The Newspaper Funny Pages’ Last Great Hurrah
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A mischievous cartoonist landing an invite to the White House? It could only have happened during the heyday of the daily comics page. Throughout the 1980s, a series of spirited young strips — including “Bloom County,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Cathy,” “The Far Side,” and “For Better or Worse” — together drew hundreds of millions of daily fans. In the same period, established hits like “Peanuts” and “Doonesbury” reached new levels of power and popularity.
Brian Raftery for The New York Times writes of a time [new gift link], the last time, when newspaper comics pages made stars of cartoonists and comic strip collections regularly made the best seller lists. With Berkeley Breathed, Lynn Johnston, Jeff Kinney, Cathy Guisewite, Universal Press editor Jake Morrissey, Andrews McMeel Publishing’s Tom Thorton, and Garry Trudeau.
That bond was reflected at bookstores, where compilations like “The Far Side Observer” and “Garfield Swallows His Pride” were reliable hits. The demand for comic strip collections was so fervent that when Andrews McMeel Publishing released “The Essential Calvin and Hobbes” in 1988, the company ordered a cautiously optimistic print run of a million copies. They quickly sold out.
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