Long in the long ago comic books and newspaper comics were practically joined at the hip, which was logical enough what with comics having their origin starting out as just a bunch of daily and Sunday strips collected, colored if needed, and put into comic book formatting.
However even in the 50s and early 60s, after it had all become original content, Newspaper strips were seen in the spin racks with Beetle Bailey, Allie Oop, the Phantom, and even for a short while the Peanuts gang in comic books written and draw by other people.
Which was one of the problems with those things, the jobbers they hired to do the comic book versions of those well known characters just never got them quite right.
By the 70s, except for the Phantom, who still shows up today he being a superhero and all, that sort of thing was mostly over. I think Charlton did one with Blondie and Dagwood, but things had so changed that the newspaper comics and comic books were just too different, with more items such as Superman, Spider-Man and a short lived DC Universe strip, going from comics to the newspapers than coming from the newspaper's funny pages to Comics.
Such is life, or mass media anyway.
However..... What if they were to do that sort of thing again today?
I mean bring out original Comics featuring some of the newspaper strip characters of today.
Frank Millers' Luann? (guess who’s a killer psycho prostitute now?)
Okay, maybe not.
But still, of the fairly new strips on the scene now which ones might you at least give a look if they had a comic book published doing longer sustained adventures of the characters?
Possibilities:
Cow and Boy
Rabbits Against Magic
Over the Hedge (Heck they had a cartoon already)
Heart of the City
Lio (put that one on my pull list)
Cul de Sac
Non Sequitur with Danae and her family (this one as well, though I doubt anyone other than Wiley would get it right)
Pearls Before Swine
Drabble (Oh Glob the horror! If the artist got the art “right” a full 22 pages of a comic like that would probably cause retina scaring.)
Get Fuzzy (If for no other reason than to see those characters somewhere other than that damned bare, stark apartment he and those psychopathic talking animals live in. Say? Do you think that human in that strip might be crazy and in a mental hospital somewhere and imagining those critter? Nah! If he were crazy it might actually be funny from time to time.)
Or perhaps some sort of team-up comics, you know.... Garfield and Marmaduke together to see who can be the least original?
Any others you think might at least be worth a try?
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