Today we honor the memory of comics that are gone, but not quite (yet) forgotten, and especially those that faded away (not with a bang, but with a whimper). Some of these may not be completely dead, but all of them are at best only shadows of their former selves. Happily, none of them has been turned into a zombie.
The image above the headline was taken from “The Comic That Has A Finale Every Day“, about which Maggie the Cartoonist once asked, “I just don’t get the concept here. Who would read this? Why would a strip run a finale every single day?” I agree, but the tiresome image was merely a placeholder, the purpose of it all was an experimental exercise in creative commentary. The author (or perhaps perpetrator) was Ruben Bolling, who reported on his Substack site (on Groundhog Day) that the feature had finally been laid to rest at the end of last year. In stark contrast to all of the other strips listed below, I was not sorry to see that one disappear.
The end of Cul de Sac was particularly tragic. Not only did Richard Thompson lose his battle with Parkinson’s (in 2012), he was physically unable to give his brilliant creation the grand exit that he had hoped for, and ultimately selected an appropriately poignant rerun for the final strip:
The recent demise of Real Life Adventures was submitted by Boise Ed, who commented: “Another one bites the dust. I wish Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich and happy retirement, but it’s sad to see another of the good comics go away. I like the way the did it, though.“
Aaron Johnson’s niche comic “What the Duck” ran for ten years (from 2006 to 2016), and was picked up for syndication in 2008 (using the euphemistic title “W.T. Duck“). The GoComics archive began in 2009, but recently ended (without any explanation) exactly fifteen years later (in January 2024). Note that the dates of the strips in the GC archive have absolutely no relationship to the original publishing run. This was the author’s final strip, which seems to apply to cartooning just as much as to photography:
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P.S. This is only the second time that What the Duck has appeared at CIDU: Bill posted a WtD six years ago.
Ink Pen was retired by its author nearly a dozen years ago, and has been stuck in rerun purgatory at GoComics ever since then:
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Phil Dunlap’s tentative plan to release new Ink Pen comics once a week never materialized.
Bill Hinds gave Cleats a fitting sendoff on Halloween Sunday (2010), including some really creative ironwork on the gate:
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According to The Daily Cartoonist, Hinds “decided to bring his comic strip to a close, citing the need to focus on other projects that are more economically profitable.” Wikipedia reports that the strip was in 75 newspapers, which apparently was not enough to make a viable living on, but Hinds did have Tank McNamara as a fallback, which at one point was appearing in 350 newspapers. Cleats is still in reruns at GoComics, and may (or may not) still be appearing in print somewhere, but this is the first time that it has appeared at CIDU in more than 15 years (that was over a decade before Comicgeddon).
Lennie Peterson’s motivation to terminate The Big Picture was somewhat similar:
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When the strip went into reruns at GoComics, Peterson took the unusual step of creating some Sunday format strips to introduce the relaunch, in which he also announced his intention to (occasionally) insert new material among the reruns. I have not yet figured out how often this actually happened.
Bug Martini went mysteriously AWOL after the appearance of the following strip (on 21-April-2023):
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P.S. Chak reported that Adam Huber has resurrected his strip after an 18 month absence, and Chemgal later mentioned (very presciently) that Chak had “figured it out long before me, which shows how infrequently I’ve been checking on my ‘might-be-dead‘ strips“. This is encouraging news, but there wasn’t any official “announcement” (or anything else new) on Adam’s website, except for a vague promise in the fourth panel of the strip that unexpectedly appeared on Sept. 25th:
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Only time will tell whether Bug Martini will really remain alive. The website “caption” still claims “Random nonsense three days a week“, but that has not been the case for years. I think the best we can hope for is one strip per week (teaser ads for pay-per-view Sunday strips do not count). The current tally is four new strips over five weeks.
Pab Sugenis “ended” his “New Adventures of Queen Victoria” on 14-Feb-2021 with a special group photo, but has revived the strip on intermittent occasions since then (sometimes crediting ChatGPT for the “writing”):
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The problem is that there’s no way to know when (or if) any new NAQV strips will ever appear at GoComics (the author’s own website has been shut down).
