The new survey of the top comic strip artists is out. According to the American Newspaper Standards Institute and its top survey-response team the most popular creators of comic strips this year are:
- Charles Schulz
- The Guy Who Draws Calvin and Hobbes
- Garfield
- The Guy Who Draws Far Side
- The Guy Who Draws Cathy
- Walt Disney
- Snoopy
- The Cryptoquote feature
- Grant Snider
- Bambi
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Another Blog, Meanwhile 
That’s about the truth of it. What’s your personal 10? I’ll try to see if I can place the artist without having to look up the strip.
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My personal favorite cartoonists? With or without counting the folks who are, through no current fault of their own, dead, since Charles Schulz and Walt Kelly are among that bunch.
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I had to look up Walt Kelly, as I’ve never read Pogo. Charles Schulz is fairly standard; it’s almost a given. I’d add Berkeley Breathed and Max Cannon to my list though. Gary Larson is a favorite, too.
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Walt Kelly certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea — his strips tend to be a bit packed and dark-as-in-muddy in the earliest (and I’d say best) years — but his are easier to get into than George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, particularly since much of Kelly’s best work was satire directed at topics of the 1950s that are still recognizable and understandable.
Bloom County was another magnificent strip, one of the keystones of its era, and I’m really impressed at how Breathed kept trying to improve everything about it — particularly the composition of Sunday panels — when he could’ve just kept coasting. I didn’t like the transition to Outland, though I’m interested what I’d think of it nowadays, but I suspect that a Sunday-only strip with a complicated cast just can’t work. Even Bill Amend’s FoxTrot — running now Sundays-only — is a pale shell of itself, probably because it can’t support even the core family cast, much less have stories.
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What!?!?!? No Dilbert or Bloom County????
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I’m sorry to say people generally haven’t thought about Dilbert since a couple years ago when it was revealed Scott Adams uses sockpuppets to try to win Internet Forum arguments about sexism, which just left us all feeling a little sad and walking slowly away.
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