Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Ink-Slinger Profiles by Alex Jay: Frank Robbins
... Robbins was a Grade-A prodigy of the drawing board in his native Boston at the age of four, won several art scholarships at 9, painted giant murals for his high school at 13 ...
“I began life back of the North Station in Boston … precisely on the wrong side of the tracks! At fifteen [around 1933], my family came to New York, lived on the East Side and I began my professional career.”After kicking around as errand boy in ad agencies, Frank, at the age of sixteen, came under the eagle eye of Edward Trumbull, well-known muralist. Trumbull was then color director of the Radio City project, and through him Frank met the architects and contractors for the buildings being erected. He immediately received commissions to do pencil portraits of all the architects and other personalities connected with the construction project. Upon completion of this lengthy and challenging job, Frank met the Rockefellers and received a grant from them to study and paint. A year later, in a studio given to him in the Graybar building, Frank was busy working on a series of mural sketches for the then proposed Children’s Broadcasting Studio in the RCA building. The sketches were approved when then NBC studios opened for a full schedule of broadcasting. Since the murals were to be painted directly on the walls this gave Frank the choice of working for three months in the wee hours between midnight and early dawn or forgetting the whole deal. Due to his health at the time Frank had to regretfully drop the project.
… the Thomas B. Clarke prize of $100 was awarded to Franklin Robbins’ “Sixth Avenue ‘L’.”
At about the same time he’d been doing Scorchy Smith, Robbins also drew Lightnin’ and the Lone Rider, a thinly syndicated cowboy strip. This poor man’s Lone Ranger had originally been drawn by Jack Kirby.
Frank is now married, and his lovely wife, Berta, helps him on research and the more pleasant matters of life. “Frankly,” Frank confided to me, “Any similarity between my comic strip heroines and my wife are pure coincidence!”
“I taught English there,” she said. “I met Frank while I was directing a play reading of Amadeus.”“His wife had died two years before I met him … We were together for about five years. We had a wonderful marriage. It was a big loss when he died, let me tell you.”
“We had a sound system that was second to none. ... He created a single cone speaker that was astonishing. It was very pure sound, very clear. wonderful, wonderful. He knew a lot about sound. He had boxes and boxes of research about sound.”
Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles
Monday, November 20, 2023
Firsts and Lasts: Dumb Dora's Not So Dumb ... But Cancelled Anyway
Dumb Dora was on its third artist, or more like a hundred and third if you count ghosts and assistants, when her strip was retired in January 1936. Bil Dwyer was the final credited artist on the strip, taking over in late 1932 from Paul Fung, who in turn had taken over from Chic Young.
Dwyer reportedly brought on a small army of helpers to get the Sunday and daily strip out on time, including Milton Caniff, who R.C. Harvey reports did much of the pencilling for the initial eighteen months of Dwyer's tenure, plus inking some of the girl characters. By the time Dumb Dora ended Caniff was long gone, but we can still easily see vestiges of his style on the dailies above, the last two of the series.
Dumb Dora had begun as a me-too flapper strip in 1924, but had the additional hook that Dora acts dumb but usually turns out to have a bean firing on all cylinders by the end of each gag. The concept is fine, but awfully repetitive. By the time Dwyer took over the conceit was well and truly played out, and flappers were long gone, so the strip had turned into a more generic "teen boys chasing the pretty girl" feature, which left it drowning in a sea of its betters -- Tillie the Toiler, Harold Teen, Winnie Winkle, Etta Kett, etc.
Mark Johnson supplied a scan of the last two rather rare dailies seen above, which offer no farewell or conclusion to the strip. So I went looking online to see if the Sunday, which ended the next day (January 5 1936), offered us some closure. Nope!
Labels: Firsts and Lasts
My guess is that the feature lasted as long as it did because Dora had been such famous character that her very name became part of the popular American idiom, everybody said it, there were "Dumb Dora Clubs" organised by college girls; a "Dumb Dora" was a shorthand description of a He said-she said joke or cartoon gag.
Thing is, though still well known, it became stale. It was corny. The name was associated with the 1920s.
It was like calling your strip "Oh You Kid" or "Sheik n' Sheba". And all those change of artists didn't help. There's nothing interesting story-wise, either.
