Beware the Powertics

I love comic strips, especially when they manage to have a deeper meaning while making me laugh. I enjoy them even more when they step up and take on current events, particularly political ones.

The first time I remember becoming aware of this phenomena was back in the good old days when Bubba was in the White House and Opus called Bloom County home. I think it was a pretty formative and mind bending experience when Bill the Cat knocked up Socks.

Berkley Breathed continues to really just not give a crap, and in a beautifully opulent way he goes where others fear to tread and gets a laugh from it to boot. You can check out Opus' latest adventures on Salon as well as in many Sunday Funnies sections.

Doonesbury deserves its own posting. Really you should just try and find all of them and read them straight through, it'd really be fascinating. I recently picked up an abridged compilation of the first four or five years that really lets you see where the major characters are coming from if you haven't been following the strip since its inception. Doonesbury is in short awesome, always timely and up to date, fearlessly political and often hilarious.

Today's Non Sequitur is a great example of how it stays poignant. The series with Danae and Lucy the Pony and her family certainly deserves mention here, but I enjoy the random Far Side-ish strips like today's even more. (When Non Sequitur first came on the scene I certainly viewed it as a Far Side knock-off and not a terribly good one either. The strip has evolved really nicely and is now one of my few daily reads)



All others aside my favorite strip these days is Get Fuzzy (in a certain way I consider it an heir to Calvin & Hobbes) and this week Rob and the boys have once again dipped their toes into the proverbial political pool. Bucky, as can be expected, is on the warpath and he wants to talk some powertics.