Why Newspaper Comics Send Me Into a Rage

I don't enjoy newspaper comics. At best they are sort of below that sector of humor that Mission Hill explores so beautifully, the zone between laughing aloud and laughing inwardly. Most of them are just bland, sanitized exercises in telling the same running gag that's been going since the 1920s. But a lot of them make me irrationally angry. The worst thing is that if I get my hands on a newspaper, I can't even pick out the meh comics and leave Family Circus to its own devices. I am compelled to read the entire page from start to finish, except, mercifully, for the soap comics.

They do things in them, though. Things that are calculated to drive me up the wall. The first thing is the callous disregard of the comic's own setting, and the worst offender is BC. Now, I know that the cavemen worship Jesus and cavort around with dinosaurs. That's okay. The secret to BC is that it does not, in fact, take place in prehistory but rather in a post-apocalyptic future.

Yeah, that's canon. And it even might make sense for the characters to reference figures from antiquity, like we do with ancient Rome and all that, but the rate and detail level at which they do so is just obnoxious. The other day a strip about campaign ads ran. Really?

The other thing is animal psychics. Red and Rover needs to get out of my newspaper and I am not playing around. It's a cutesy strip about a boy and his dog that has absolutely nothing else going on in it. It only runs on Sundays in my paper, so maybe they interact with any other living thing during the week. I don't know. It's a bit creepy, frankly. Anyway, Red talks in speech balloons and Rover thinks in thought bubbles in a conversational way in which it is obvious that they are responding to each other. Don't do this. Haul off and make it a talking dog. Garfield skirts this line as well. Also, remember when Garfield had side characters? These comics just seem to fall into their schtick and don't let go to explore new stories anymore.