One morning in early 1985, the comic strip creator Berkeley Breathed received a call from an unlikely fan: Ronald Reagan.
Breathed had started “Bloom County,” the wily tale of several eccentric middle-American animals — human and otherwise — five years earlier. Its cast included an emo penguin named Opus as well as Bill the Cat, a droopy-tongued, occasionally comatose former presidential candidate with a penchant for Tender Vittles and cocaine.
On its surface, “Bloom County” didn’t seem particularly Gipper-friendly. But a recent installment had featured a flattering image of the first lady, Nancy Reagan, and the president wanted to express his gratitude.
When Reagan finally reached Breathed at his home in Iowa City, the cartoonist had stepped out of the shower. “Mr. President,” Breathed told Reagan, “you should probably know I’m not wearing any pants right now.” Their chat went well, and not long afterward, Breathed found himself seated with Reagan at a state dinner, where the two discussed the president’s film career.
A mischievous cartoonist landing an invite to the White House? It could only have happened during the heyday of the daily comics page. Throughout the 1980s, a series of spirited young strips — including “Bloom County,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Cathy,” “The Far Side,” and “For Better or Worse” — together drew hundreds of millions of daily fans. In the same period, established hits like “Peanuts” and “Doonesbury” reached new levels of power and popularity.
“It was this delightful time when newspapers still held a bonding role in both the culture and the popular zeitgeist,” Breathed wrote in an email.
That bond was reflected at bookstores, where compilations like “The Far Side Observer” and “Garfield Swallows His Pride” were reliable hits. The demand for comic strip collections was so fervent that when Andrews McMeel Publishing released “The Essential Calvin and Hobbes” in 1988, the company ordered a cautiously optimistic print run of a million copies. They quickly sold out.
“Cartoon collections were exploding out of the warehouses and into people’s homes,” noted a former Universal Press Syndicate editor, Jake Morrissey, who worked with such artists as Bill Watterson (of “Calvin and Hobbes”) and Gary Larson (of “The Far Side”). “People still read the newspaper, so those books were essentially being advertised by the comic strips every day.”
For the writer and cartoonist Jeff Kinney, the daily strips — and the books they inspired — were a family tradition.
His father would leave The Washington Post’s comics section out each morning, so that Kinney could keep up with the latest editions of “Calvin & Hobbes” or “Bloom County.” Kinney even wrote a fan letter to Breathed as a teen — and was delighted when he got a response.
“I felt like the world really made sense on those comics pages,” said Kinney, who went on to create the best-selling series “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” “I looked at them and thought, This is where I want to be.”
Decades later, Kinney can still reel off the names of some of his favorite comic collections, like “Tales Too Ticklish to Tell” and “Weirdos from Another Planet.”
The peak-panel era was the result of several forces — some creative, some commercial. And it would have been unimaginable if not for two long-running megahits that helped define the art form. The first was Charles Schulz’s casually profound “Peanuts,” which debuted in 1950 and went on to inspire multiple TV specials, films and chart-climbing books (not to mention a Broadway musical).
“Nobody had seen a comic strip become such a cultural sensation until ‘Peanuts’ hit huge with college kids, and the youth movement in general,” Breathed said.
Two decades after the creation of “Peanuts,” Garry Trudeau introduced “Doonesbury,” about a group of young friends and lovers trying to make sense of the 1970s, grappling with everything from the Vietnam War to Watergate. The strip earned a Pulitzer Prize and turned Trudeau into an interpreter of the modern zeitgeist: He shadowed Gerald Ford on a trip to China, accompanied a hunt for the Loch Ness monster and ran into a legion of luminaries, from Kurt Vonnegut to Paul McCartney.
“Since I write a topical strip, I’ve had an excuse — research — to hang with virtually anyone,” Trudeau said in an email. “I’m not a real journalist, but I’ve had a journalist’s life of experiences.”
“Doonesbury” was both inventive and divisive — and it was a huge influence on the strips that began in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Historically, comic strips were designed to appeal to the widest possible audience,” Cathy Guisewite, the creator of “Cathy,” wrote in an email. But “Doonesbury,” she went on, “opened the door for a new kind of strip that people could hate as passionately as other people loved. Strips got edgier.”
