My favorite American strip cartoonist is Milton Caniff. All three of his syndicated strips (Dickie Dare, Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon) were absolutely top-drawer: timely tales, grippingly told, and superbly researched and drawn. My favorite is Steve Canyon -- no better chronicle of the Cold War exists, either in words or pictures.
Strip cartooning today is a pale shadow of the way it was during my youth. TV soap-opera programming has absorbed the audience for the dramatic series, which in general were far better written than any TV soap (Stan Drake's The Heart of Juliet Jones was especially well presented), and fans of the sci-fi, Western, and historical genres now get their fix from films, computer games, and TV as well. Only the humor strip remains -- and I use the term "humor" loosely; besides Mort Walker, Dik Browne, and the other greats from the Golden Age, newspaper comics put the gag back in gag strip. With the '70s came a decline in the quality of newspaper humor strips (the slow fall of Peanuts began then), bottoming out with the advent of the Age of Garfield in the 1980s. Gone are most of the truly witty cartoonists of yore, who got the yuks using wordplay, subtlety, and caricature, all drowned in a sea of smartass kids, sarcastic animals, and sexless, poorly-drawn couples (I speak of Sally Forth, not Love Is...).
The comic strip, along with jazz and motion pictures, is our only native American artform. Now, the best cartoons come from Japan and Europe, and no one remembers Al Capp. What a shame.
This discussion is GREAT because everything you folks talk about has something to do with Al Capp! As for Milton Caniff, Capp disliked him immensely because he claimed Caniff stole material from him. And Capp always referred to Milt Caniff as Milt "Goniff." I hope you "got" that.
Mainly due to the idiotic decision by the newspapers to reduce the panel size of the comics. That pretty much signaled the END of quality newspaper comics strips.
Yet MORE reason for the History Channel to do a show about American newspaper comics. BTW, back then Al Capp was the toast of high society and was considered part of the avant guard.