I just happened to include a Boondocks strip in yesterday’s Halloween post, not realizing (back then) that the strip has been in reruns for over 18 years. Here is the final Sunday strip, dated 26-Mar-2006 (immediately preceeding Aaron McGruder’s “planned for six months” sabbatical, which only later turned out to be involuntarily permanent):
Berke Breathed resurrected “Bloom County 2015” to indulge in some political humor. He periodically incremented the year in the title, but it never got past 2019 (the GoComics title card still says “2015”); nothing new has appeared there since 8-June-2020 (back when CIDU Bill was still with us):
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Although his GoComics feed has dried up, Breathed does post some material on his Facebook page, but virtually all of it is re-runs. It’s simply not worth connecting to Zuckerberg’s sewer just on the off chance of finding a new Bloom County strip. The last new one appeared in August 2023:
The Perry Bible Fellowship still posts new comics on an irregular basis. Here again, the problem is knowing whether it is worth checking back for new material. Please note that PBF is very often NSFW.
Liberty Meadows was in print for less than five years (from March 1997 to December 2001). Frank Cho abandoned syndication in favor of self publishing to avoid repeated censorship problems:
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The Liberty Meadows rerun archive at GoComics appears to start (Jan. 2002) in the middle of the original syndicated run. Cho continued to release book collections until 2006, but after a subsequent deal with Sony Pictures fell through, he finally announced (in 2012) that he had quit working on the strip: “As much as I want to do Liberty Meadows (believe me I want to), the other jobs pay better.“
The latest demise hasn’t even been completed (yet). The Daily Cartoonist just recently reported that Fort Knox (by Paul Jon) published its last daily strip on October 19th, although the last new Sunday strip won’t appear until November 10th.
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P.S. Fort Knox is no longer available at GoComics (although it’s not clear whether that was a recent deletion). The strip is still available at Arcamax, at least for now.
P.S. Please feel free to mention (and link to) other dearly departed comics in the comments!
Comics I Don't Understand 
Oh sorry, I don’t know any more about
But on the other hand, I can show you some
These are from La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz
And yes, the September dates within the art match okay with the content.
If you like, here are the Spanish versions:
Perry Bible Fellowship has an RSS feed, so there is no need to check out the website for new materials.
Danny, I don’t undertand. AFAICT there is nothing uncertain about the continuation of La cucaracha.
OTOH the post, and readers quoted there, are surely right to be bemused at the status of Queen Victoria . It has recently had a thread of apparently fresh strips, on the theme of “Could we do a restart?” and the fate or progress of other strips which have done that. (These are located after the mentioned ChatGPT ones.)
But GoComics is not treating it like a daily that is a going concern, and putting out something for each day from an archive. Instead there are just date gaps. So even though as of today (01 November 2024) the last one up at GoComics is the one for 25 October 2024, a few days ago, that doesn’t really make it definitively a final strip.
Here is the current apparently-final strip:
And if you would like to read them forward, the sequence started just a few days earlier, on 22 October, after a gap from 01 February 2023. (Which may not have been new, as the comments on this one start with “Nearly four years, and daily readers still mill around the storefront waiting for a fix.”
I won’t try to embed them all, as you can go to https://www.gocomics.com/thenewadventuresofqueenvictoria/2024/10/22 and click the forward wedge. (That was supposed to be a link, but above and also here below are supposed to be embeds.)
BTW, looking at the GoComics comments for the tail end of Queen Victoria, we can note that “Scott Meyer at Basic Instructions is doing just fine, thanks”. That refers to a successful restart of a previously terminated comic!
@ sheep (2) – Thanks – I had a vague memory of an RSS feed for PBF, but I was not able to find the address anywhere on the website, so I assumed that it might have been discontinued following the recent address piracy problems. I just checked pbfcomics.com again (with no results there), but an Internet search produced: https://pbfcomics.com/feed/
The one I miss the most is Achewood. I know Chris Onstad has some kind of Patreon deal, but I don’t know what’s in it.
I loved Cleats. My son played soccer and we read comics every night before he went to sleep and these strips were a favorite, even in repeat. I had never seen this one and, given that our son died nearly 12 years ago now, it has poignant meaning for me. Wonderful! Thank you for sharing it.
@ Targuman (7) – Nothing I can write here would be an adequate response, so permit me to cower behind a “You’re welcome!”
However, if you missed that Sunday strip, you may not have read the leadup to it. The Cleats link in the introduction will take you right to it, and you can navigate backwards from there.
I miss this one:
https://www.toonhoundstudios.com/pvp/
The “Liberty Meadows” strip ended on the eve of Brandy’s wedding. At the time there was a reprint comic book; when the strip ended the comic book had a few pages of Frank crashing the wedding and the two of them joyously running away. with the promise of the story continuing in the comic book. So far as I know it didn’t continue.
“Boondocks” was reincarnated as an animated sitcom. This was interesting as the strip had largely abandoned that setup and much of the cast in favor of straight-up political humor. McGruder discussed that evolution in the collection “A Right to be Hostile”.
