With the recent release of Netflix’s The Sandman receiving widespread critical and fan acclaim, it’s easy to get nostalgic for fiction from past eras as continues to weigh heavily across the pop culture landscape. While much of the current zeitgeist takes its inspiration from the pages of Marvel and DC, there’s also a vast array of small and big screen adaptations derived from the glory days of daily newspaper print comic strips.
A few of these include Peanuts holiday animated specials, Archie live-action shows like Riverdale, movies like Dick Tracy, Popeye, and Dennis The Menace, and Adult Swim offerings like The Boondocks. Gen X and Baby Boomers alike fondly remember the heyday of ’80s comic strips.
Andy Capp
Andy Capp was a popular offering in the latter part of the 20th century. Penned by cartoonist Reg Smythe, Capp appeared first in the British papers the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror as a single-panel strip, then later expanded to four panels and worldwide syndication.
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Capp was a tongue-in-cheek statement on certain segments of the British working class, with the title character a perennially out-of-work alcoholic barfly who gambled and drank to excess, constantly asked for handouts, and fought with fellow bar patrons and his long-suffering wife, time and again. Seen as a blue-collar look of England’s class system, full of all its stereotypes, the comic strip enjoyed a successful run until Smythe’s death in 1998, but still continues via other artists, albeit with a slightly different style.
The Wizard Of Id
Created by cartoonists Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, this series which launched in 1964 follows the antics of a wide assembly of different characters, styled much like Hart’s first commercially successful strip B.C., set within the somewhat rundown medieval kingdom of Id. It mostly focused on the court of comic relief characters surrounding a tyrannical, dwarf-sized monarch known only as The King, including his in-house wizard not so subtly modeled after King Arthur’s Merlin.
The strip often satirized popular American culture and frequently engaged in meta-references to suit its daily gags, such as peasants using modern technology. The strip was met with critical acclaim, winning best humor strip by the National Cartoonists’ Society several times in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Cathy
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This perpetually stressed-out female protagonist rendered by cartoonist Cathy Guisewhite has often been parodied by the likes of Saturday Night Live and other satirical outlets. From 1976 to 2010, Cathy fans enjoyed the daily antics of their heroine, always struggling with the “four guilt groups of life:” food, family, work, and love.
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Guisewhite was offering a not unsubtle glimpse into the pitfalls and foible of the latter 20th-century modern woman, and longtime fans waited many years for the strip star’s ever-patient boyfriend Irving to finally get serious, which he, at last, did on Valentine’s Day in 2004. The final strip in 2010 revealed that Cathy was pregnant, and so her daily antics went into history, leaving behind an indelible footprint with her signature catchphrase, “Ack!”
Doonesbury
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The legendary politically left-leaning comic strip did indeed start on the comics page before many newspaper editors tossed it over to the op-editorial newspaper section once it quickly became known as a satirical soapbox of sorts. This was thanks to creator Gary Trudeau’s frequently cutting social commentary on the American sociopolitical landscape.
The strip focused on multiple characters, including American presidents throughout the decades (most notoriously portrayed as a waffle for Bill Clinton and a Stetson hat atop an invisible figure for George W. Bush) and its title character Michael Doonesbury, issuing incisive observations on the state of American affairs. Trudeau’s comic quickly became one of the best in the medium, and in 1975, the first daily comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Blondie
Cartoonist Chic Young started producing the strip featuring the eponymous blonde and her sandwich-loving husband, Dagwood, as far back as 1930, and it also became a long-running film series and radio show. Young died in 1973, but passed along the creative rights to his son, Dean, who continued the Blondie legacy and expanded its distribution to over 2,000 newspapers in 47 countries.
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Its titular heroine was originally named Blondie Boopadoop and Dagwood was actually an heir to an industrial fortune, rather than the carpooling working class schmoe he ended up being in later years. The Bumstead household eventually evolved into a pop-cultural statement of everyday life in American suburbia.
The Far Side
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Perhaps the most famous single-panel comic strip of all time, The Far Side‘s quirky and often dark sense of humor was an ’80s staple. Gary Larson became prominently renowned as the most surrealist cartoonist of his day, frequently using animals and nature, pending disasters, and warped renditions of classic proverbs to issue hit-and-run sight gags. His style was an appropriately bizarre counterpart to more heartwarming comics like Calvin and Hobbes.
Appearing in more than 2,000 newspapers across the world and translated into 17 different languages, The Far Side‘s collected editions proved wildly popular, generating tens of millions of dollars for parent company, Universal. Few and far between were academic and corporate offices in the ’80s which didn’t have a cut-out Gary Larson panel taped to the door.
Garfield
Jim Davis’ billion-dollar empire including an array of hard print, television and movie adaptations, and endless scores of merchandise sometimes seems hard to believe, given it’s all based on the self-serving antics of a perpetually lazy, coffee and lasagna-loving cat who quite literally stands as the American pop culture flashpoint of ‘I hate Mondays.’
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Garfield, his long-suffering owner, Jon, and fellow pet, Odie, have been entertaining fans since 1978, proving to be one of the medium’s most successful products, partly thanks to Davis’ lack of social or political commentary and mostly because the title character does indeed emulate a fair approximation of many American middle class laments and desires. The strip still holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for being the most widely syndicated comic strip.
Peanuts
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Much like apple pie, baseball, and bipartisan politics, it’s hard to find more core Americana than Charles Schulz’s long-standing, top-of-the-heap body of work than the venerable Peanuts gang. For 50 years ‘Sparky,’ as he was known to his peers, issued daily and Sunday weekly strips of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the rest of the kids and the greater portion of the comic landscape was less poor for it.
Almost 18,000 strips were published, with some academics arguing the scope of the Peanuts saga might be the longest story ever told by a single human being. Its animated TV seasonal specials, particularly its annual Christmas offering, A Charlie Brown Christmas, became a rite of passage and intergenerational tradition for nearly all American families.
Calvin And Hobbes
Though it enjoyed a lesser stint among the daily newspaper strips, running simply from 1985 to 1995, Bill Watterson’s classic and much-lauded strip hit the American cultural sweet spot in ways few other similar offerings did. Calvin and Hobbes satirized a number of institutions Watterson found wanting, including the art world, academia, and family dynamics and co-dependencies.
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In following the spectacularly imaginative make-believe world of Calvin and his (alive?) imaginary stuffed tiger BFF, Hobbes, Watterson issued an intricately exquisite balance between the confusion and pain of middle childhood, the ongoing struggle of parenthood, and the innocence of unmapped futures, courtesy of everyone’s favorite hero, Spaceman Spiff.
Bloom County
While all the aforementioned newspaper comic strips were incredibly popular in the ’80s, the true reigning champ of the medium in the decade had to be Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County. The four-panel offering was a quintessential ’80s comic strip, with frequent parodies of the era’s sociological, political, and entertainment arenas, including scathing satire of then real estate mogul Donald Trump’s first run for office and presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
Mixing anthropomorphic animals with human characters was a well-known method for most cartoonists, but Breathed made his signature characters Opus, Bill the Cat, and Steve Dallas the comic strip hallmarks of an entire generation, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
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