Strips after “Doonesbury” varied in style and sensibility. Many were character-driven, like “Cathy,” which followed a single woman balancing her career and her love life, or Watterson’s tale of a boy and his tiger, “Calvin and Hobbes.”
A few strips experimented with long-form storytelling, such as Lynn Johnston’s “For Better or Worse,” which began in 1979 and spent nearly three decades chronicling the lives of an ever-expanding family. And at least one major blockbuster comic was downright impossible to categorize: Larson’s gonzo “The Far Side,” which featured a revolving lineup of playful scientists, philosophical animals and occasionally, God himself.
“People would call me and ask, ‘What does today’s “Far Side” mean?,” Morrissey said. “But audiences were interested in artists who had a smart sense of humor. When ‘The Far Side’ is making jokes about praying mantises, that’s a completely different world than the strips from our parents’ era.”
As circulation levels hit record highs in the mid-1980s, the readership for comic strips expanded not just in terms of size — “Cathy” alone had 70 million readers by the decade’s end — but also in terms of demographics.
“Editors wanted to attract 9-year-olds,” Johnston noted. “But adults also loved the comics — probably more so, because they analyzed everything and discussed everything.’”
Shifts within the retail industry also contributed to the popularity of the new strips. By the 1980s, comic-strip compilations were being prominently displayed at nationwide chains like Waldenbooks and B. Dalton.
“Malls were the important retail center, and that made a huge difference,” noted Tom Thornton, a former Andrews McMeel Publishing C.E.O. “You’d walk by a store, and within the first 10 feet, there’s a floor unit featuring the latest ‘Calvin’ or ‘Far Side’ collection.”
That ubiquity gave comic strip writers and artists a remarkable amount of cultural cachet. When Trudeau revamped “Doonesbury” after a lengthy hiatus in 1984 — which landed the strip on the cover of Life magazine — he found himself in a battle with newspaper leaders, some of whom wanted to reduce the strip’s size. But “Doonesbury” was so beloved that editors had no choice but to give in to Trudeau’s demands.
“Ben Bradlee, then editor of The Washington Post, punished me by banishing me to a spot under the gossip column,” Trudeau said. “As it turned out, that was the most widely read feature in the paper. I was thrilled.”
Comic strip fans weren’t just loyal. They were vocal, too — especially when their favorite titles ran into controversy. In 1993, a “For Better or Worse” supporting character disclosed that he was gay, prompting more than a dozen newspapers to cancel it. In the weeks that followed, Johnston heard from thousands of fans. Though she received some death threats, much of the feedback was supportive.
“That one story gave me access to editors and readers from all over the place,” Johnston recalled. “A woman wrote to me and said, ‘I haven’t spoken to my daughter for three years, and I called her today.’ It opened doors and built bridges for many families.”
Many artists and writers enjoyed the kind of perks that could only come with creating a hit strip: Johnston became friends with Charles Schulz and hung out with staffers at Mad magazine. Breathed, who was injured in a flying accident in 1986, received what he described as “Volkswagen-sized flowers” from Barry Manilow, who was occasionally a target of “Bloom County.” And Guisewite found success with TV, winning an Emmy for an animated “Cathy” special, and making more than a dozen appearances on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.”
“It was the scariest thing I ever did,” she said. “I’ve never told a joke in my life, and have zero ability to be spontaneously witty. So I would lock myself away for days before each appearance, and try to practice possible questions and answers over and over — along with praying that I would remember any of it.”
By the late 1990s, the comics craze began to cool. Breathed ended “Bloom County” in 1989, and a few years later, both Larson and Watterson announced their retirements.
A handful of titles would help fill the void those hit strips left behind, including “Dilbert,” “Mutts,” “Big Nate,” and “The Boondocks.” But the decline of newspapers — and the rise of the internet — slowly robbed the daily comics page of its relevance.
Still, many of the groundbreaking strips from the 1970s and 1980s have been revived over the last decade, like “Bloom County” and “The Far Side.” And while comic strip collections no longer dominate the book sales, stores are packed with best-selling titles from writer-artists like Kinney, Raina Telgemeier and Dav Pilkey. Decades after the comic strip boom, readers still want funny, visually dynamic, and deeply personal stories — even if they’re told in a completely different format.
“If I was going to start again at the age of 20, I wouldn’t even think of a comic strip for the newspaper,” said Johnston. “I’d do a graphic novel.”
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