“Apartment 3G” in its sad last years had a story arc where each of the three roommates is about to take off for an exciting new life, clearly a sort of series finale. Instead, they abruptly decide to stay together and the strip wobbled on a bit longer.
Hinds and his “Tank McNamara” partner Millar did a strip called “Second Chances”, about a couple both on their second marriage. When that was winding down, “Tank McNamara” had a story of Tank having to move, and settling on a house in the suburbs. Concurrently, the “Second Chances” couple noticed somebody new moving in next door. They meet, and the next day “Second Chances” ended with a goodbye from the creators, noting that the Chances would carry on as characters in “Tank McNamara”. They’re still there as Tank’s friends and neighbors.
Recall stumbling across “Rip Kirby” late in its run. Disillusioned by the outcome of a murder case, Rip informs his girlfriend he’s going to retire. They turn to the reader and offer a cheerful thank you and farewell.
I’ve been a GoComics subscriber for a long time, back to the “UClick” days. I haven’t changed my lineup in a long time, and many of those are now reruns, at least in part. Others not mentioned include:
Stone Soup. This went to Sunday only at some point, with no dailies at all. Then the Sundays ended in a few years back but we got reruns on that day only. Recently, they started showing the strip from near the beginning. They also wiped out the archives and restarted that from the beginning of the strip to the current one. So far, the Sundays are not in color.
FoxTrot. This is new on Sunday, reruns during the week under the banner FoxTrot Classics. Some didn’t like the fact that rerun Sundays aren’t shown because there’s no separate link for new FoxTrot the way there are with some Classics. People in comments post the one from the archive that would go in sequence.
Doonesbury. This is also New Sunday/rerun daily, without a “Classics” label. No one seems to care much about the missing Sundays.
Calvin and Hobbes. This runs as it did originally, including the embedded reruns from Watterson’s sabbaticals. This confuses some commenters. When explained, they want to know GoComics doesn’t “fix” it. GC does nothing except take what the content provider sends for the day.
Preteena. Straight up reruns, badly out of sequence. The girls are getting ready for summer camp. The image quality is very poor, to the point that some Sundays are unreadable so people post links to better ones in the archive. Also calls for GC to fix these issues. See above.
Lucky Cow. Just reruns. It’s well aligned with the calendar, but I don’t know if that was something the syndicate did or an artifact of the starting and stopping dates.
Big Top. Just reruns.
For Better or For Worse. Originally it was supposed to be a reboot but became just reruns with occasional changes made to make it seem modern. That’s often silly when you have teens using landline phones and no mobiles.
One Big Happy. I don’t actually remember if they originally ran new ones or not. Currently, it’s reruns, with new strips on Creators and some other site. It’s misaligned with the week, Sunday strips are on Wednesday.
Liberty Meadows has been odd in the past year or so in that rerun arcs aren’t necessarily in sequence. As noted by bensondonald, the current dailies are nearing the end. The Sundays are showing very early strips.
@ Trish Lee (9) – Ooops, edited: When I first tried it, that URL didn’t work, so I dug up a link to the Wikipedia page for Scott Kurtz‘s webcomic “Player vs. Player“. Retrying your link later proved that it was a temporary problem, both pvponline.com and toonhoundstudios.com/pvp/ seem to work fine.
@ beckoningchasm (6) – Here’s a link to the Achewood archive, which can be used to navigate through the entire publishing run:
> https://achewood.com/archive_new.html
@ deety (3) – Thanks very much for the update about NAQV. Those strips had not yet appeared when I wrote that section. The crack about “Berke Breathed” in the newest strip made me laugh, especially since he has rebooted “Bloom County” three separate times under three different names.
@ bensondonald (10) – I had never heard about “Second Chances” by Millar & Hinds. Unfortunately, even if the strips were archived somewhere online, they have been rendered nearly unfindable, because a completely different series of action comic books (by Mammone & Bertolini) has flooded the “Second Chances” name space. 😦
I did find a brief article about “Second Chances” at The Stripper’s Guide, including four Sunday strips. Not as much as I would have liked, but better than nothing.
And at La Cucaracha, here for 11/1 and 11/2 are two more strips following up on the “holiday sequence acceleration” theme.
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And in Spanish:
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Thank you @Kilby! I did not mean to make anyone uncomfortable! It was a sincere “Thank you” and I appreciate “Your welcome.” Grief and loss stays with us, but comics, soccer, and LEGO are ways I can stay connected and remember (and celebrate) our son and his life. Or, as my friend says, “It’s all good.” ;-)