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Calvin & Hobbes, and The Far Side.
Pretty much guaranteed on any sane person's list.
True enough. Given this, I'll describe some more obscure strips that are similar to and may appeal to fans of these strips.
The Far Side is the best known of one-panel strips that take an ironic or satiric look at things. Although it's gone, it left in its wake various imitators. These include Loose Parts, Rubes, Close to Home, and Non Sequitur.
Calvin & Hobbes is about an imaginative little boy and a talking animal companion. One of my newest favorites is Lio, which is about an imaginative little boy much like Calvin. The difference is that Lio is a silent strip, and Lio (the character) doesn't have any constant companion. When Non Sequitur is not a one-panel strip, it is usually about the adventures of a little girl named Danae and her talking horse Lucy. Danae is very unconventional and imaginative, and while similar to Calvin, she also has her own style. She especially likes to imitate public figures. Lucy is mainly the straight man, like Hobbes before her. Hubert & Abby is a comic I discovered by randomly trying out something new at gocomics.com. Hubert is a talking hamster or gerbil. It's left indefinite what he is. He's the unconventional Calvin-like character of the strip. Abby is a human nurse whose home Hubert lives in. She is mainly the straight man of the strip. There is also a talking turtle. Lost Sheep and Citizen Dog are both about humans and talking animals living together.
Something the Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes share in common is that the artists who made them retired. Before these strips were around, the great new strip appearing in newspapers was Bloom County. This was an ensemble strip, featuring humans and talking animals, along with heavy doses of political satire. It was like a fusion of Pogo and Doonesbury. Berkeley Breathed, the artist behind Bloom County, retired the strip and replaced it with a Sunday strip called Outland. He moved some of the most popular Bloom County characters to another dimension, added Mickey Mouse's brother Mortimer to the cast, and kept this up for a little while until he retired this strip too. Some similar strips include Liberty Meadows, which is also an ensemble of humans and talking animals, Pearls Before Swine, which is mainly talking animals but also includes humans, Dilbert, which includes various talking animals in the human work world, and Non Sequitur, which brings humans and talking animals together and indulges in political satire. I suppose Dilbert is not as obscure as the others. It is the new giant in comic strips since the Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes went away. But it does have its similarities to the previous giant, Bloom County, which in turn resembles the giant of an earlier time, Pogo.
