Jessica’s Page about Comic Strips

I’ve been fascinated by comic strips practically forever. Perhaps it started in third grade. We had an assignment where we were supposed to bring in a Sunday comic strip showing dialog…I think it was for a lesson on practicing how to use quotation marks properly. Somehow, I ended up with someone else’s strip, ended up with a copy of Sally Forth, featuring Hilary, a little blonde-haired kid who looked a little like me. And Hilary’s dad in the strip, Ted, when he isn’t busy working, he seems to have a number of cool “interests” shown in the strip…watching the FIRST Robotics competition (and the match illustrated was definitely one of the more exciting ones, if you’d been there), reading Comics Curmudgeon, and so on.

In junior high, I used to save the comic strip page from the newspaper every day so later I could go back and re-read the strips, and eventually, cut out my favorite ones and tape them to my wall. In 9th grade, I was stoked that our high school got free copies of the morning edition of the local newspaper, meaning I could read the comics before school, and not have to wait until the afternoon paper delivery at home, of course I started reading the rest of the paper too after the comics, but comics always first. In college I started reading the comics with breakfast, because San Diego, being a big city and all, had morning paper delivery. And then the syndicates and newspapers started putting the comics online, which was a great relief when the local paper stopped carrying some of my favorite strips like Mary Worth and Rhymes with Orange. And now these days they even have blogs about comic strips!

So I thought I’d share some portion of my vast collection of favorite strips: