I STILL LAUGH OUT LOUD...

...when I read the funny papers.

Yesterday, I nearly came unglued when I read “Get Fuzzy.” I’ve spent enough time in Asia that the idea of monkey as a pizza topping isn’t all that far-fetched.

I love the comics. Whether it’s the Sunday pages in color or the weekday editions in black-and-white, I read ’em all... even the few I can’t stand.

Single panel gags. Soap operas. Joke-a-day strips. Adventure strips. Slice o’ life strips. Political strips. Each one is a little work of art. And what constantly astonishes me is that the artists have to crank out these little gems every single day.

I can still remember what a treat the Sunday funnies were to me. Growing up on Long Island, I lived in a household that took two newspapers: Newsday during the week, and the New York Times on Sunday. Back then, Newsday did not have a Sunday comics section (in fact, I’m not even sure they offered a Sunday edition at all) and of course the Grey Lady never has sullied her pages with comic art. The only time I ever saw the color comics - the honest to goodness Sunday funnies - was when we visited the grandparents. Most of the time, that meant the New York Journal-American on our forays into Brooklyn. When, in 1962, the Journal-American folded, my Dad’s parents started taking the New York Daily News, which conveniently absorbed the J-A’s comics. And on our annual trips to Florida, it meant the Miami Herald.

In those days, the Sunday comics were very different from today’s dinky-ass, shrunken pages. Each strip took up either a full page or, at the very least, a half page. Tabloid size, in the case of the Daily News - full-size, in the case of the Miami Herald. That’s gigantic. Today, it’s not uncommon for there to be four different strips on the same page... or even more. This miniaturization makes it more and more difficult for the artists, who have to be sure that their work remains crisp and legible even when highly reduced in size. Frustration over this shrinkage trend is, I’m convinced, what drove Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”) out of cartooning.

Things aren’t totally bad. Color printing is dramatically better than it used to be, and the comics are now generally printed on higher-grade newsprint. Color rendering is also a lot more sophisticated, with all kinds of subtle gradations that would have been impossible years ago. If only the damned things were a little bigger...

And the humor has evolved, too. Maybe there’s no “Krazy Kat” out there today, but the recent decades have given us (besides C&H) “The Far Side,” “Bloom County,” and “Bizarro.” I’m not sure what the newspapers readers of 50 years ago would have made of some of today’s strips, but then again, I’m sure that early 21st century American culture would totally confound them anyway.

There are geniuses out there writing and drawing these things, and I could pack this post with names if I felt like acknowledging all the ones I love. [A tiny sampling: “Opus,” “Zippy,” “Mutts,” “Get Fuzzy,” “Doonesbury,” “Pearls Before Swine,” “The Boondocks,” “For Better or for Worse” - hell, I even like “Blondie.”]

Rather than do that, I’ll ask you: What are your favorite comic strips? Your least favorite?

And do any of them still make you laugh out loud?