Random musing about comics... (Patreon)

I was just thumbing through a copy of Penguin Dreams and Stranger  Things, which is of course one of the old Bloom County books.

I'd  had this one years ago, but it had gotten lost to the mists of history  years ago. I suspect the Sandinistas ate it. I recently found this copy  and one of Happy Trails at the local secondhand book store- the  same place I found a 120-year-old "boy's book of inventions".

Anyway,  for some reason it occurred to me: Just exactly how many Bloom  County strips did Berke Breathed draw during the original run? Well,  a quick Google doesn't bring up the answer, but we can estimate. Looking on Wikipedia, we see that BC ran from December 8, 1980, to  August 6, 1989. Besides the automatic "holy crap, that was thirty  years ago!", we can use a date-calculating website (because of course there are such things) and find out there are 3,195 days, inclusive, in that time period.

Assuming that, as a  7-day-a-week newspaper comic, he drew at least one strip for each and every one of those days, it would be probable there are at least that  many BC comics from the original run. Now, TWB has of course been running longer than nine years- point in fact, as of last  June, it's been running for seventeen years. ("Holy crap", is right. :) )

But,  of course TWB wasn't 7 days a week; it was only three for most of that- only having switched in 2015 to a mere 5 days a week. But, despite this, TWB still  has... 3,031 "official" strips. (Over the years there have likely been over a hundred additional fillers that were later taken out.)

So,  TWB has already been running almost twice as long as Bloom County ever did, and before this tourney storyline is over, will  have more strips. I've also been running longer than The Far Side  (15 years) and Calvin & Hobbes (10 years.)

That's all really utterly meaningless, but it still kind of blows my mind a little bit. :)

I  am, of course, not the oldest strip, nor do I have the deepest archives  (I think both those trophies go to Kevin & Kell, which has  been 7-days-a-week since like 1995, which should make for over 9,000  strips, except Holbrook has been doing no less than three  concurrent daily strips for most of that time, so his combined archives  are probably better than 25,000 strips deep. Speaking of blowing ones'  mind a bit. :D  )

But  it's still kind of amazing that I basically accidentally started  and ran a webcomic that has run longer and is close to totalling more than one of The Big Three Undisputed Greats.

Doc.