Yung was the only one who really understood the character and material to suit her, perhaps Fung did as well to some extent, but by the time it was dumped on Dwyer's drawing board, the feature had lost its soul.
: 11/21/2023 1:02 AM Gene Rayburn: Dumb Dora is SO dumb . . .
Audience: HOW-DUMB-IS-SHE?
Rayburn: She thinks "Night School" is where you learn how to be a ______.
I never knew it was a comic strip reference. I wonder how many people did.
: 11/22/2023 12:53 AM https://comicskingdom.com/trending/blog/2015/09/10/ask-the-archvist-dumb-dora
: 11/22/2023 2:28 PM Sunday, November 19, 2023
Wish You Were Here, from Grace Drayton
Here's a Grace Drayton postcard issued by Reinthal & Newman as #250. Drayton's cards in this series were generally quite humourous, but this one just tries to elicit compassion for the typical Drayton waif.
This card was postally used in 1914, sent from Great Britain to Portugal. Eventually it ended up in a Florida antique store, where I bought it and then brought it here to Nova Scotia, Canada. That is one well travelled postcard!
Labels: Wish You Were Here
Saturday, November 18, 2023
One Shot Wonders: One Thing That Sticks in Danny Long's Noodle by Will Sperry
Way back in 2012 Cole Johnson sent me this strip that he clipped out of the San Francisco Bulletin of January 20 1912. He wondered if this was a one-shot cartoon or part of a series starring this Danny Long fellow.
I never looked into the matter until recently, but then I noticed that the Bulletin is now available at newspapers.com. Well, as it turns out, Danny Long isn't a cartoon character at all, but rather the manager of the San Francisco Seals. Thus the gag makes perfect sense, and additional review of the paper reveals that Will Sperry was their sports cartoonist, apparently just in 1911-12 based on a quick perusal.
Sperry's early cartoons for the Bulletin are nothing to write home about, but by 1912 he had quickly developed into a pretty darn fine cartoonist as evidenced by our sample. What happened to Mr. Sperry, then? Well, I'm no expert at tracking but I found a few tidbits. Seems he went to Europe when World War I broke out and served valorously in relief of Belgium, being cited for bravery on several occasions. When the U.S entered the war, he took a commission with the expeditionary force. When the war ended he elected not to come back to the States but rather to live in France. After that I lose track of him. I wonder if he got back into art over there in Europe once his war hero days were over?
Labels: One-Shot Wonders
Friday, November 17, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: Nobody Works Like Father
Here's a series by the ever-busy pen of Gene Carr that reminds us that "social media" is not a phenemenon limited to the current century by any means. Long before the internet, long before TV, even long before radio, people could still tune into cultural zeitgeists. Yes, fads and memes were with us in 1906 -- maybe they didn't travel at the speed of fiber optics, but they still worked their way through our society at an amazing speed.
In 1905 a new song was published called "Everybody Works But Father", a comic ditty about a lazy father. A number of artists recorded it, and here's one of them:
It was a big hit and soon spawned postcards and other trinkets bearing the title. Soon there were also reply songs, like "Father's Got a Job", and various singers offered new and alternative lyrics. In the world of comics, Gene Carr took up the gauntlet and decided to defend poor father. His series Nobody Works Like Father debuted on January 28 1906*, offering new song lyrics featuring a father who slaves for his family only to be treated like dirt.
Carr must have really relished creating this series because the strips are in my opinion some of his best work; funny, on point, animated, and smart. Coulton Waugh, on the other hand, singled it out in The Comics for what may or may not be a diss, "too reminiscent of the ancient days of Dickens and Cruickshank to last long in a modern world."
As with social media today, though, the world quickly tired of its memes even way back when. Gene Carr's Nobody Works Like Father ran its course in less than a year, last appearing November 25 1906*.
* Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Labels: Obscurities
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
Ink-Slinger Profiles by Alex Jay: Burne Hogarth
…Max kept those sketches and took them and his young son to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1924. Burne was accepted as a student at age 12. By age 15, he was an assistant cartoonist at Associated Editors’ Syndicate. He flourished at the Institute and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts….Burne graduated high school at the dawn of the Great Depression….
