So, you know how folks (especially me) often complain that we see modern North American (NA) comics as something of a wasteland. That apart from some independent work superhero comics have come to dominate meaning that the crappy superhero genre is now conflated with NA comics as a whole.
Now I'm beginning to see more and more that the real tragedy is actually masked in a way, because a lot of people seem to think that Superheroes have always dominated the American comics scene. That the issue is more one of the quality of the genre than with NA comics as a whole.
This wasn't always the case. There used to exist a vastly more mainstream comic form, one with an incredibly sophisticated level of writing that calls back to some of the very best of American writers like Twain or Whitman, or earlier writers like Jonathan Swift. Those would be newspaper comics.
I think by now a lot of us have been educated on the demise of the funny papers by Bill Watterson, but I don't think it's truly appreciated what's been lost, because a lot of the material has simply never been reprinted, has not been reprinted in an accessible way (such as with the lavish Popeye and Krazy Kat coffee-table books), or was once reprinted in a widely available form, but has not been reprinted since the 60's. Just about the ONLY book I can think of that avoided this fate is Peanuts.
A lot of that stuff is dismissed - like Superhero Comics - as kids' stuff. That's understandable, considering the absurdist, often slapstick humour, the fondness for gibberish and satire, and so forth, but man, when you actually read the best material, it's phenomenal stuff. There's always that idiot debate about how artistic comics can be, but apart from some more modern outliers (Will Eisner for example), some of those early newspaper strips may have reached for heights higher than any other comics published in any country at any time have scaled.
There's this sort of dim awareness that maybe something is gone, but really the tendency is to automatically slot newspaper funnies in the "Blondie" cheap sitcom slot (well, even Blondie was kind of neat when it was new). Bill Watterson's most lasting legacy may have been to provide a sole living example to current generations of what was once a thriving, bountiful industry.
There's just this huge hole now and superhero comics (or any single genre for that matter) are never going to fill it.
None of what I have to say will probably be any kind of surprise to Thad, but I dunno about anybody else. At the very least, the following strips are worth looking at if you ever get the chance. Some of these are no doubt blindingly obvious choices (Calvin & Hobbes), but are included on the list for completeness' sake (Thad, feel free to add any suggestions of your own):
George Harriman - Krazy Kat
E.C. Segar - Popeye
Walt Kelly - Pogo
Al Capp - Lil Abner (not so much the later stuff after Capp became a horrible reactionary curmudgeon. Anything prior to Vietnam is probably still good.)
Crockett Johnson - Barnaby
Charles Schultz - Peanuts
Gary Larson - The Far Side
Bill Watterson - Calvin & Hobbes
There's a wealth of other stuff (especially in the earlier half of the 20th century), but my experience of it has been so limited that I don't know enough to recommend stuff like Little Nemo, or the early works of Rube Goldberg (and even if I did, I'm not sure how much of it would be easy to find, other than Little Nemo). In the same vein, I have yet to get much in the way of exposure to some of the long running drama strips (Terry & the Pirates, Scorchy Smith, Gasoline Alley) or comedy-dramas (Barney Google). So I don't know where they fall on the spectrum from really good to boringly soap-operatic.
