Jeffrey Lindenblatt's Paper Trends: The 300 For 1988 -- Biggest Gainers and Losers

The biggest gainer for 1988 was Calvin and Hobbes, which had tied for second place last year with an increase of 20 papers. This year the strip gained a massive 48 papers. Coming in second was last year’s biggest gainer The Far Side with 27 papers. Over the last three years The Far Side has gained a total of 92 papers. The rest of the biggest gainers continue their trend in gaining more papers. Here is the rest of the best.

Bloom County - 9
Family Circus – 8
Wizard of Id – 8
Frank & Ernest – 7
Berry’s World - 7
Born Loser – 6
In The Bleachers – 6

The biggest losers are two recent strips, U.S. Acres down by 16 papers and Gummi Bears dropping 11 papers. The rest are the adventure strips on their slow downward spiral, and the incremental loss of popularity of the NEA package. Here are  the rest of the biggest losers:

Dick Tracy – 7
Steve Canyon - 6
Eek & Meek – 5
Bugs Bunny – 5
Amazing Spider-Man – 5
Crock – 5
The Neighborhood – 5

And again we track the continued losses of the adventure strips. The only one gaining was Brenda Starr, perhaps reflecting the writing of relative newcomer Mary Schmich, a respected name in newspaper circles:

Alley Oop – 36 (-3)
Amazing Spider-Man – 27 (-5)
Dick Tracy – 23 (-7)
Phantom – 23 (-2)
Mark Trail – 18 (0)
Captain Easy – 17 (0)
Buz Sawyer – 14 (-2)
Steve Canyon – 14 (-6)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 13 (-1)
Brenda Starr – 11 (+2)
Little Orphan Annie – 10 (0)
Flash Gordon – 4 (0)
Rip Kirby – 4 (-1)
Popeye – 2 (0)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Brick Bradford – 0 (-1) – strip ended
Secret Agent Corrigan – 0
Mandrake the Magician – 0
Tim Tyler’s Luck – 0

Adventure strip slots are down 26 from last year; that is a 10.7% drop.

It is interesting that 1988 will be the last year for both Steve Canyon and Captain Easy. When we started this survey with the year 1978 Steve Canyon had 62 papers and Captain Easy only had 42 papers. Now in its last year Captain Easy had more papers than Steve Canyon, though of course both are way down from those 1978 figures now. Maybe in the future we can go backwards and see what their highest totals were. Also, it is clear that the syndicate did not want to continue with Steve Canyon after Milton Caniff passed away. I wonder how many years the strip would have continued if Caniff hadn’t passed away.

On the soap opera strips it was a much better year, They only lost 4 spots.  

Mary Worth – 63 (-3)
Rex Morgan – 50 (0)
Judge Parker – 32 (+1)
Apartment 3-G – 24 (+2)
Gil Thorp – 11 (-1)
Heart of Juliet Jones – 6 (-2)
Winnie Winkle – 3 (-1)