Comics Scene: Give us a capsule history of your career and early background. You graduated from the Chicago Art Institute?Burne Hogarth: No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact, I went to the Institute but it was only a kind of supplemental activity while I was really in the process of going to high school and at the same time doing art work.I went to the Art Institute, started Saturday classes, at the age of 12 [1924]. My father thought that I had sufficient material to be able to enroll in classes like that and so he took down a bundle of stuff one day, on a Saturday, and said “Let’s go see what they will think about this.” And they accepted me—so that’s how my training began. Later I went to the Institute taking special courses, but I didn’t enroll in any formal classes. I couldn’t because we were not an affluent family and [the world] was headed into what was later to be known as the Great Depression.CS: When did you know you had a talent for cartooning?BH: Very early, when I was a kid, about four. My father would sit and design furniture and cabinets—he was a carpenter and cabinet maker—and I would ask for my own piece of paper and pencil. And when I would say, “What should I draw?” he would push a cartoon under my nose and say “Here, draw this.” So the cartoon became a kind of focus of attention.CS: What happened after you left the Art Institute?BH: I enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago. There I studied further drawing and then cartooning as another side of that. That’s when I met a cartoonist who was working for a syndicate and other people who were working for newspapers, and we used to get heavily into what syndication was all about…deadlines and magazines and doing samples and taking them around. I did gags and editorial cartoons, illustrations and that was all part of my portfolio.I used to take this around and get some jobs in magazines and at the same time worked at odd jobs like driving a truck, selling newspapers and shoes—nothing was too high, too low, or too intermediate to do, because there was obviously an economic necessity.One of the people I met at the Academy introduced me to one of the syndicates. I worked (for them) in his studio and I was his assistant. I was just an apprentice. I used to come in and sweep up. I learned lettering and I learned also there’s something about the craft of doing work on deadlines. And more than anything else I learned how to use pen, brush, different media and all sorts of things in a very professional way. Maybe two and a half, three years later I sold my first feature to Bonnet Brown.
Ivy Hemmanhaw. It was one panel, humorous gags about Americana. I was just 18 [1930]. It lasted about a year and then I went on to teach in the Emergency Educational Program, which came along about the time I was 20–21 [1932–1933], and I went to school, too. I went to Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and studied psychology, anatomy, sectional anatomy, and then things altered. The Depression got worse and under the urging of friends who had relocated to New York, I made my foray into the field in New York, into the syndicate field, very quickly—and that became the start of a whole new and different part of my life.
…Well, I want to tell you, I started work in February. It was agonizing. I spent 11 hours every day, half the time in the library, and I’d be sitting up nights and working incessantly, and by the end of the week I’d be drained. I’d send this stuff off to the syndicate…I lived the life of a monk in that period….” In the fall, the syndicate decided to end the strip. Hogarth said, “…‘Thank God this thing is over! I’m through with it’. The pirate strip was the heaviest chore I ever carried. And I was glad it as over.
Classes are still forming at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, 112 W. 89th St., it was announced by Silas H. Rhodes, director. Nationally prominent cartoonists and illustrators, headed by Burne Hogarth, illustrator of “Tarzan,” comprise the faculty and lecturing staff.
…When I got to meet Bernie Hogarth, I went up to his studio, which was in his apartment. My brother [Dan Barry] had an apartment like that later on.You would go into the main area of the apartment and it was one step down into the living room area, but there was also a staircase at the end of the living room that went upstairs to the bedrooms, in an apartment house, believe it or not. I don’t know how they designed this thing, but it was really remarkable. So you’d go up the staircase and there’d be a landing there and that landing would take you into the bedrooms. Then in one of the upstairs bedrooms was his studio. It was this beautiful, brightly lit studio and it was on Central Park West.It was a beautiful apartment and of course he was very wealthy. He’d written anatomy books and he taught and of course they paid him very handsomely on the Tarzan daily. Trust me, he was very well paid, especially for those Sunday strips. He was a brilliant guy….
…By the mid-1950s she had met artist Burne Hogarth, famous as the man who drew the Tarzan comic strip. They soon married and had two children….…In 1962, the Hogarths moved from their Queens apartment in search of more space for the boys and a studio for Burne. In Mount Pleasant [New York], they found a fortress of a house, resembling something out of Charles Addams….…Her personal life has also become a testing ground. She and Burne were divorced last year….
