I like the one with the family with the little boy Petey, a little girl, mom and dad... the little girl goes to kindergarten with Dill and Kevin Bucket Head, the boy lies on his bed and reads comics... I don't even know the name of it because I just read the picture part. But it's a nice mix of bizarre and sweet at the same time.

Yes, Rex Morgan is definitely getting on my nerves. I remember that thing from the Milwaukee Journal in the 1950s. Today, they seem to get a new illustrator every three weeks. If I so much as look at it, it's bad luck and I make myself look somewhere else.

I wasn't that big a Charles Schultz fan, though I'm probably the only person who feels that way. Calvin and Hobbes, on the other hand, took the art to heights not since equaled.

And my dad, too, sang Deck Us All With Boston Charlie at odd moments. No one else in the house could figure out why.

I was another lie-on-the-floor-reading-comics kid. I figured out reading by myself, well before first grade. I'm pretty sure the comics, along with the church hymnal, were where I learned. There's nothing like hearing everybody in the room sing A Mighty Fortress Is Our God while your mom runs her fingers under the words to make things stick in your mind.

snoqueen wrote:I wasn't that big a Charles Schultz fan, though I'm probably the only person who feels that way.

No, I'm with you. I don't think I ever even cracked a smile at Peanuts. Yup, she pulled the football away again....

Even as an adult I thought it was often pretty smart and funny.

It wandered toward the end but was always a cut above "Hi and Lois" and the other dreck. I appreciate that when Schulz died, the strip died with him, at least in terms of new material. He was an interesting guy and a troubled one. Also a zillionaire and a multimedia superstar. I recommend David Michaelis' biography "Schulz and Peanuts."

You can count me among the big fans of Schulz's work, but to say he "wandered" towards the end seems downright charitable. My memory is of lots of strips that literally made no sense, culminating in endless Sunday comics of panel after panel of Snoopy's brother (Spike?) doing nothing in a desert.There was more than one occasion in high school (1986-1990) when I recall reading a strip at the breakfast table, turning to my mother, and asking if she too had noticed that Peanuts was now the work of an insane person. Admittedly, I've never bothered to go back and check out the later ones (it went on for another decade, if I'm not mistaken) so perhaps my memories are simply those of a jaded teenager.

Unfortunately Cul-di Sac is going to end soon. Its creator has Parkinson's which is becoming too difficult to work with. He has another artist helping him with the strip but he says it's just not going to be doable at all soon,. I was sorry to hear that, I love that strip. Alice reminds me so much of my older sister when she was little. And Petey is a lot like my oldest sister. Here is a blog attached to the strip:http://richardspooralmanac.blogspot.com/

I still have my father's crumbling collection of Pogo books. He loved that strip and it permeated out lifes. No one will play checkers with me cause I learned that if you are losing just shake the board violently and yell "EARTHQUAKE!" And Friday the 13th is ALWAYS worse if it comes on a Monday. Dad laughed at how the boats the characters went fishing in always changed names in every other panel. We named our little plastic play boat the "Warren B Ainsley" after one of those panels. I plan to name the boat my husband won't let me buy the same name.

And I love me some Joshreads. He regularly skewers Family Circus, I wouldn't be surprised if the Keane Compound has a hit out on him....

Cappy Dick! I read that every Sunday in the Toledo Blade in the early seventies. Glad to see that it hit a nerve with someone in another part of the country. I loved the comics back then: Hagar the Horrible, Hi and Lois, Funky Winkerbean, Gil Thorpe, Doonesbury, etc. When I was in college in the eighties, I loved the Far Side and Bloom County, and discovered reprints of old comics (Dick Tracy, Lil Abner, Pogo). I even grew fond of Brenda Starr during that time (is that strip still around?), which I read everyday in the Detroit Free Press. I now feel like a crotchety old man (Crankshaft?) who thinks today's funny pages aren't as funny or entertaining. I'm currently rereading a Dick Tracy collection -- good grief, there's over the top violence every couple of days! Maybe it was the Sorpranos or The Wire of its day. Minus the swearing.

Never read Rex Morgan. I was always a Mark Trail guy. Soap opera during the week, educational on Sundays. In 1st grade, our teacher asked one of us to cut out Mark Trail and bring it in to read to the class on the following Monday. That might have been my first experience with public speaking. I always loved it when he and his St. Bernard would chase off some dirty oil or timber barons.

We don't get the paper at home, so my son's only exposure to the funnies are via my old books or when he goes to his grandparents' house.

The Sunday funnies also used to have some great mazes and contests in them for kids. That section could occupy as much as an hour on Sunday, keeping me out of my parents' hair while they read the rest of the paper.

My dad taught me to read with the Sunday paper, also a good bit about geography and history, sometimes just through scanning the agate scores in the sports section. "Where's Lehigh?" Go get your atlas and I'll show you. "Why is there a Michigan and a Michigan State?"

Kenneth Burns wrote:I once heard a homeschooling parent say the Bible is a textbook for all areas of knowledge -- literature, history, math, science. Sounds like a similar philosophy works with the sports pages.

And with Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge comics. Those were in comicbooks, so I guess this is something of a threadjack, but I learned to read from Disney comics, mostly Uncle Scrooge, and also Donald Duck. And I learned a good bit of history from Uncle Scrooge, too, from the goldmines of the Incas to the legend of the Flying Dutchman to Ponce de Leon-- who Barks recreated as Poncey de Loon.