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I think about Bill and Bunny Hoest and John Reiner a lot, more than I probably should. Those three individuals are responsible for the output of The Lockhorns comic strip daily since 1968. That’s 55 years and three months of daily strips, with four on Sunday. Back of the napkin, that’s about 28,000 single-panel comics entirely about a husband and wife who lowkey hate each other. He’s a lazy, boozy aspiring philanderer; she’s an overspending scold who can’t drive. There’s never a break in the barrage of their mutual agitation, no signs of joy, no children, no warm moments.

It must be said that there’s something genuinely inspiring about the purity and the sheer output that the husband-and-wife team of Billy and Bunny and now Reiner have created over the years. Where most other strips will occasionally diverge into side characters or alternate storylines, The Lockhorns are just a nonstop run of thousands of one-liners all centered around the core of a miserable marriage between two people who seem doomed to imagine little else but their partner’s faults. The characters don’t evolve and they don’t improve, and they don’t seem to want to.

I wonder sometimes if Hoest and Reiner ever wake up and find themselves absent ideas, scrambling for a fresh take on a two-generation old family feud. The Lockhorns is so topically narrow that I imagine there must be days where they feel like they have plumbed the absolute depths of how much two people can’t dislike each other, and still they continue. There’s a box in the newspaper (or, more realistically, a folder on a web server) that needs a cartoon and a one-liner, and, like Conan at the wheel of woe, they keep grinding until they have something that will hopefully draw a passing chuckle.

No joke: hat’s off. It’s an extraordinary body of work.