Allan Holtz’s Stripper’s Guide has provided comics researcher Jeffrey Lindenblatt a platform to present his latest project. Jeffrey has taken 300 newspapers, from large to small. and used them as a source to extrapolate the best selling newspaper comics strips from 1978 to 2019.
Says Jeffrey:
I decided that I would research 300 different daily papers from big cities to small cities and determine an actual count of which strips are available in how many papers. First question: why 300 papers particularly? At this time not nearly every newspaper is available, so of course I take what I can get. I am a subscriber to newspapers.com service, and they can just barely supply me with 300 daily papers in the year I chose to start. Also, statistically speaking, it is really not necessary to check every newspaper. A representative sample is almost as good.
The December 9 installment is the introduction, while the December 10 installment gives us the ranking of those comic strips that debuted in 1977. The #1 ranked “rookie” strip is a surprise.
This promises to be a fascinating look into recent comic strip history.
Here is the link to Jeffrey Lindenblatt’s Paper Trends entries.
Oh, and here’s the pecking order of those 1977 debut strips, with their overall position:
Four of the top five comic strips are story strips, ushering in a new “adventurous decade”; though it should be noted that Spider-Man debuted in January 1977 and Shoe first appeared in November 1977.