The top two gainers this year are strips that both began earlier in the 1990’s. Baby Blues gained 15 paper and Close to Home gained 13. The success might be in the vein of the Garfield boom in the early 1980’s with its successful book series. Both Baby Blues and Close to Home had two successful collection books in print at this time. The remaining big gainer is a nice mix of old and new strips. Calvin and Hobbes and Far Side did not make the top gainers list this year, maybe they reached a point of saturation that they could not gain many new papers. Here are the big gainers:

Baby Blues – 15
Close To Home – 13
Berry’s World – 6
Family Circus – 5
Crankshaft – 5
Non Sequitur – 5
Dave – 5
Hocus-Focus – 5
Pickles – 5

PS – Both Calvin and Far Side did gain a few papers. Calvin with 3 and Far Side with 2.

For big losers this year we have only two. Andy Capp continued its downfall by losing 8 more papers. Andy Capp is a classic case where the times change. A strip about a drunkard in the 1990’s was not a popular subject. Even though Jeff MacNelly had the big rookie with Pluggers his earlier strip, Shoe, lost 6 papers this year.  There were no other strips that lost 5 or more paper this year.

Adventure strips continue their decline, but lost only 7 combined spaces this year. Amazing Spider-Man gained 2 papers perhaps because of its Mutant Agenda crossover with Marvel Comics. This was a marketing gimmick in which Marvel published a three issue mini-series, but the fourth ‘issue’ has readers clip the newspaper strip and glue it into a comic book.

The daily version of Flash Gordon came to an last year; we have one paper on file that ran it to the end. That cannot be said for Secret Agent Corrigan and Tim Tyler’s Luck, which are all still available this year, but we have not even a single taker among our surveyed papers. Popeye’s only remaining paper dropped it, but it was not a big loss because the Popeye dailies were in re-run at this time. Here is the breakdown:

Adventure strips overall (-7)
Alley Oop – 32 (0)
Amazing Spider-Man – 18 (+2)
Phantom – 13 (-1)
Mark Trail – 12 (-2)
Dick Tracy – 11 (0)
Brenda Starr – 9 (0)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – 6 (-2)
Mickey Mouse – 5 (-1)
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad – 5 (-2)
Rip Kirby – 4 (+1)
Little Orphan Annie – 3 (0)
Modesty Blaise – 1 (0)
Popeye – 0 (-1)
Flash Gordon – 0 (-1)  ** ended

The soap strips this year lost more papers than the adventure strips they lost 8 papers. Not a single one managed to gain papers. Here is the breakdown:

Soap strips overall (-8)
Mary Worth – 52 (-2)
Rex Morgan – 41 (-2)
Judge Parker – 22 (-2)
Apartment 3-G – 15 (0)
Gil Thorp – 9 (-1)
Winnie Winkle – 3 (0)
Heart of Juliet Jones – 2 (-1)