Is the Comic Strip Brevity This Century's Far Side?

Admit it: you really never got over the day that The Far Side disappeared from the comic strip page of your newspaper. The 80s and early 90s were a golden age for the comic strip page; your eyes could peruse in just a matter of minutes the cows and fat kids in a Far Side you probably didn't fully understand most of the time down to Calvin and his best buddy Hobbes building the weirdest snowmen in history and over to Opus and Binkley and the gang revealing the atrociously bad breath behind Ronald Reagan's morning in America. And then, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, all three were gone. Poof! Genius on the comics page disappeared. If The Far Side was your favorite of that Big Three then perhaps you'll be willing to give Brevity a chance. It is the first single panel comic strip to be even worthy of your attention since Gary Larson took a powder.

At first glance, admittedly, Brevity appears to be little more than a clone of The Far Side. Consider the panel in which a doctor is at bedside where a fork and spoon are in a hospital bed and he says: "Congratulations, it's a spork." But on its own level, Brevity is beginning to carve out a little niche identity of its own. For instance, the strip where a bunch of cats and one dog are playing spin the bottle and there is a thought balloon coming from one of the cats who is praying "Not the dog, not the dog." Or one my household's favorites which takes place at a party at which a vase full of flowers has fallen and crashed to the floor and one of the partygoers tells everyone not to panic because he is...a florist. Brevity is filled with amusing little jokes on everyday situations and words like these. While so far not introducing any iconic images on par with the cows, the old lady or the fat kid from The Far Side, one thing that Brevity has going in its favor is that it contains preciously few panels that leave you scratching your head like the Far Side so often did.