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I had a weird dream, wasn’t bad or good or even “exciting” but it was interesting enough to post on these here forums.

So in this dream I had an omnibus of the sunday cartoon strip “Hi & Lois”

And I’m fairly certain most of the younger people here don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, don’t worry, I’m going include pics like this one:

Anyway so this Omnibus was huge and contained every strip ever created, looked like an old school telephone book with those really thin pages where if you flicked through them too fast, you’d rip them. Everything was in various shades of black, gray & white. (So like Escape the Dark Castle)

Now the Omnibus had one of those gimmicky “reversible” things where if you went to the back cover and turned it upside down and flipped through that end of the book, you got an extra bit which contained the very last Hi & Lois story ever made along with designer notes in the end.

Never having read the last story before, I immediately turned the page to read it (Actually in real life I never really read Hi & Lois to begin with, so it was already odd)

So this is supposed to be Hi & Lois, but the artwork isn’t H&L at all, it looked like The Family Circus.

Why the Omnibus said Hi & Lois when it looked more like Family Circus, I don’t fucking know, weird shit happens in dreams.

Now I’ll add that only the mom and dad looked a lot like the Family Circus characters and they were given a bit extra detail to make them look less “cartoony.” And no, not that “hyperrealism” that the creepy pasta writers always seem to be in love with, as I said, they just looked a little more detailed.

There were only two kids (boy and girl) and they didn’t look like from either strip, but they still looked vaguely more like older versions of the ones from Family. (The mom and dad looked older as well)

At this point the dream starts flipping back and forth between an “over the shoulder third person cam” of me reading the comic and a first person view as if I’m watching a cartoon since the characters became animated and were talking with voices and everything.

Don’t worry, I’m getting to the grimdark soon.

So the first scene is the family all sort of doing their own thing in a nice looking living area. Like this version of the Family was a lot richer than their original middle class setting. They looked like they lived in a penthouse with huge windows looking out over a big city and the sun setting. (The only thing that had color in this)

The mother asks where the family album is to which someone asks why does she want it, and she says it would be nice for the family to spend time looking at it while the sunset.

The father continues reading a newspaper and mumbles something about him not knowing and then “It might be over there.”

The kids are even less helpful, with the daughter saying she doesn’t see the point to which the mom says more things about family togetherness, but her optimism is only met with more cynicism, especially from the son who makes the big reveal.

“Seems like a waste of time, but if you wanna do it, then you better do it quick because the sun is going to set soon…forever.”

And here’s the delightful grimdark.

Apparently the sun was going to be burning out completely within an hour or so meaning everything on the planet would be freezing to death in the dark soon. Last story indeed!

But it gets even better, apparently things were pretty shitty for awhile now. The Family was living in one of those Judge Dredd like “Megablocks.” Huge fucking building with a shit ton of people lived. Rich living at the top and the poorer living at the lower levels. (Obviously the family was one of the elite given their fancy digs) There were also stores and such in the building.

And that’s not all! I flipped ahead to see how much further I had left to read and the story apparently later contained a bunch of servant androids and maintenance robots murdering the shit out of people all over the building as the systems controlling them started failing.

The funny thing is, this took a long view approach that copied a typical Family Circus gag of the kids going all over the place just to complete a simple task.

So like that except with more murderbots and dead bodies.

Last thing I remember in the dream, I stopped reading exclaiming “Holy shit, I gotta show my wife this!” and then I woke up.

(Then soon she woke up and I excitedly told her about the dream. Lol)

This makes me wish that story was a real thing.  I've never seen a newspaper cartoon go grimdark like that, but it would be so cool if it did.  I mean, imagine watching Calvin and Hobbes fight actual monsters or destroy a nuclear reactor.  It would be such an interesting twist that no one would see coming.

Calvin and Hobbes is just fine the way it is and adding anything to that would only detract from what it's meant to be. Beetle Bailey is in serious need of refreshing the forumla, however.

Also isn't the whole point of Prince Valiant that it's intentionally grimdark and depressing and the hero is fundamentally doomed no matter what he does, (so there's always a sense of drama every 10 panels even when he finishes a major plot problem because he's DOOMED by FATE) or have I only been tuning in to that whole part when he's not doing too good?

I'm glad you were able to remember something in such vivid detail. Reading this makes me wish we had technlogy that could save dreams for repeated expierencing. I think people say drugs can do that? So who would want to ruin something so pure? Deathbots murdering citizens and all. 

Yeah, I haven't read the newspaper or Sunday comics in decades. So it was just one of those random things.

Never really read Family Circus either, though given that it was a one panel bit, I probably glanced over it more often than Hi & Lois.

I always skip to the comics when I obtain a newspaper

As someone who periodically steals a local paper in order to annoy all my friends with hideously punny 1940s talk-show-style dad jokes that are next to the comics, I wholeheartedly approve. Of course there's probably nothing germier than a newspaper stand during a pandemic so I haven't picked one up in a long time, but I wish one of the mainstays would actually do something like this. Or, hell, I wish the local newspapers would do anything other than garfield, 2 reliably good strips that never appear the same week twice in a row, and all the issues of The Phantom but in randomized order.

I've heard that newspaper comics are under so many restrictions to keep them censored, inoffensive mush that it's easier to just keep running the same comics from 70 years ago than to get new ones in there.

When webcomics first started becoming a thing there was an attempt by a couple of the bigger ones to break into newspaper publishing for the validation and proof of being taken seriously (They were getting a lot of flack for how pointless what they were doing was etc and how could they go anywhere with it as career when their work was just free on the internet??? etc. And yes I know how lol that seems now...) but they pretty much hit a brick wall there because nothing edgier than Dennis the Menace can be published.

Genuinely amazed that something as good as Calvin & Hobbes made the cut with all the enforced blandness.

I remember even back in the 80s there was a creeping censorship going on. 
 

So there was this ad cartoon strip that was trying to encourage saving money by getting a newspaper subscription.
The panels asked various questions of saving money and similar things and you got multiple choice, choice A. was always saying something negative about your sister (whether you had one or not) and the last choice was always involving doing something positive concerning the newspaper.

Illustrations involved some grumpy looking blonde girl on one side and then later a Gypsy.

Basically the questions started giving you the choice to sell your sister to the Gypsies and the illustration started showing a gypsy shoving her in a bag and carrying her off.

I remember them running that strip for several years and then suddenly the Gypsies got turned into Pirates (and the illustration was a pirate instead)

Nevermind the fact the piece is still encouraging you to engage in female slave trade, god forbid we offend some filthy Gypsies.