Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Jeffrey Lindenblatt's Paper Trends: The 300 for 2001 -- Biggest Winners and Losers
The biggest gainer in 2001 was a repeat of last year. Cartoonist Jerry Scott’s two strips, Zits and Baby Blues, added a combined 29 papers between them, which is three more than his amazing performance of the year before. The other big gainer was last year’s bronze rookie winner, Get Fuzzy, which added 15 more papers, stepping up to silver.
Here are the strips that added at least 5 papers or more. You will see an interesting pattern with these strips:
Zits – 17
Get Fuzzy - 15
Baby Blues - 12
Fox Trot – 5
Mutts – 5
Pickles – 5
Boondocks - 5
As we begin a new century, we can see the mindset of the feature editors was “out with old and in with the new.” All the strips that gained 5 or more papers this year are relatively young strips.
The strips that were the biggest losers were mainly veterans. Leading the pack as with last year was a strip that went into reruns. Peanuts dropped 20 papers. The other big loser this year was Shoe, which dropped 15 papers and Cathy with 11 papers. Here are all the strips that lost 5 or more papers:
Peanuts – 20
Shoe - 15
Cathy – 11
Frank and Ernest - 7
Beetle Bailey – 6
Wizard of Id – 6
Rugrats - 6
Garfield – 5
The continuing pattern of adventure and soap strips losing papers continued in 2001 with adventures strips losing 4 spots and soaps losing 3.
Adventure (-4)
Alley Oop – 30 (0)
Mark Trail – 12 (0)
Phantom – 11 (0)
Brenda Starr – 7 (0)
Dick Tracy – 6 (-1)
Amazing Spider-Man – 5 (-2)
Mickey Mouse – 2 (0)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 2 (0)
Tarzan – 2 (0)
Little Orphan Annie – 1 (0)
Mandrake the Magician – 1 (0)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Zorro – 0 – (-1)
Soaps (-3)
Mary Worth – 39 (-3)
Rex Morgan – 36 (+1)
Judge Parker – 19 (0)
Gil Thorp – 8 (0)
Apartment 3-G – 7 (-1)
Ended -- Heart of Juliet Jones, but it was already at 0 papers in the survey
Labels: Paper Trends
