Tuesday, August 30, 2022
Jeffrey Lindenblatt's Paper Trends: The 300 for 1990 -- Winners and Losers
This year we have something that rarely happens in newspapers: a strip in the top 10 coming to an end. Most comic strips begin with either a small or big debut, reach a peak position and over time lose papers and then when strip is near the bottom the syndicate cancels the strip. In this rare case, though, on August 6, 1989 Berke Breathed decided to end his daily strip Bloom County and transform it to a Sunday-only feature, called Outland.
Since Bloom County’s debut in 1980 it has been gaining papers every single year. In last year’s survey Bloom County was the 9th most popular strip with 133 papers. On the following Monday there were a huge number of open spaces available. So, what did newspaper editors add to their papers? The answer is that except for one rookie practically all of them were veteran strips.
Leading the pack would be Calvin and Hobbies with a whopping 57 papers. Other big winners were Fox Trot with 25 papers, Far Side and For Better or For Worse with 19 papers and Cathy with 18 papers. Here are the rest of strips that gain at least 5 papers:
Mother Goose and Grimm – 13
Curtis - 13
Crankshaft - 12
Rose is Rose - 11
In The Bleachers – 8
Safe Havens - 8
Garfield – 5
Hagar The Horrible – 5
Arlo and Janis – 5
Grizzwells – 5
On the other side of the coin, all the strips that lost 5 papers or more were also veteran strips. Berry’s World took the biggest hit, losing 13 papers. Andy Capp and Nancy continued their losses with 6 and 5 papers respectively. Amazing Spider-Man and Phantom lost 5 papers each, mainly replaced by the new Batman strip. Here is the complete list of all the strips that lost 5 or more papers:
Berry’s World - 13
Andy Capp – 6
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith – 5
Nancy – 5
Amazing Spider-Man – 5
Phantom – 5
Small Society - 5
Even with the return of Batman the adventure strips still continued to lose spots. This year the adventure strip goes down another 10.9 % mainly because of the end of Buz Sawyer, which still had a respectable 13 papers:
Alley Oop – 37 (2)
Dick Tracy – 22 (-1)
Amazing Spider-Man – 18 (-5)
Batman – 15 (15)
Mark Trail – 15 (-3)
Phantom – 14 (-5)
Brenda Starr – 11 (-1)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 10 (-3)
Little Orphan Annie – 7 (-2)
Rip Kirby – 4 (0)
Flash Gordon – 2 (-2)
Popeye – 2 (0)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Secret Agent Corrigan, Mandrake The Magician, Tim Tyler’s Luck – 0
Ended
Buz Sawyer – 13
Joe Palooka – 1 (a temporary revival)
The soap opera strips are continuing their slow demise, dropping about 6% since last year:
Mary Worth – 59 (-4)
Rex Morgan – 49 (-1)
Judge Parker – 27 (-4)
Apartment 3-G – 23 (1)
Gil Thorp – 10 (-1)
Heart of Juliet Jones – 3 (-2)
Winnie Winkle – 3 (0)
Labels: Paper Trends