...In 1953 she married cartoonist Burne Hogarth, who drew the Tarzan comic strip (1937–50) and founded the art school that became New York’s School for the Visual Arts. Soon after son Richard was born in 1956 and son Ross in 1959, the Hogarths moved to suburban Westchester County, which had a reputation for good public schools. (She and Burne divorced in 1981, and nine years ago she married Art Kamell, a longtime activist and former labor lawyer.)
Labels: Ink-Slinger Profiles
Monday, November 13, 2023
Obscurity of the Day: Miracle Jones
After his masterful performance on Tarzan, it's amazing to think that Burne Hogarth followed it up by not just one but two total misfires. The first was Drago, an atmospheric quasi-western set in South America that showcased fabulous art but herky-jerky storytelling.
Hogarth's second attempt at getting back in the newspaper limelight is today's obscurity, Miracle Jones. An ill-advised departure from the action/adventure milieu, which was Hogarth's specialty, this strip tries to adapt Hogarth's dynamic art style to a humor strip. Miracle Jones was a bald-faced copy of James Thurber's Walter Mitty character, a nebbish whose fantasies are played out for the amusement of readers. The character had just been adapted into a 1947 blockbuster movie starring Danny Kaye, so Hogarth just jumped on the bandwagon with a character who is Walter Mitty in every respect excpt the name.
United Feature originally offered the strip under the title J.P. Miracle, but changed it prior to release. The strip began on February 15 1948* in a vanishingly small list of papers as a Sunday-only feature**. Hogarth provided impressive art but it was all for naught. United and Hogarth threw in the towel before even the first year anniversary, the strip apparently ending on December 5 1948***.
Art expert Alberto Becattini offers us an interesting aside on Miracle Jones, stating that future E.C. Comics star Bernie Krigstein ghost-pencilled two weeks worth of the strip. There may have been other assistants and ghosts involved, too, because I notice that Hogarth does not generally sign his name in the final panel, only in the often dropped title panel. Was he trying to tell us something? Considering that he was back working on Tarzan at this time it seems likely that other hands helped out on this throwaway strip.
* Source: Boston Post
** A few sources claim the strip began in 1947, but no evidence for this has been found.
*** Source: Jeffrey Lindenblatt based on Long Island Press.
Labels: Obscurities
: 11/15/2023 6:11 PM So the idea (implied) that it took Hogarth ghosts to get both strips out makes perfect sense.
Can anyone expand?
Sunday, November 12, 2023
Wish You Were Here, from Dave Breger
Labels: Wish You Were Here
Saturday, November 11, 2023
One-Shot Wonders: The Auto Creates a New Record by C.W. Kahles, 1902
Here's a singularly repellant one-shot by Kahles. It certainly was a world with different values and proprieties just a hundred-some years ago. Hard to believe this nauseating 'comic' was okayed for publication by editors all over the country.
Our digitized example is from the Nashville American of May 25 1902, but probably would have run a bit earlier in its syndicate home paper, the Philadelphia North American.
Labels: One-Shot Wonders
This looks like something that likely originated as unadorned text ("A motorist hit a dog and paid the farmer for his loss. The next day, the road was lined by farmers with dogs."). A viable joke if a bit nasty in that undetailed form, it becomes appalling here despite (or because of) the quality of the artwork. What's more, the opening panels clearly state the motorist enjoyed killing the dog, which makes the whole thing uglier. And it muddies the punchline -- is the motorist appalled at these entrepreneurs, despite being a happy customer before? Or is he excited about setting the "new record" promised in the headline?
Friday, November 10, 2023
Selling It: Snake Oil? No, Fish Oil!
Scientific testing has proven that there is no special medical wonder inherent in cod liver oil. It is high in vitamins A and D, and so it is undeniably good for those who have a deficiency. But there was a day when it was considered an indispensible member of the family medicine cabinet, "good fer what ails ye," a cure-all for most any malady.
Preying on such beliefs, the Scott's Emulsion folks made claims that it had some special ability to ward off rickets in children. Which it would since rickets is caused by a vitamin D deficiency. But most kids get plenty of vitamin D from sunshine, and those who don't get any time outdoors in the sun probably have bigger problems that Scott's Emulsion won't fix.
