Coming up on SFGate.com: a poll asking readers which comics they’d like to keep, which they’d like to kill.

Among the several way-past-it strips which lost all humor and inspiration many years ago, yet still take up space on the Chronicle’s comics page, are:

Garfield (a panel from today’s strip seen at right) — Absurdly boring and limited in range, this strip shows the same characters in the same poses using variations on the same jokes year after year after year. Perhaps this strip’s biggest offense — aside from it never being funny — is that while it’s supposed to be about a cat, it has absolutely nothing to do with cats.

Peanuts — The zombie-like quality of this strip — about the suburban life of children of the mid-20th century, and how their desires and dreams are mercilessly crushed by circumstance, human nature, and a dead God — brings a new meaning to the term “syndication.” The artist is dead and they’ve been rerunning “classic” strips — with little attention to the strip’s only classic period, the early 60s — for years now, inadvertently reinforcing the strip’s core message of nihilism and suffering.

Rhymes with Orange — One of the worst-drawn daily strips of all time, I think it’s been funny twice in ten years. It’s so badly done that usually I don’t even understand what point the artist was trying to convey.

The Fusco Brothers — While the artwork provided initial interest, the artist long ago ran out of ideas and, like the Garfield creator, is simply recycling situations ad nauseum. It also loses points for being a one-panel strip taking up a three-panel space.

I don’t much like Baby Blues or Sherman’s Lagoon either, but they aren’t toxic like the others.

Which strips would I keep? Believe it or not, I like Blondie more and more. While it can also be charged with over-recycling jokes and situations — yes, Dagwood oversleeps, and he eats large sandwiches — the strip actually makes me laugh three or four times a year. The writing in Sally Forth has some bite, though I’m still put off by the way they keep changing artists. And For Better or For Worse is well written and drawn. Take a look at today’s strip:

The strip demonstrates artist Lynn Johnston’s characteristically confident line, variety of poses, mixture of humor and dignity. While the strip can be maudlin, the breadth of its writing is very impressive. And never forget it was the first daily strip ever to feature a gay character in a positive way — and that 18 newspapers canceled the strip because of it. This very long interview with Johnston is from the year after that 1993 incident.

A year ago, Johnston said she was approaching retirement; new strips continue, but mixed in with old ones from the feature’s first years.