So Bad It's Horrible/Newspaper Comics

In some cases, Newspaper Comics are so bad that their creators refuse to acknowledge them, preferring to Retcon their mistakes out of existence. Those are the lucky ones.

Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not enough to justify a work as So Bad It's Horrible. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.

Second Important Note: It is not a Horrible comic just because The Comics Curmudgeon or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it. There needs to be independent evidence to list it. (Though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review.)

Examples (more-or-less in alphabetical order):

Newspaper Comics

• Between Friends is best described as a Lifetime Movie of the Week in comic strip form, but without humor, intentional or accidental. It brings Wall Bangers by the truckloads whenever it tries to be serious. Nobody with a Y chromosome escapes unscathed unless they're Viggo Mortensen or a reasonable facsimile thereof. All the "empowered" women are depicted as insecure Does This Make Me Look Fat? types who both agonize over buying the low-fat double-whipped frappuccino and pound back the cheesecake like there's no tomorrow; they don't fare well either.
• Marmaduke is repeatedly riffed on, and for good reason; it's just that plain monotonous and ugly. Nearly half of its article on The Other Wiki discusses just how thoroughly hated it is by comics critics.
• 9 Chickweed Lane: Everyone's a sex-crazed, pretentious asshole, so it's impossible to like anyone except the cat. Homosexuality is handled so badly it manages to insult conservatives and liberals alike — one character quickly breaks up with his boyfriend of several years, dances with a seducing female acquaintance, has sex with her that night, and then swears up and down that he's not interested in women and being gay is just how he is (comparing it to his shoe size). Then he dumps her, she's understandably upset, and he tries to talk to her. Somehow, the readers are supposed to feel sorry for this guy. And did we mention that the author has gone through great lengths to silence criticism?
• Reply All doesn't even have the saving grace of a passable artist — it looks like a 5th-Grader's MS Paint webcomic. Pupils are seen well outside the actual eye, characters' hairstyles make them seem balding, blatant copy-pasting makes the characters appear superimposed upon the backgrounds. Even the jokes are so flatly delivered they become hard to identify. Honestly, do the editors even care?
• Working It Out is a comic so violently unfunny that it might accidentally get a pity laugh out of the reader. Most of the "jokes" consist of really, really, really bad puns. Boring, unfunny office "humor" everyone's heard a million time before, and things that kinda seem like they're supposed to be jokes, but aren't. One example is a comic where the boss character is playing with his cell phone with the caption informing us that he likes to fire employees through text messages (and this "joke" was used twice).

Political Cartoons

• Counterthink is a ridiculous mix of PETA and Scientology's most paranoid fantasies. Topics include why spending money on drugs, rather than herbal placebos, is bad; "doctors are incompetent, egotistical butchers"; "technologies are dangerous"; and "chemical additives, including Fluoride, are evil."
• The works of Brazilian artist Carlos Latuff could aptly illustrate the entry for Anvilicious when the term enters the dictionary, but that trope still doesn't go halfway in describing his cartoons. A primitive black and white view of the world permeates his strips, with the USA and Israel entirely demonized (and literally everything controversial they've ever done attributed to Motiveless Malignity), virtually everyone who opposes them made out to be a hero despite sometimes being completely different from one another (communists on the left and Islamic fundamentalists on the right are both celebrated), gratuitous amounts of violent imagery are used to reinforce his "points", and his Dethroning Moment of Suck was his participation in/shameless promotion of a contest held by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that called on artists to write cartoons about the Holocaust in rebuttal of the infamous Danish cartoon that pictured the prophet Mohammed, allegedly pointing out the Double Standards of the World in their views of Judaism vs. Islam — because we all know that violating one of the tenets of a religion you don't even practice is a comparable atrocity to trying to kill off everyone who practices that religion! Not to mention that Ahmadinejad doesn't even believe in the Holocaust.
  • Basically, he's pretty much a rebellious uneducated 12-year-old in the body of a grown man with passable drawing skills.
  • He's also said to be incredibly rude, deleting any comment on his art that doesn't agree with him exactly, including, presumably, people who try to be voices of reason offering constructive criticism. Which is a shame, as he has drawn some surprisingly heartwarming cartoons advocating peace in the Middle East. It's just that these are lost amid a sea of blood, leather-pantsing, and bodily fluids.
• The Leftersons! is a political themed comic in the vein of Mallard Fillmore. It somehow manages to be both more Anvilicious and less funny than its inspiration. The creator of the comic doesn't seem to understand American Liberalism, and so the strip fails at satire. The characters have no personality to speak of. The art is unbelievably boring; many panels, and even layouts for entire strips, are reused again and again with random background color changes.
  • An example of its failure: the son of this Strawman Political family is named Stalin and wears a Darwin-fish shirt, and his hair is done in a random-ass Totally Radical 1980s punk style, which shows you how up to date the author is.
  • The wife is named Imelda because, you know, Imelda Marcos was evil and therefore... she was a liberal! Haha!!!
• Many consider the reactions to the political strips of Mallard Fillmore a textbook example of Confirmation Bias. The problem with that idea is that much of those with similar views (conservatives, especially older ones) don't find the strip funny, either. Those on the opposite side of the political spectrum tend to find the comic blatantly insulting, which is probably the point. Non-political readers just find it joke-free. Check any comics board with a newspaper section and note how many posts on "The Duck" contain the phrase "I'm a conservative, but...". The comic itself would probably be relegated to right-wing websites and newsletters were it not used as a "counter-balance" for the liberal viewpoints presented in Doonesbury. It tends to substitute talk radio talking points for punchlines, forgets to do its research, and it frequently repeats the same "joke" over several strips from slightly different angles. It overuses Straw Liberals, many of whom are in the regular cast. This is made all the sadder because Bruce Tinsley's occasional non-political strips can be genuinely funny and do show a flair for observational humor. Unfortunately, those strips make up less than 10% of the strip's output. Discussing Mallard Fillmore on The Comics Curmudgeon is now an automatic banning offense.
  • It may be redundant to mention, but Mallard Fillmore also has horribly ugly art which often consists only of the duck's head shoved into a corner by a Wall of Text. And if it's not that, you'll often see Mallard splayed out in front of the television with his (thankfully undetailed) crotch on full display.
• Minimum Security is filled with terrible artwork and strawmen representing people the artist disagrees with — meaning people who eat meat, vote Republican, drive cars, buy things, wear clothes, etc. The artist has since sold out, trying more conventional humor and failing at it. You can still read the old strips online.

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