Anvilicious / Comic Strips

• It's not uncommon for political cartoons to have a simple message with each side, country, ideology or issue explicitly labeled. However, this does not necessarily mean the cartoon is of low quality: in most cases it's done to avoid ambiguity or at least the kind of miscomprehension that leads to angry letters to the editor.
• Bill Watterson admitted that the Green Aesop in a Calvin and Hobbes story where Calvin and Hobbes took a trip to Mars was "pretty heavy-handed."
  • Still, his unpublished political-style cartoons on his anti-commercialist views need to be seen to be believed. Watterson was under constant pressure to sell out during the original run Calvin and Hobbes, something that embittered him quite a lot.
  • An in-universe example is Calvin's story "The Dad Who Lived to Regret Being Mean to His Kid", which he asks his dad to read to him.
• Sometimes Mutts doesn't have a joke. Instead there's an ad for some save-the-animals cause, one that doesn't even feature the regular cast of the strip. It's like if the last five minutes of Seinfeld were replaced with a PETA infomercial.
• Hey, Nemi-readers? Being cruel to animals is bad, okay? Got that? Too bad, because we're gonna repeat it a hundred times anyway.
• Mallard Fillmore wants you to know that liberals are bad, bad, stupid, stupid, bad, bad people. And they're stupid and bad, MMKAY?
• And Ted Rall wants you to know the same thing, except about conservatives.
  • Same goes for Tom Tomorrow. Many of his cartoons don't even contain jokes, they're just quoting something stupid a Republican politician or Fox News host said (or a strawman approximation thereof), or an offensive part of GOP policy, with an optional riff on why it's stupid.
• Spoofed in one Bloom County arc where Milo has a nightmare about being a cartoonist with a black-hooded Torture Technician as his "boss", punishing him for typos and the like. After he wakes up, he starts to deliver a speech about how great is is that we have cartoonists, only for Opus to walk in with a level glare on his face and say "Oh, just stop."
  • On multiple occasions, Bloom Country would let the anvils drop. One strip in particular was a parody of Star Trek, and basically ranted about the shrinking amount of space available to newspaper comics.
• Doonesbury is so heavy with some of its political commentary that some newspapers put it on the editorial page.
• Though Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams is known off the comics page for all sorts of controversial opinions these days, historically the strip was often criticized for only having one message: “management is bad.” Some early strips can be quite heavy-handed about hunting and eating meat, of all things, as Adams is a passionate vegetarian.

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