I'm not particularly a fan of Liberty Meadows - I checked out a bunch of strips while gathering reference for this image, and I don't think I laughed once - but the character designs are pretty nice.
Anyway, Baltimore was a blast regardless, so I'll be coming back this September. Be nice to try and hit SPX on the same trip, which is just a week later - if I can register fast enough this year! (I'll be on a plane between London and New Zealand on the day SPX table bookings open, so I may be screwed already... we'll see.)
Liberty Meadows is simultaneously one of the better-drawn and least-funny newspaper strips of all time.
ReplyDeleteLiberty Meadows has to be read at length to get any humor out of it because there are rarely any jokes per se; the humor is based on the personalities (and defects) of the characters. The conceit is that it's an animal hospital attached to a university, except that the resident 'patients' have mostly psychological or emotional problems rather than strictly medical ones: the escaped circus bear is a thrill junkie, the bullfrog is a hypochondriac, the pig (a former frat mascot) is hampered by alcoholism and misogyny and the orphaned duck has separation anxiety. When the strip began dealing seriously with the human characters it ceased having its own identity.
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