Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Jeffrey Lindenblatt's Paper Trends: The 300 for 2000 - Biggest Winners and Losers
The biggest gainer in 2000 was cartoonist Jerry Scott who had a one-two punch with a combined total of 26 papers added. Zits gained the most with 16 papers and Baby Blues, which gained 10 papers was the #2 gainer. Another big gainer was Fox Trot with 8 papers and Luann with 7 papers. Here is the list of all the strips that gained at least 5 papers during the past year.
Zits – 16
Baby Blues - 10
Fox Trot - 8
Family Circus – 7
Luann - 7
Rose is Rose – 6
Crankshaft – 5
Pickles – 5
Heart of The City - 5
The biggest losers did not happen until the first Monday of 2000. That is when the most successful strip of the second half of the 20th century, Peanuts, came to an end. Well, it did not really come to an end but went into reruns In what was then a rare move, instead of ending the strip the syndicate started offering reprints from the year 1974. After that client papers had two options; they could run the older strips that were 4 panels long or the newer strips that were at most 3 panels long. Not all the current clients wanted reruns so 13 papers decided to drop the strip. But the vast majority signed on – that 13 paper drop represents only about 6% of Peanuts clients. And once syndicates realized that newspapers and readers would accept reruns, the practice started to flourish – a big blow to young cartoonists hoping to crack newspaper syndication.
Another big loser again was Andy Capp with a loss of 9 papers. Here is the complete list of strips that lost 5 or more papers.
Peanuts – 13
Andy Capp - 9
Rubes – 7
Rugrats – 6
On the story strip front the adventure strips and soap strips lost only 2 spots this year. This year we had the debut of the last pure adventure strip Zorro which only got 1 paper. Ten years from now we will have the debut of another adventure strip, Rip Haywire, but that falls in the category of comic adventure like Alley Oop.
Adventure (-2)
Alley Oop – 30 (+2)
Mark Trail – 12 (0)
Phantom – 11 (0)
Amazing Spider-Man – 7 (-2)
Brenda Starr – 7 (0)
Dick Tracy – 7 (-1)
Mickey Mouse – 2 (0)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 2 (0)
Tarzan – 2 (+1)
Little Orphan Annie – 1 (0)
Mandrake The Magician – 1 (-1)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Zorro – 1 (+1)
Ended
Rip Kirby – 2
Soaps (-2)
Mary Worth – 42 (0)
Rex Morgan – 35 (-2)
Judge Parker – 19 (0)
Apartment 3-G – 8 (0)
Gil Thorp – 8 (0)
Labels: Paper Trends
The Milwaukee Journal is part of the Gannett papers and this past year they were all ordered to pick comic from a list of only 34 and one of them is the Peanuts.
