Thursday, June 30, 2022
Jeffrey Lindenblatt's Paper Trends -- The 300 for 1989: Biggest Gainers and Losers
The two biggest gainers of 1989 were the same as for the year before. Calvin and Hobbies gained a massive 36 papers this year and The Far Side gained 11 papers. Not as big as last year’s advancements of 48 and 27, respectively. Coming in third, it’s a tie between For Better Or For Worse and Bloom County with 6 papers each. This will be Bloom County’s last year as a daily strip. It would have been interesting to see how high Bloom County would have gone if it remained in syndication. Next year we will see which strips will be chosen by editors to replace Bloom County – that’s a lot of spots to fill. The rest of the big gainers are:
Herman – 5
Arlo and Janis – 5
Snafu – 5
In The Bleachers – 5
The Neighborhood - 5
The biggest loser of 1989 was a long running strip, Andy Capp, which lost 7 papers. The next two were also the biggest losers of last year: U.S. Acres and Gummi Bears, losing 6 papers each. Also losing 6 papers was last year’s rookie, What A Guy! The rest of the losers were all shedding under 5 papers.
This year the adventure strips took a huge drop. This was mainly because two classic long-running adventure strips, Steve Canyon and Captain Easy, ended. The drop this time was a massive 18.5%. Here’s the full list:
Alley Oop – 35 (-1)
Amazing Spider-Man – 23 (-4)
Dick Tracy – 23 (0)
Phantom – 19 (-4)
Mark Trail – 18 (0)
Buz Sawyer – 13 (-1)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 13 (0)
Brenda Starr – 12 (1)
Little Orphan Annie – 9 (-1)
Flash Gordon – 4 (0)
Rip Kirby – 4 (0)
Popeye – 2 (0)
Joe Palooka – 1 (1)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Secret Agent Corrigan, Mandrake The Magician, Tim Tyler’s Luck – 0
Ended
Captain Easy – 17
Steve Canyon – 14
The soap opera strips didn’t do nearly as bad, losing only a collective 4 papers:
Mary Worth – 63 (0)
Rex Morgan – 50 (0)
Judge Parker – 31 (-1)
Apartment 3-G – 22 (-2)
Gil Thorp – 11 (0)
Heart of Juliet Jones – 5 (-1)
Winnie Winkle – 3 (0)
Labels: Paper Trends