Anyway, I digress. The October 1938 Sunday half-page ad shown above sports art by a wonderful newspaper and magazine cartoonist, an artist who I don't generally associate with advertising strips. Let's leave his name off this post for awhile and see if a Stripper's Guide reader can ID the artist whose work we see above.
UPDATE 11/13/2023: So, not much activity in the ranks. Alright, here's my ID, and I'm 98% sure it is accurate. The Uncle Dan ad is by R.B. Fuller, of Oaky Doaks fame. The unusual take on the woman's eyes is to me the dead giveaway of the ID.
Labels: Advertising Strips
(of course if one clicks on the image
the new tab hedder reads "Uncle Dan by Fuller.")
Now the question is R. B. or Ving?
Wednesday, November 08, 2023
Jeffrey Lindenblatt's Paper Trends: The 300 for 1997: Overall Results
In 1996 we lost only one paper, the Muncie Evening Press (IN) which ended on May 18, 1996. It merged with the Star Press which is also on this survey. We also had a paper that was missing information last year come back, so the number of papers stays at 255 for this survey.
Big news this years is that it finally happened -- Garfield has taken over the number #1 spot by adding just one more paper to its total. Not much other movement in the Top 30. Dilbert added 37 papers but only moved up one spot from 11 to enter the Top 10. Andy Capp has fallen out of the Top 30 and Crankshaft and Rex Morgan enter or reenter the Top 30.
|
Title |
Rank |
Rank Change +/- |
Papers +/- |
Total Papers |
|
Garfield |
1 |
Same |
1 |
221 |
|
Peanuts |
2 |
Down 1 |
-1 |
219 |
|
Blondie |
3 |
Same |
1 |
206 |
|
For Better or For Worse |
4 |
Same |
6 |
203 |
|
Beetle Bailey |
5 |
Same |
2 |
179 |
|
Hagar The Horrible |
6 |
Same |
1 |
156 |
|
Cathy |
7 |
Same |
-2 |
152 |
|
Family Circus |
8 |
Same |
3 |
151 |
|
Doonsbury |
9 |
Same |
1 |
145 |
|
Dilbert |
10 |
Up 1 |
32 |
137 |
|
B.C. |
11 |
Same |
0 |
105 |
|
Hi and Lois |
12 |
Up 1 |
3 |
104 |
|
Wizard of Id |
12 |
Down 2 |
-2 |
104 |
|
Frank and Ernest |
14 |
Same |
3 |
101 |
|
Fox Trot |
15 |
Same |
4 |
95 |
|
Born Loser |
16 |
Same |
0 |
88 |
|
Shoe |
17 |
Same |
-4 |
83 |
|
Dennis The Menace |
18 |
Same |
1 |
81 |
|
Marmaduke |
19 |
Same |
-1 |
62 |
|
Sally Forth |
20 |
Up 1 |
4 |
61 |
|
Mother Goose and Grimm |
21 |
Down 1 |
0 |
60 |
|
Ziggy |
22 |
Same |
1 |
55 |
|
Close To Home |
23 |
Down 1 |
-2 |
52 |
|
Non Sequitur |
24 |
Up 1 |
5 |
51 |
|
Mallard Fillmore |
25 |
Down 1 |
-2 |
47 |
|
Mary Worth |
26 |
Same |
-1 |
42 |
|
Baby Blues |
27 |
Same |
2 |
41 |
|
Arlo and Janis |
28 |
Down 1 |
2 |
39 |
|
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith |
29 |
Down 2 |
-1 |
38 |
|
Crankshaft |
30 |
Entering |
2 |
37 |
|
Rex Morgan |
30 |
Entering |
1 |
37 |
E&P Survey vs. Stripper's Guide The 300 Survey
The surveys I did for Editor & Publisher were of the top 100 papers in the US, by circulation. There’s an important difference in the criteria for that poll compared to The 300 – in the E&P survey strips got ranked with Sunday papers included; in other words if a given daily or Sunday paper ran Peanuts, that paper got counted. This allowed Sunday-only strips and strips with more popular Sundays than dailies, to get in the running. The 300 poll covers daily features only.
