AAAACK!

It was announced in late August that the Cathy comic strip would be ending in October. I was floored. Dumbfounded.  Aghast that Cathy was still published.  No one outside of Cathy's target market (which I assume consists primarily of single women of questionable sexual orientation, much like the title character) will notice or care.  Nothing against Cathy specifically, but comic strips are just another dying art form that can't seem to find a place in our modern age.

When's the last time you really read and laughed out loud over a comic strip?  I haven't had an ounce of interest in the "funny papers" since Gary Larson retired The Far Side in 1995. (Moment of silence...)  There's no way to pinpoint exactly what set the Far Side apart from the other frames that cluttered up the comics page, but it was inarguably the Seinfeld of comic strips - absurd, ironic, polarizing, about nothing at all, yet hilariously relatable and memorable.  As required reading, I strongly encourage that you spend your hard-earned dough for the hardbound edition of The Complete Far Side, a two-volume set that contains the whole shebang of over 4,000 Far Side cartoons.

On a side semi-related note, here's Exhibit Z illustrating what an odd-ball kid I was... Long before I realized that a person could exchange money for goods like Far Side calendars and comic strip compilations, I would hoard the funnies from the Winston-Salem Journal in a yellow cloth suitcase, clip out the Far Side cartoons on rainy days, and then glue them into my very own Far Side scrapbook.  Aaaack, indeed.