” I agree, but the tiresome image was merely a placeholder, the purpose of it all was an experimental exercise in creative commentary. The author (or perhaps perpetrator) was Ruben Bolling, who reported on his Substack site (on Groundhog Day) that the feature had finally been laid to rest at the end of last year. In stark contrast to all of the other strips listed below, I was not sorry to see that one disappear.
The end of Cul de Sac was particularly tragic. Not only did Richard Thompson lose his battle with Parkinson’s (in 2012), he was physically unable to give his brilliant creation the grand exit that he had hoped for, and ultimately selected an appropriately poignant rerun for the final strip:
The recent demise of Real Life Adventures was submitted by Boise Ed, who commented: “Another one bites the dust. I wish Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich and happy retirement, but it’s sad to see another of the good comics go away. I like the way the did it, though.“
Aaron Johnson’s niche comic “What the Duck” ran for ten years (from 2006 to 2016), and was picked up for syndication in 2008 (using the euphemistic title “W.T. Duck“). The GoComics archive began in 2009, but recently ended (without any explanation) exactly fifteen years later (in January 2024). Note that the dates of the strips in the GC archive have absolutely no relationship to the original publishing run. This was the author’s final strip, which seems to apply to cartooning just as much as to photography:
Ink Pen was retired by its author nearly a dozen years ago, and has been stuck in rerun purgatory at GoComics ever since then:
… Phil Dunlap’s tentative plan to release new Ink Pen comics once a week never materialized.
Bill Hinds gave Cleats a fitting sendoff on Halloween Sunday (2010), including some really creative ironwork on the gate:
… According to The Daily Cartoonist, Hinds “decided to bring his comic strip to a close, citing the need to focus on other projects that are more economically profitable.” Wikipedia reports that the strip was in 75 newspapers, which apparently was not enough to make a viable living on, but Hinds did have Tank McNamara as a fallback, which at one point was appearing in 350 newspapers. Cleats is still in reruns at GoComics, and may (or may not) still be appearing in print somewhere, but this is the first time that it has appeared at CIDU in more than 15 years (that was over a decade before Comicgeddon).
Lennie Peterson’s motivation to terminate The Big Picture was somewhat similar:
… When the strip went into reruns at GoComics, Peterson took the unusual step of creating some Sunday format strips to introduce the relaunch, in which he also announced his intention to (occasionally) insert new material among the reruns. I have not yet figured out how often this actually happened.
Bug Martini went mysteriously AWOL after the appearance of the following strip (on 21-April-2023):
… P.S.Chak reported that Adam Huber has resurrected his strip after an 18 month absence, and Chemgal later mentioned (very presciently) that Chak had “figured it out long before me, which shows how infrequently I’ve been checking on my ‘might-be-dead‘ strips“. This is encouraging news, but there wasn’t any official “announcement” (or anything else new) on Adam’s website, except for a vague promise in the fourth panel of the strip that unexpectedly appeared on Sept. 25th:
… Only time will tell whether Bug Martini will really remain alive. The website “caption” still claims “Random nonsense three days a week“, but that has not been the case for years. I think the best we can hope for is one strip per week (teaser ads for pay-per-view Sunday strips do not count). The current tally is four new strips over five weeks.
Pab Sugenis “ended” his “New Adventures of Queen Victoria” on 14-Feb-2021 with a special group photo, but has revived the strip on intermittent occasions since then (sometimes crediting ChatGPT for the “writing”):
… The problem is that there’s no way to know when (or if) any new NAQV strips will ever appear at GoComics (the author’s own website has been shut down).
I just happened to include a Boondocks strip in yesterday’s Halloween post, not realizing (back then) that the strip has been in reruns for over 18 years. Here is the final Sunday strip, dated 26-Mar-2006 (immediately preceeding Aaron McGruder’s “planned for six months” sabbatical, which only later turned out to be involuntarily permanent):
Berke Breathed resurrected “Bloom County 2015” to indulge in some political humor. He periodically incremented the year in the title, but it never got past 2019 (the GoComics title card still says “2015”); nothing new has appeared there since 8-June-2020 (back when CIDU Bill was still with us):
… Although his GoComics feed has dried up, Breathed does post some material on his Facebook page, but virtually all of it is re-runs. It’s simply not worth connecting to Zuckerberg’s sewer just on the off chance of finding a new Bloom County strip. The last new one appeared in August 2023:
The Perry Bible Fellowship still posts new comics on an irregular basis. Here again, the problem is knowing whether it is worth checking back for new material. Please note that PBF is very often NSFW.
Liberty Meadows was in print for less than five years (from March 1997 to December 2001). Frank Cho abandoned syndication in favor of self publishing to avoid repeated censorship problems:
… The Liberty Meadows rerun archive at GoComics appears to start (Jan. 2002) in the middle of the original syndicated run. Cho continued to release book collections until 2006, but after a subsequent deal with Sony Pictures fell through, he finally announced (in 2012) that he had quit working on the strip: “As much as I want to do Liberty Meadows (believe me I want to), the other jobs pay better.“
The latest demise hasn’t even been completed (yet). The Daily Cartoonist just recently reported that Fort Knox (by Paul Jon) published its last daily strip on October 19th, although the last new Sunday strip won’t appear until November 10th.
… P.S.Fort Knox is no longer available at GoComics (although it’s not clear whether that was a recent deletion). The strip is still available at Arcamax, at least for now.
P.S. Please feel free to mention (and link to) other dearly departed comics in the comments!
Comics I Don't Understand 