Continuing our comparison of the Editor & Publisher Top 100 Circulated Papers and the papers in this survey, we have some interesting differences. In my 1997 E&P article, four strips that appear on the Strippers Guide Top 25 do not appear on the E&P Survey. Three of them can be explained because of the papers in different surveys. Born Loser and Frank and Ernest are two strips from the NEA syndicate package. NEA clients are mainly small town papers so more of them are in The 300 survey. Also, the same could be true for Mallard Fillmore; small town papers tend to have a more conservative political outlook compared to big cities and their high-circulation papers. Lastly, Prince Valiant is not on The 300 survey since it is a Sunday only strip.
|
Title |
Top 300 Ranking |
Top 300 # Papers |
E&P Ranking |
E&P # Papers |
|
Garfield |
1 |
221 |
1 |
92 |
|
Peanuts |
2 |
219 |
3 |
88 |
|
Blondie |
3 |
206 |
5 |
87 |
|
For Better or For Worse |
4 |
203 |
2 |
90 |
|
Beetle Bailey |
5 |
179 |
10 |
75 |
|
Hagar The Horrible |
6 |
156 |
9 |
83 |
|
Cathy |
7 |
152 |
6 |
86 |
|
Family Circus |
8 |
151 |
8 |
84 |
|
Doonesbury |
9 |
145 |
7 |
85 |
|
Dilbert |
10 |
137 |
4 |
88 |
|
B.C. |
11 |
105 |
13 |
69 |
|
Hi and Lois |
12 |
104 |
19 |
56 |
|
Wizard of Id |
12 |
104 |
12 |
73 |
|
Frank and Ernest |
14 |
101 |
Not in Top 25 |
|
|
Fox Trot |
15 |
95 |
18 |
58 |
|
Born Loser |
16 |
88 |
Not in Top 25 |
|
|
Shoe |
17 |
83 |
14 |
66 |
|
Dennis The Menace |
18 |
81 |
11 |
75 |
|
Marmaduke |
19 |
62 |
15 |
66 |
|
Sally Forth |
20 |
61 |
16 |
61 |
|
Mother Goose and Grimm |
21 |
60 |
17 |
59 |
|
Ziggy |
22 |
55 |
20 |
55 |
|
Close To Home |
23 |
52 |
Not in Top 25 |
|
|
Non Sequitur |
24 |
51 |
21 |
51 |
|
Mallard Fillmore |
25 |
47 |
Not in Top 25 |
|
|
Baby Blues |
29 |
41 |
22 |
49 |
|
Prince Valiant |
No Daily Version |
No Daily Version |
23 |
48 |
|
Jump Start |
37 |
31 |
24 |
43 |
|
Mary Worth |
28 |
42 |
25 |
42 |
Other strips mentioned in the E&P article:
|
I Need Help |
94 Tie |
8 |
99 |
9 |
|
Tommy |
63 Tie |
13 |
64 |
16 |
|
Buckles |
84 Tie |
10 |
97 |
9 |
|
Curtis |
41 |
26 |
26 |
41 |
|
Andy Capp |
33 |
34 |
28 |
37 |
|
Over The Hedge |
63 Tie |
13 |
53 |
20 |
|
Us and Them |
94 Tie |
8 |
92 |
9 |
Universal Comics Page
Over the past 80 years when you picked up a paper from another town or city in most cases you would read some of the strips that appeared in your local paper but mostly you would see strips that you have never seen before. By the 1980s, with the slow demise of newspapers beginning and fewer papers around to compete for features, more papers had the opportunity to buy strips that were not available to them before. This could lead to more variety from one paper to another, but instead, the editors of these papers would do the opposite and just pick the most popular strips. As this way of filling a comics page became more and more prevalent, you would now see many of the same comics in every paper.The Universal Comic Section is a measure of how many papers run the most popular strips.
Very little change in the Universal comic section this year and the Colorado Spring Gazette still has the most universal comic section running the Top 26 strips in their newspaper.
