Comic Mini-Arcs

The early 1990s were a watershed moment for Newspaper comics.  For Better or for Worse was still in its Halcyon Days.  Bloom County had just retired, and was replaced with the lower-quality Outland.  The Far Side was still chugging along, and Herman had been on brief hiatus, which was quickly forgotten compared to the first of two hiatuses of Calvin & Hobbes.  One could say that the presence of the Boy & his Tiger was what spurred some strips to elevate their art form a little higher than usual, and not in the sense of trying too hard.

I posted the series of comics where Skyler graduated, but there was an earlier batch of comics (that in my premature haste, forgot to add) which would've included an interlude with his Uncle playing a minor part.



Sadly, we never got to see what Cosmo got to say.  In between this interval and when Skyler graduates just a scant two weeks later, there's nothing terribly remarkable in between.  But that's not terribly surprising.  This kind of thing wouldn't be considered unusual for occasional long-running strips, but how often do you see consequentative comics on other unremarkable daily comics?

This Hi & Lois strip starts off like pretty much any other comic, ending on a somewhat weak note.

But then, if you read these comics back-to-back, you see that there's the faintest fringe of connection between them.

When this comic appeared at the tail beginning of December 1st, I thought Ditto was just speaking in hyperbole.  But as seen above, that's clearly not the case.  Not often, a story can pop up entirely without warning, and it takes some minor backtracking to find out how it all started.  Such was the case for this Hagar the Horrible comic:

What was thought to be an easy throwaway In-law joke turned out to be a week-long series of events of a Vacation in England.  Or the 11th Century version of England.  Or an extremely condensed and sanitized 11th Century version of England.





It's somewhat disappointing that there were hardly any other daily strips that bothered to do more serial comics, since stories tend to stick in the audience's mind longer than a daily bombardment of jokes.  Though, until I put these comics together, I doubt anybody even remembered these coming into existence.

But there would be one Legacy comic that would have a major change to the status quo that still remains to this day, and is the subject of my next post.