dailynewsnblog
Lots of famous pop culture characters began with daily newspaper comic strips. Garfield and the Peanuts gang are probably the most famous examples, but there are many others, like Popeye, The Addams Family, and Dick Tracy. All of those characters were originally featured in daily comic strips. Only later did they become the subject of cartoons, films and comic books.
But sometimes things work the other way, where a popular character who originated in a different medium becomes a comic strip character later. Here are five such examples of huge pop culture characters you probably didn’t know had a daily newspaper comic strip.
1
The Muppets
The Muppet Show ended in 1981 when the creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, decided to move on to other projects. Still, he didn’t want his tremendously famous characters to fade from the public mind, so he got to work on his third Muppet movie, The Muppets Take Manhattan. He also launched a newspaper comic strip with the characters, ensuring that people would still see them daily.
The strip starred the Muppets in a wide variety of scenarios, from putting on performances like in The Muppet Show to just hanging out. There were also a great many fourth-wall-breaking comics that addressed the fact that they were now in newspapers, which is in keeping with the meta humor of the Muppets.
The strip was drawn by cartoonist Guy Gilchrist and written by his brother Brad Gilchrist. It ran from 1981 until 1985, when a creative dispute ended the strip. Guy Gilchrist had wanted to expand the comic strip to include the then very popular Muppet Babies characters, as well as the Fraggle Rock characters, but King Features, which distributed the comic, didn’t want that. Jim Henson was also very busy with other projects by then, including some with the Muppets, so he was likely okay with it ending as well.
2
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
A lot of comic book superheroes ended up with their own comic strips at some point. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man all had them, and so did the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The strip began in December of 1990, after the blockbuster success of the first film, and while the original cartoon was a giant hit and Ninja Turtles toys were flying off the shelves at Toys “R” Us. The Turtles were on every piece of merchandise imaginable at this time, from marshmallow breakfast cereal to toothbrushes (effectively causing and trying to cure the same problem). Launching a newspaper strip at this time was all a part of the same marketing juggernaut.
The strip took a lighter, more comedic approach to the Turtles, more in keeping with the cartoon series than the comic books and first film. It was drawn by a handful of different artists at Mirage Studios, which owned the Turtles before Nickelodeon purchased them in 2009, though the artist who handled it the most was Dan Berger, who spent years on the strip before it ended in January 1997, just a few months after the end of the original cartoon series.
3
The Simpsons
The surprising thing about the Simpsons comic strip is not that it existed at all, but when it existed. Just like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Turtle-Mania in 1990 and 1991, The Simpsons enjoyed a similar marketing juggernaut — usually called “Bartmania” — around the same time. This was when Bart was on countless pieces of merchandise and the song “Do the Bartman” became a hit song (with the help of Michael Jackson).
Surprisingly, though, the Simpsons comic strip ran in newspapers from 1999 until 2002. They were written and illustrated by a variety of people involved with the Simpsons comic book series at the time, and they were all drawn in the same style as Matt Groening’s cartoon series. The comics were created years before their publication, which has led some to believe that they were originally going to be featured in the comic books, but were then set aside and eventually distributed by newspapers. While the existence of these comics is little known outside of die-hard Simpsons fans, that may soon change as a collected book of the strips is coming this October.
4
Rugrats
The Nicktoon Rugrats had remarkable staying power throughout the 1990s. The show about talking babies debuted in 1991 and peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the release of three theatrical films, the first two of which were incredibly successful. During the buildup to the first movie, which would debut in November 1998, Nickelodeon launched a daily Rugrats comic strip, done by an array of artists and writers. The strip ran until May 2003, the same year the third, and notably less successful, Rugrats film came out. The next year, the original cartoon series ended too.
5
Star Wars
From 1979 until 1984, a daily Star Wars comic strip ran in newspapers across the country. It mostly depicted a series of comic book-like continuing storylines, told a few panels at a time. Each of these stories lasted a few months before the artist and writers, of which there were several, moved on to the next continuing story.
Much like Star Wars: The Clone Wars would depict events between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, the newspaper comic strip covered the territory between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Even after The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, the comic strip remained in between the first two movies, so as not to interfere with the cliffhanger ending of The Empire Strikes Back.
The strip wrapped up in early 1984, shortly after the original trilogy concluded. While the strip was declared non-canon after Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2014, some interesting Star Wars elements were featured in it. For example, Admiral Ackbar appeared in the comic strip before he debuted in Return of the Jedi, and it was the first place to explain the pre-Anakin Skywalker origins of C-3PO (as Anakin merely rebuilt C-3PO from discarded scraps). Over the years, there have been several collections of the comic strip, but it still remains a mostly obscure part of Star Wars history.
