Of course "Nancy" and "Henry" and other unfunny and repetitive tosh like that is absolutely DREADFUL stuff! But it's not unintentionally hilarious stuff, and that was the point of the article in the link that I posted at the start of this thread.

I wanted to have the thread title say "Homage to 5 Most unintentionally hilarious comics of all time" but I could fit all that in the title box, darn it!

Look, people, stay on subject please. This thread is not an attempt to nominate the 5 worst comics of all time. There are simply too many competitors for that.

No, this thread is about comics that are meant to be taken seriously, but are in fact unintentionally hilarious.

I think there are hardly any comics left in today's newspapers which are intended to be taken seriously. They are all intended to cause a momentary laugh, a chuckle, something along that line...though most of them fail miserably at it, I'd have to say.

Comics now are a pale shadow of what they once were. There was a time when you had adventure comics, soap opera comics, sci-fi comics, medieval romance comics, pirate comics, seafaring comics, aeronautical comics, spy comics, jungle comics, intrigue in the Far East comics, it was an incredibly rich field of possibilities. Comics in those days were often meant to be taken seriously as adult stories and they had storylines that could run on for six months, a year, even several years before reaching the conclusion of that story! They were like graphic novels.

It was a different world.

Now, in the context of that world there had to be some serious comics that were a bit...ummm...strange...a bit twisted.

I think that "Mary Worth", "Rex Morgan M.D.", "Dick Tracy", "Mark Trail", and "Gil Thorpe" all rate as more than a bit strange...and the guy in the article I linked to tells you why in a most amusing fashion. ;-) He nails it.

In my opinion, "Little Orphan Annie" was also more than a bit strange in a number of ways: the incredibly rightwing views of the mysterious Daddy Warbucks, who once deliberately arranged for an A-bomb to go off in some "evil" Eastern European commie state (never identified), thus killing a lot of "evil" anti-American people.......the bizarrely stiff and very, very poor artwork, the round empty eyes on people, the cardboard characterizations......that weird dog "Sandy" who went everywhere with Annie and never said anything but "Arf!"...   yup, that was one hell of a weird comic, to say the least. Unintentionally hilarious, and a bit creepy at the same time.

As for Dick Tracy, what a macabre excercise in sado-masochistic fantasy! I think the author must have been a very odd fellow.