I was checking out a link from IMWAN to CBR when I stumbled across this article by Haiden Sayne. It gives his personal choice of "10 Best Comic Strips of All Time:"




https://www.cbr.com/best-comic-strips-a ... anuts-gang


I agree wholeheartedly with "Peanuts" as #1.

"Calvin & Hobbes" is good Top 10 material, and a plausible choice for #2.

Most of the rest seem like safe Top 10 picks for anybody with much knowledge of the history of American newspaper comics. YMMV.

I wouldn't put "Garfield," even in its heyday many years ago, in the Top 10. If I did, he'd just barely sneak in at the end of the list. That strip's been running on autopilot for decades now.

I'm sure the Spidey newspaper strip has its fans, and I recall liking it well enough when it ran in our local paper for a time, but surely it's not Top 10 material when there are so many other great strips to choose from.

I've never for the life of me understood why "Mutts" gets such great praise. To me it has never seemed more than OK. Maybe its biggest fans all loved it when they were kids? It didn't come out until well after I'd left my own childhood behind.

Thoughts?

Peanuts is definitely number 1. It had it all, and is a cultural touchstone like no strip before or after it.

2 says more about the voter than the strip - Calvin and Hobbes, or Doonesbury. I'd go C&H, but ymmv
3 Doonesbury for me, and I didn't even like it much. Brillant
4 Dilbert for the massive relationship to today's modern world, and personal relatability.
5 (by reputation) Prince Valiant for the art.
6 Blondie- family friendly every man comedy still running today
7 Dick Tracy - when unfunny serials were still a valld format; and I think noir worked better than...
8 Flash Gordon - I love Space Opera, but SF works better in other media
9 Garfield; sure, it got really tired, but again, it broke out past the funny pages into other media
10 Beetle Bailey. Somewhere out there, I'm sure there are realistic strips of Bailey at war, but in the mean time, here's the army life played for laughs

I'd also throw out a couple that I think deserve mentioning, but not consideration. Shoe, which was quite sarcastic for a comic strip, and For Better or For Worse, which I don;t know if it got as disseminated as much in the states as it did in Canada. Oh, and Bloom County. Which was hilarious

And of course, Far Side wasn't a comic strip, so it doesn't count.

You’d have to sell me on Garfield, Beetle Bailey and Spider-Man, but I guess it’s a personal list.

You can make a good case for "Beetle Bailey" based on historical significance. It was a leader in the new wave of humor strips that came out in the early 1950s. It and "Peanuts"--which began at almost exactly the same time--really left their mark on how American newspaper strips were done from then on.

Jason makes a good case for having an old-fashioned "domestic comedy" strip on a Top 10 list. "Blondie" is one of the most obvious choices in that genre.

I'm a fan of Little Orphan Annie, but I can certainly understand that most people my age barely know her beyond
possibly the movies. My Dad has a nice collection: "ARF! The Life and Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie." That
started my interest. I know own all of her strips from 1924–1851.

Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts for sure would be on my Top Ten.
B.C. and Wizard of Id were always good. I suppose I'd have room for Beetle Bailey and Blondie.

When I was a kid, I also appreciated Family Circus, Dennis the Menace, Hägar the Horrible, even Ziggy. Now, I doubt
I would get much out of any of them, except the first year or two of Dennis the Menace really was a menace--and funny.
The earlier the better on all of those. But that's true for me and Peanuts, too.

I was never much into Doonesbury nor Bloom County nor Pogo, often too political for my tastes, but the earlier strips of
all of them were decent.

I also liked looking at the artwork of Prince Valiant, but I rarely ever read the strip. I'd read Andy Capp but rarely ever laughed;
the same for Marmaduke and score of others like Broom-Hilda, Crankshaft, Shoe….

The Lockhorns could be quite funny. Hi and Lois were decent. Gasoline Alley had it's moments, as did For Better or Worse,
Mother Goose and Grimm.

Strips like Mutts and Zits came out after my time, so I'm not one to judge. And I never found Cathie the least bit funny.

