The local newspaper is about to do yet another purge of its comic pages, getting rid of some old strips and inserting some new ones — a process that apparently provokes more furious reader feedback than the publication of out-and-out mistakes, ridiculous editorials, offensive advertisements, or just about any other feature of the paper. At the dinner table, members of my family started free-associating about which cartoon series were the most expendable, for which reasons. We came up with several filter-function proposals.

Drop any comic strip that:

• ... is more than 25 years old
• ... consists entirely of re-runs because the creator is in fact dead
• ... isn't being drawn by the original artist (i.e., whose creator has hired an "inker" to do the actual drawings, or which has been sold to another person)
• ... employs clip-art or repeated images, with the only change being in the thought-clouds or dialog-balloons
• ... moves so slowly (makes so little plot progress) that a reader could skip it for more than a week and not miss anything of significance
• ... uses a handful of predictable gags more than 50% of the time (e.g., characters speaking absurdities to giant statues; ranting about a particular political topic; following dashed lines around the neighborhood; getting confused about homonyms or near-homonym phrases; being beaten up for goofing off; talking to a sunbeam; etc.)

Other criteria for comic critiques?

TopicHumor - TopicLiterature - TopicPersonalHistory - 2005-01-04

(correlates: NegativeHelp, ReadLikely, 2004-11-11 - Lockout, ...)