Top 2 – 204 (Same)
Top 3 – 176 (Up 2)
Top 4 – 152 (Up 3)
Top 5 – 124 (Up 2)
Top 6 – 91 (Down 1)
Top 7 – 75 (Down 1)
Top 8 – 59 (Up 1)
Top 9 – 47 (Up 1)
Top 10 – 36 (Up 6)
Top 11 – 22 (Down 1)
Top 12 – 15 (Up 3)
Top 13 – 9 – (Down 1)
Top 14 – 3 (Up 1)
Top 15 – 3 (Up 2)
Top 16 – 2 (Up 1)
Top 17 – 2 (Up 1)
Top 18 – 1 (Same)
Top 19 – 1 (Same)
Top 20 – 1 (Same
Top 21 – 1 (Same)
Top 22 – 1 (Same)
Top 23 – 1 (Same)
Top 24 – 1 (Same)
Top 25 – 1 (Same
Top 26 – 1 (Same)
The average number of comics per paper moves up just a bit to 17.59 from 17.33.
Here are the remaining results of the 1997 survey:
35 – Rose is Rose (+3)
34 – Andy Capp (-4)
33 – Funky Winkerbean (-1)
31 – Jump Start (+4)
30 – Alley Oop (-1), Lockhorns (-1)
28 – Rubes (0)
27 – In The Bleachers (+2), Marvin (-1)
26 – Curtis (-1), Luann (-1)
25 – Grizzwells (0)
23 – Mutts (+2), Real Life Adventures (-2)
22 – Gasoline Alley (-3), Kit N Carlyle (-1)
20 – Bizarro (0), Eek and Meek (0), Geech (-2)
19 – Judge Parker (-1), Pickles (+5)
18 – Berry World (-1), One Big Happy (0)
17 – Heathcliff (-1), Overboard (-1), Tank McNamara (-5)
16 – Beattie Blvd (-1), Farcus (-1), Robotman (0)
15 – Fred Basset (0)
14 – Adam (+1)
13 – Drabble (0), Ernie (-3), Mixed Media (-2), Nancy (-2), Over The Hedge (-3), Pluggers (-1), Sylvia (-2), Tommy (R)
12 – Amazing Spider-Man (-1), Mark Trail (0), Phantom (+1), Rhymes With Orange (+2), Stone Soup (+4), Tiger (-1)
11 – Betty (0), Big Nate (0), Dave (0), Ghost Story Club (+6), Mr. Boffo (0)
10 – Apartment 3-G (-1), Bound & Gagged (-1), Buckles (R), Speed Bump (+1)
9 – Crabby Road (0), Dick Tracy (-1), Herb and Jamaal (0), Middletons (0), Sherman’s Lagoon (+1), Zippy (0)
8 – Archie (+1), Buckets (0), Dunagin’s People (-1), Duplex (+1), Gil Thorp (0), Hocus-Focus (0), I Need Help (R), Kuduz (0), Us & Them (-3)
7 – Brenda Starr (-1), Fusco Brothers (0), Ralph (0), Thatch (0), They’ll Do It Every Time (0)
6 – Against The Grain (R), Chaos (-2), Grin and Bear It (0), Momma (0), Norm (R), Off The Mark (+3)
5 – Committed (0), Motley’s Crew (0), Safe Havens (-1), That’s Jake (0), Tumbleweeds (-1)
4 – Ballard Street, Bottom Liners, Broom Hilda, Citizen Dog, Comic For Kids, Crock, Donald Duck, Horrorscope, 9 Chickweed Lane, Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Terry and The Pirates, Willy N Ethel
3 – Bent Offering, Better Half, On The Fastrack, Quigmans, Reality Check, Ripley’s Believe It or Not
2 – Animal Crackers, At The Zu, Between Friends, Chubb & Chauncey, Cornered, Culture Shock, Frumpy The Clown, Little Orphan Annie, Mickey Mouse, New Breed, Our Fascinating Earth, Redeye, Rip Kirby, Second Chances, Swan Factory, Tundra, Two Toes, Walnut Cove
1 – Belvedere, Ben, Bent Halos, Best Years, Bliss, Family Business, Flintstones, Good Life, Hazel, Health Capsules, Ick, J.D. Comics, Laffbreak, Love Is, Lumpy Gravy, Meet Mr. Lucky, Modesty Blaise, Moose Miller, Out of Bounds, PC and Pixel, Penmen, Quality Time, Rural Rootz, Small Society, Suburban Cowgirls, Tarzan, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Tight Corner, Trudy, Twins, Wild Life, Wit of The World, Word for Word
Labels: Paper Trends
