Wednesday, July 28, 2021
Jeffrey Lindenblatt's Paper Trends: The 300 for 1985 -- Biggest Winners and Losers
The biggest gainer is a strip that has been out of the newspapers for the last 22 months; Doonesbury returns as a force to be reckoned with, gaining an impressive 17 papers over what he had when he went on vacation. This rise is in spite of the fact that Garry Trudeau now demanded that his daily strip can only be printed at a certain minimum size, larger than the current comic strip daily. This caused a major change to the location of Doonesbury in newspapers – many editors took the opportunity to move it to the op-ed pages.
In other news, Garfield is continuing its climb, and The Far Side is finally picking up steam.
Here are the top gainers of the year:
Doonesbury - +17
Garfield – +15
Far Side - +12
Bloom County – +11
Cathy – +9
Frank and Ernest – +7
Andy Capp – +6
Dennis the Menace – +6
Lockhorns –+ 6
Peanuts – +5
Blondie – +5
Hagar the Horrible – +5
Shoe – +5
Marvin - +5
Here are the biggest losers of the year.
Conrad – 10
Berry’s World – 7
Amazing Spider-Man – 6
Mr. Men and Little Miss – 6
Fenton – 6
Small Society – 5
Grin and Bear It - 5
Adventures strip continue their downward spiral:
Alley Oop – 41 (-2)
Dick Tracy – 36 (-1)
Amazing Spider-Man – 35 (-6)
Buz Sawyer – 26 (-2)
Phantom – 23 (1)
Steve Canyon – 22 (-4)
Mark Trail – 20 (-2)
Captain Easy – 19 (-3)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 15 (-1)
Can You Solve The Mystery (new strip) – 14 (14)
Little Orphan Annie – 11 (-2)
Rip Kirby – 11 (1)
Brenda Starr – 10 (-1)
Flash Gordon – 4 (0)
Mandrake The Magician – 2 (0)
Popeye – 2 (0)
Brick Bradford – 1 (0)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Secret Agent Corrigan – 1 (0)
Superman – 0 (0)
Tim Tyler’s Luck – 0 (0)
Adventures strips that ended accounted for even more of an adventure strip bloodbath:
Joe Palooka – 8
Star Wars – 7
Lone Ranger – 3
The total slots devoted to adventure strips for 1984 was 274, down from 320. That is a 14.3% drop, which is less than last year but still a big drop.
I have been asked how the soap strips are doing at this time. Not great but still better than the adventure strips. What will be happening is that over time after the adventure strips go the soaps will follow them.
Mary Worth – 72 (-1)
Rex Morgan – 55 (1)
Judge Parker – 32 (0)
Apartment 3-G – 23 (0)
Gil Thorp – 11 (0)
Dondi – 8 (-1)
Heart of Juliet Jones – 8 (-1)
Winnie Winkle – 4 (-1)
As you can see the soap strips are holding up their own in 1984. There are other story strips but they fall into the comedy category like For Better or For Worse, Funky Winkerbean and Gasoline Alley. There are many strips that can fall into that category, but we would have to break them up to strip that run a story or theme for a week or run a story that can go up for three months or even longer. That is another category completely.
Labels: Paper Trends
