Best Comic Strip?

Lowbrow Answer: Peanuts
Yeah, we get it, she pulls the football out from under him before he can kick it. Spare me. Reading Peanuts is like babysitting without the under-the-table payment afterward. I don't like hanging out with idiot children in my actual life, so why would I spend my free time reading about it?

And what's with all the adults talking like muted trumpets? Was there something in that town's water supply in the 1950's? Can you say, "Mercury Poisoning?"


Middlebrow Answer: Calvin and Hobbes
This comic isn't as amazing as you think it is. Sure, the main characters are named after famous philosophers and yeah, some of the storylines deal with such topics as art history, masculinity, and totalitarianism. Don't forget, however, that some of the OTHER storylines deal with such topics as bubble gum, homework, and superheroes in underpants.

At the end of the day, it's a little blond kid and his stuffed tiger. And for every strip that discusses the dialectic of pop culture, there's another that discusses how happy drinking hot chocolate makes you after playing in the snow.



Highbrow Answer: Zippy the Pinhead
What the hell is going on in this this comic? When I first read the strips back in 1994, I didn't understand HALF of what was happening. I just re-read a few to jog my memory and I still don't understand it 15 years later. All I know is that a weird pinhead dude with a bow in his hair walking through landscapes that seem to change at his whim and babbling incoherently about anything he can think of reminds me of only ONE other guy.

That's right: Henry Miller. And he was High. Fucking. Brow.