Sally Forth (and former Flash Gordon) artist Jim Keefe
noted the temporary end of new Spider-Man comic strips.
With the Amazing Spider-man comic strip going to reprints for the time being, Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s run on the strip has come to an end. March 17 was the last Sunday with March 23 being the last daily.
…
With adventure strips being far and few between on today’s comics page, I thought it would be of interest to look at a few notable comic strip finales.
And so Jim presents a number of last strips for various adventure strips.
I thought I would compliment that with the firsts to his lasts.
Buz Sawyer debuted November 1, 1943
The first Buz Sawyer Sunday, featuring Roscoe Sweeney, appeared November 28, 1943
The above come from the Comics Kingdom blog
where they also serve up some outstanding examples of Roy Crane comic strip art.
Jim also shows various ends to Terry and the Pirates,
so here’s Milton Caniff‘s first daily (October 22, 1934) and Sunday (December 9, 1934) strips.
Jim posts the ending of Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim.
Both those strips premiered on the same January 7, 1934 page by Alex Raymond.
I have already covered a couple of the strips so I’ll just refer you
to those Buck Rogers and Secret Agent X-9/Secret Agent Corrigan pages.
And finally Jim completes the Alex Raymond quartet with the Rip Kirby finale.
Rip Kirby was Raymond’s return to comics after WWII, with the door opening on March 4, 1946.
Jim only shows the very last strip of Rip this time,
early he had shown the entire last week by Frank Bolle after John Prentice’s death.
Thanks for the fantastic addendum. Loved getting a look at how these strips first premiered one after the other – Great post!