They don’t draw them like this anymore. This is a Rex Morgan from 1955.
Or this Buz Sawyer from 1977:
Jef Mallet has some thoughts on the subject (July 10, 2021):
Stephan Pastis and I have been friends quite a while — both Frazz and Pearls Before Swine were in development at the same syndicate at the same time and launched one right after the other in 2001. Stephan occasionally teases me in his strip, mostly via Jef the Cyclist, and once in a great while I tease him back.
Pearls has been a great success. It’s well earned, and I’ve never been jealous of that success. But I have, occasionally, wondered why I was putting all that effort into posing, composing, positioning and shading my characters when, apparently, it’s not really all that necessary. Perhaps an experiment was in order.
So there you go. If nobody notices today, I can forgo the detail work. On the other hand, I’ve already learned from the experiment that it doesn’t save me that much time. It just saves me time spent shading, which then gets poured into other busy work. In other words, I have a problem, but it’s my problem and I might as well make the most of it.
Without shading:
Previous day:
and this recent one — which shows he kept shading (and brings us back into CIDU territory):
Terry Beatty’s 2025 Rex Morgan has a lot less detail than the 1955 version, but still a lot more detail than, say, Pearls Before Swine, as befits a strip that’s still a continuing story rather than a gag strip.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The artwork of a comic strip needs to match the tone of the strip. A soap opera strip like Mary Worth wouldn’t feel right if it was drawn in the style of Baby Blues for example. For Better or Worse had some humor to it but it often dealt with more realistic situations so it needs passably realistic artwork. Likewise if Garfield was drawn as a real cat it would not feel right when zany stuff happens. Pearls Before Swine is usually dumb and silly and the artwork works well for that. If Dilbert was drawn like Rex Morgan it wouldn’t have sold all those calendars.
Very nice essay-post!
Also, the physical space that a comic strip occupies on a newspaper page has shrunk significantly over the years, necessitating a similar reduction in detail. (Though I don’t think Non Sequitur‘s Wiley has gotten that memo.)
There were some brilliant artists in earlier years. Little Nemo in Slumberland, by Winsor McCay, and The Kin-Der-Kids, by Lyonel Feininger, are often seen as high points. Those set a high standard: McCay was an extraordinary artist who was also a key figure in the development of animation, and Feininger was also an impressionist artist whose paintings today sell for millions (although Art Spiegelman has argued that his Sunday comics were actually his greatest aesthetic triumph).
In my opinion, the more efficient designs of later strips were a two-edged sword. Peanuts had an impressive design, but it did not always serve the strip well, because its simplicity allowed editors to compress it to postage stamp size. And if Peanuts, one of the most popular strips, could be run in such a small size, how could less successful strips demand more space?
“They don’t draw them like this anymore.” … Characters smoking? No, that mostly stopped decades ago.
I’d argue that the reduction in space drove simplification, not the other way around. Not only did comic strip sizes steadily shrink, but magazines increasingly favored scattered small-size gag panels over full or half pages. Cartoonists had to grab passing eyeballs like billboards, sometimes surrounded by competing signage. This led to strong black lines, minimal backgrounds, and an emphasis on individual style — as distinctive as a product label.
Also, there’s a type of humor involved. Many cartoonists affect fast, improv-like gags and their drawings try to imply they were dashed off as quickly (even when they weren’t). Others, dealing in deadpan humor, are deliberately precise and posed (Dilbert, Pearls, Garfield). And some preserve a just-folks stiff amateurism, even when there’s clearly draftsmanship in the details.
Charles Ettinger, then current artist on Dick Tracy, does some fine work. Here’s a recent Sunday. I’m not sure this HTML to embed the image will work (it’s an experiment). I took it out of their page code. I will include the strip link as well. Note, if you come across this in the future, GoComics now restricts access to archived strips for non-paid viewers.
https://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy/2025/05/11
It surprises me that GoComics decided to started to restrict access to the comics on the website. These comics are constantly shared on social media. I think even Gary Larson had to give up on trying to keep people from sharing The Far Side. GoComics should get some advertising sponsorship because I don’t think many people are going to be paying for a subscription.
GoComics is dramatically raising the subscription price, over twice the old. I suspect it’s to pay OpenWeb to manage the Comment section, because the tiny GC staff Did. Not. Want. To. Do. That. So they need to increase the separation between free and paid accounts. If you can’t add nice perks, you can take away some from the hoi polloi.
Early on, some fools were trying spam campaigns in Comments to demand a return to the old GC. They included hashtags. I just shook my head, as that would only make it easy to find all the comments, remove them, and the perpetrators. Which is what happened. Are people incapable of logical thinking?
One thing that has been added to the Comments, sensibly, is the ability to post GoComics links. When you do that, it will embed an image which presumably will be available in perpetuity. I don’t have social media accounts so I don’t know if “sharing” to Facebook or Twitter (F-X) will do something similar.
I see that the image code just disappeared. The old GoComics trick of adding .jpg or .gif to an image URL doesn’t work anymore. Dick Tracy runs on Comics Kingdom too, and from their “buy a print” link I get a .jpg. Let’s see if this embeds (or shows).
The broken flowerpot bore the name “Arthur”, identifying it as an old MAD magazine running background gag. Others included the zeppelin, the Moxie logo, the long-necked bird, and in Mort Drucker TV/movie parodies, cartoony little dogs.
I must agree with Mitch4 (2):
Very nice essay-post!
The current Dick Tracy guest author likes that sort of inside joke. Through much of the arc, there has been an insurance investigator who details his expenses as he goes. Although he was not named, commenters quickly pointed out that it was based on an old radio show named Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yours_Truly,_Johnny_Dollar
And indeed today’s strip, and probably the arc, ended with “Yours Truly.”
The strip that preceded that one featured “Chauncey and Edgar”, who regularly appeared in Rocky and Bullwinkle.
When someone posts a GoComics link in comments, it provides an image in the message. Opening that image seems to allow the old trick of adding an extension. Let’s see if it posts. Note that is from outside the paywall date range.