If they called them “The Saddies,” even fewer people would read them

As a kid, I used to love the funnies. They were my favorite part of the daily newspaper; in fact, they were the only part I read. I can remember my parents reading them to me and, as I got a little bit older, helping me read them myself, as I’d sound out the words in the bubbles. I imagine the same holds true for most Americans my age or older, and maybe even younger (although fewer and fewer of those who are younger).

My father was a big newspaper fan, and we used to get the two daily newspapers throughout my childhood: Our hometown paper and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This meant two sets of funnies. They overlapped quite a bit, but each page had some strips the others don’t.

Peanuts, Animal Crackers, Garfield, B.C., Andy Capp, Blondie, The Wizard of Id, The Family Circle, For Better Or For Worse, Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois, Hagar The Horrible, Dennis The Menace, Marmaduke, Funky Winkerbean, Spider-Man, Doonesbury…I remember these all being pretty consistent in the papers I grew up with.

I remember when new strips came, like Calvin and Hobbes and Jump Start and Dilbert and Fox Trot, and when when others left, like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side and Bloom County and Pogo. I remember when Born Loser mentioned my hometown Ashtabula in it, and I remember clipping Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles out of the paper every day, when a Jim Lawson strip was running in the local paper (at the height of Turtlemania). I remember when Farley died, and when Mort Walker introduced the Asian guy into the Beetle Bailey cast. Rose Is Rose was one...

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