Like many people, comic strips were the way I got into cartooning. For one thing, my parents subscribed to the Columbus Dispatch, so there was a steady stream of comic strips arriving to my house daily. The trade paperbacks were also ridiculously cheap as well.
Early loves were Peanuts and Heathcliff. I got into Bloom County before I really understood what was going on, but I knew it was subversive. Calvin and Hobbes arrived in middle school, the perfect time for me to become obsessed with it. I didn’t see the golden days of the immense Watterson Sunday pages until much later because I was in college and didn’t have access to a newspaper (ironically, I was drawing my own strip for the university newspaper at the time).
But my love my comic strips lingered, and once publishers began releasing collections of classic strips in hardcover collections, I started buying the complete sets of classic strips like Terry and the Pirates, Popeye, Bloom County, and Pogo. Just this summer I bought the mammoth Doonesbury collection from a few years ago for $17 and spend most of the summer engrossed in a comic strip I had never been interested in before.
Still, these were classic strips, not ongoing strips. I hadn’t had a subscription to the local paper for a while, so I wasn’t consuming new comic strips nearly as often as I once was.
That is, until I went to the National Cartoonists Society conference two weekends ago and met a bunch of people that draw comic strips for a living. And realized how funny thy were, and how their main purpose in life is to bring joy to the world with their work.
I used to want to draw a comic strip, but it’s a grueling schedule, especially with a daily strip. You have to be funny every day, or at least most days. They don’t have the luxury to wait for inspiration like they might if they were working on a graphic novel. They are running a business, and that’s clear from the way they talk about what they do. Funny guys, but they take their work seriously.
I carried the energy from the conference home with me and became a subscriber to two comic services: GoComics and ComicsKingdom. I can’t recommend one over the other; I had to get both to get all the strips I wanted. Both are around $30 a year. You can read them for free on the website, but if you get a subscription you can get them delivered to in your inbox, sorta like a newspaper.
Here’s a snapshot of my GoComics subscription. I love Cul de Sac and Calvin and Hobbes and they run old strips of both. I have never been a Cathy fan before, but since Cathy Guisewite was at NCS, I thought I’d give it a try. Pretty sure these are older strips too, but I’m not sure.
Other GoComics comics I follow: Lio, Pearls Before Swine, Garfield, For Better or For Worse, Rip Haywire, Red and Rover, Peanuts (they have more recent strips and throwback strips), Doonesbury (I’m a big fan now), Luann, and Crabgrass. Two new favorites are Rabbits Against Magic by Jonathan Lemon and Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson, both of whom were at NCS and I could have met, and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t. Please check out their work; it’s spectacular.
Here’s a couple of shots of my feed for Comics Kingdom, which has a nice mix of new strips that I like (Macanudo, Dustin) but I’m mostly here for the legacy strips and reruns of strips that are long gone. Even though I still read new Hi and Lois strips, I love the mid-century look of the vintage strips. And of course, Krazy Kat.
They have a lot of old story strips too, and Ben Towle gave me the tip to skip reading them and just admire the artwork. I’m not sure my brain is wired to follow serial strips anymore anyway.
Other ComicsKingdom subs: Blondie, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, The Family Circus, The Pajama Diaries, Zits, Bizarro, and Zippy the Pinhead.
I recommend giving one of these subscriptions a try. I don’t recommend reading them on your phone, because while some of them are designed for that now, most of them aren’t.
I’d love hearing from you about what comic strips I’m missing that I should be reading daily.
And why not subscribe to my Substack? Or even becoming a paid subscriber? I’d love for you to support my work, and you can cancel if you get bored.
Comic strips are a dying trade in the uk, but we do have the digital magazine The New Cartoonist, which is based on the original broad sheet ‘The Cartoonist’ from the late 90’s.
If you like witty panel cartoons, take a look at Rubes by Leigh Rubin. It’s a Creators Syndicate feature that is carried by GoComics.