One of my favorite memories of childhood was faithfully reading the comics every single day; I've blathered on & on about them since the beginning of this blog, including:
MY DAILY RUN-THROUGH, CIRCA 1978-1990 (TOP 5 FAVORITES IN BOLD):
Blondie
Family Circus
Grin and Bear It
B.C.
Wizard of Id
Beetle Bailey
Bloom County
The Born Loser
Calvin & Hobbes
Curtis
The Far Side
For Better of For Worse
Funky Winkerbean
Garfield
Gil Thorp
Hagar the Horrible
Peanuts
Pluggers
Shoe
Snuffy Smith
I loved any collection/treasury of comic strips I could get my beady little paws on, including B.C./Wizard of Id, Peanuts, Hagar the Horrible, The Far Side, Boom County & of course my all-time #1, Garfield.
I didn't know it then, but it turns out my time obsessing over these may have coincided with the Golden Age of Comic Strips, the 80s & 90s:
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.I will leave you people with my all-time # single strip of all time. 🤗🤣 🤣 🤣
“It was this delightful time when newspapers still held a bonding role in both the culture and the popular zeitgeist,” Breathed wrote in an email.
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.
“Cartoon collections were exploding out of the warehouses and into people’s homes,” noted a former Universal Press Syndicate editor, Jake Morrissey, who worked with such artists as Bill Watterson (of “Calvin and Hobbes”) and Gary Larson (of “The Far Side”). “People still read the newspaper, so those books were essentially being advertised by the comic strips every day.”
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