Catching up on Comic Strip News
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Was distracted by some other projects lately and fell behind on opining and reporting comic strip news.
New Year New Art
Caroline Cash took on the Nancy comic strip on Thursday January 1, 2026 and in showing Nancy through the ages, or artists if you prefer, nailed her opening show.
An Old Year’s Day Anniversary
December 31, 2025 marked 24 years since Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis made its syndicated debut! At the GoComics blog they celebrate the 25th anniversary of Pearls Before Swine a year early.
United Feature Syndicate launched the strip in The Washington Post on December 31, 2001. By the following week, it was running in 150 papers. Over the years, the cast expanded to include Goat, Zebra, Guard Duck, and a fraternity of spectacularly incompetent crocodiles—plus Pastis himself, who appears in the strip and routinely forces his characters to deliver elaborate, groan-worthy puns. Pastis has not run a repeat comic since.
24, 25, irregardless… Rachel hits some PBS highlights, including this pearl from Pig:
The Lake Saranac Winter Car(too)nival has revealed the Garry B. Trudeau poster for 2026, it features Zonker of Doonesbury. The button, which will be based on the poster if past practice is any indication, will come soon.
In our list of comic strips that had begun and ended last year we showed the last Scary Gary comic strip which was about a fire. A commenter noted that it may have been in bad taste considering the Swiss fire that happened the night before. I sympathize.
“Too soon after the Texas Camp Mystic tragedy” was my thought when Mark Trail‘s latest adventure turned into attempting to escape from a gully washing flood.
Greatest of
Popeye by Segar, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy by Crane, Pogo by Kelly, and Terry and the Pirates by Caniff. Those were the strips that immediately came to mind when I read Derek Faraci’s ScreenRant list of the 10 Greatest Comic Strips of All Time, Ranked. None of which cut the muster for greatest of all time. I could easily replace four from Farici’s lsit with the strips I ticked off.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which four I would drop from the Greatest of All Time ScreenRant roster.
What’s creeping me out is the lettering changes happening in Mother Goose and Grimm on a regular basis these days. It seems that what was once an occasional occurence is now an every other day affair where the letters are different. Now I realize that the word count demands a smaller size, but check out the Bs, the Gs, the Es, the Ts, etc. They seem to be by different letterers or digital machine fonts.
More 2025 Best Ofs
Ines Alfonso gathered the King Features Syndicate editors and polled them:
… we gathered our lovely comic editors into one (virtual) room asked them to shout out the comics they couldn’t stop thinking about in 2025. From laugh-out-loud moments to panels that hit hard, these strips truly stood out.
And then gave us “a year-end roundup that celebrates the full, weird, wonderful spectrum of comics.”
The GoComics Newsletter, where I was notified of that Pearls Before Swine anniversary above, listed “Your 20 Favorite Comics of 2025.”
Since our site relaunch in April with a brand-new design, you’ve been reading, laughing, and sharing your favorite comics. Here are the 20 most-read features of 2025.
Listed and numbered are 1″Luann” 2″Calvin and Hobbes” 3″Pearls Before Swine” 4″Garfield” 5″Big Nate” 6″Non Sequitur” 7″Pickles” 8″For Better or For Worse” 9″Baby Blues” 10″Peanuts” 11″Arlo and Janis” 12″Doonesbury” 13″B.C.” 14″Wizard of Id” 15″Get Fuzzy” 16″Frazz” 17″Herman” 18″Andy Capp” 19″Shoe” 20″Breaking Cat News”
In a kingdom far far away (Wisconsin) Phil Hands picks his top 10 Mendota Marsh comic strips of 2025 (or here). Being an editorial cartoonist he can’t keep politics out of his Wisconsin State Journal comic strip.
The comic strip featuring young hipster Oscar Fox and ageing hippy Lewis Crane deals with issues facing the changing city of Madison and the surrounding area.
Tauhid Bondia has now convinced me that Kevin and Miles fantasies, as portrayed in Crabgrass, are not mere flights of fancy but a part of their unreal reality. They are able to travel into parallel universes.
And Another Print One Bites the Dust
MARIETTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published its final print edition on Wednesday after 157 years, marking the end of an era for one of the South’s oldest newspapers.
The last headline: “What is the Future of Local Media in Atlanta?”
The newspaper began its print run in 1868, the same year President Andrew Johnson was impeached.
The AJC was (is) a major newspaper that no longer found it profitable to print and distribute their content. Which once more raises the question: Will syndicated comic strips be able to survive in a paperless environment? Print pays much more than digital and what’s left of print are squeezing syndicate fees by playing them against each other to get the best rates.
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