Calvin and Hobbes is my evergreen #1.

Peanuts is classic, of course

Dilbert was brilliant at its best.

The last one I remember liking before I stopped reading them in the paper was Get Fuzzy. The punchlines weren't always great, but I liked the characters.

In this internet era, I like Nathan Pyle's online strip about the aliens. I don't know if it actually has a name, but at its best it's brilliant.

That’s a terrible list. No Terry & the Pirates?

I guess my list would be something like Terry & The Pirates, Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, Peanuts, Pogo, Doonesbury, Dick Tracy, Popeye, Calvin & Hobbes, and the Far Side. More or less, anyway.

I love Bloom County, but it seems very dated upon modern re-reading.

Unranked, as always. Because I can't commit.

Peanuts
Pogo
Krazy Kat
Calvin and Hobbes
Life In Hell
Dick Tracy
Li'l Abner
Popeye
Terry & the Pirates
Doonesbury

I am ashamed to admit that I haven't read Krazy Kat nor Li'l Abner yet.

There's a lot of world out there to experience. Can't do it all.

True, but those are kind essential reading for a guy like me. I'll have to get on it.

Does The Far Side not count since it is (usually) a single panel instead of technically a comic strip?

If it counts, then its omission is borderline unforgivable. Especially for the Spider-Man strip, which is (sorry, Stan) the definition of mediocrity at best, except for the early John Romita years.

I enjoyed the Li'l Abner strips that I saw, but I never saw very many of them. And I saw some gorgeous Frazetta ones.
Likewise, I also enjoyed some Dick Tracy strips over the years, especially some a few years ago that picked up a few
loose threads from Orphan Annie strip that had been cancelled/retired.

I think the single panel Far Side comic should count. Some of the ones I listed earlier like Family Circus, Ziggy, Dennis
the Menace, etc. were often (not always) single panels when they were dailies.

Perhaps "Newspaper Comics" or "Newspaper Funnies" would be a better term so that we can include those.

The Batman Comic Strips over the years have been pretty good, old and new. I especially liked the Marshall Rogers ones.

Spider-Man was okay at best, but I was happy to see it in the papers.

that was why I'd exclude it; Far Side wasn't a strip, usually; just a single panel with a great joke.
I could use the same argument to exclude Family Circus, although it would never make my list.

Mine would be...

1. Peanuts
2. The Wizard of Id
3. B.C.
4. The Phantom
5. Garth
6. Calvin & Hobbes
7. Snake Tales
8. Frontiers Of Science
9. Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors
10. Footrot Flats

This is, of course, an Australia-centric list.

My wife had a couple of Snake paperbacks when I met her. I enjoyed them quite a bit. Good gags.

I think the Far Side should count, though it would be just outside my top ten. Larson created worlds in one panel and caption. I would often wonder what preceded and what followed what we saw in each daily.
And I agree, the Spider-Man strip was not great. It would be lucky to crack the top 100 adventure strips.

Peanuts
Calvin and Hobbes
Doonesbury
For Better or For Worse
BC
Blondie
Pogo
Prince Valiant (or substitute your favorite early action strip like Flash Gordon)
Terry and the Pirates (or Steve Canyon, just so you include Caniff)
Dick Tracy

I don't necessarily even like all of them on this list, but to me it represents a much better top 10 than any list that includes Garfield.

I'd have to agree!

Believe it or not, "Snake Tales" ran for a time in Arkansas in the 1980s. It is not unknown in the U.S.

Nobody has mentioned "Funky Winkerbean." I grew up reading the early years of that strip in the 1970s and early 1980s. Great fun, very funny, and still one of my all-time favorites. In the latter part of the '80s it started getting more serious. I understand that it eventually turned into a very gloomy soap opera strip. Sounds entirely unlike the strip I grew up with. But that first decade or so of Funky was wonderful. I have most of it in hardcover reprints. It was as fun reading it again as an adult as it was the first time.