Back cover of Wood

While in the past I was a devoted reader of various comics, with special interest in undergrounds and horror comics such as the 70s DC titles Weird War, House of Mystery, and Swamp Thing, I haven't been as attuned to more recent developments in the field. Of late (outside of following the work of one or two people I know who are active artists, comics and otherwise) my main reading has been of the standard one to eight panels or so newspaper comics. Stephan Pastis' Pearls before Swine is a standout, as is Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy. Conley has his own weirdly intelligent type of references, as when he recently had a strip which assumes knowledge of Goya.
In another, one of the talking animals who doesn't quite get it (Satchel the dog, I think) confuses Eugene Onegin with the phone book for Eugene, Oregon.

Dilbert is always reassuringly and wickedly cynical. And Charles Schulz remains the Christopher Marlowe Earl of Oxford William Shakespeare of the funnies -- I say, keep running them.

Trudeau seems to be spinning his wheels to some extent with his seasoned strip Doonesbury. His serial tends to be reactive, responding to the events of the day. This can cause a slightly unsettling phase delay, due to the lag in publishing. Paul Sorvino croaking as Kissinger in Oliver Stone's Nixon: Ve are playing a totally reactive game here. The Iraqistan (actually, mostly Afghanistan now) stuff seems to strain a little too much to be relevant. The cartoonist appears to think that merely mentioning high tech stuff is making some sort of point in itself -- as if merely showing someone tweeting on a smartphone is good enough. Pastis, in contrast, if he references contemporary communications, has a reason for so doing, as when he self-deprecatingly presents himself being savaged by bloggers.