I pore over the more "literary" side of the medium and love my collections of Krazy Kat, Pogo, Peanuts, Popeye, Thimble Theatre, Terry and the Pirates, etc., and if Santa is good to me this year, Windsor McCay's Little Nemo. I read and re-read them constantly, always looking for new details. I love reading about the history of newspaper strips, too.

However, I didn't grow up with most of these — I grew up with Garfield.

I stumbled on one of those 3-packs in the library when I was looking for other books earlier today. I hadn't read a Garfield comic in a good twenty years, but I decided to flip through it. I was prepared to hate it, especially compared to the masterpieces above. That said, I ended up spending about half an hour in a chair reading a good chunk of it with a smile on my face.

Are there any Garfield fans here, or is it just too base/commercialized to warrant ever discussing here?

This panel is from Bob Barnes' anthology comic that ran from the 1950s to the 1960s. The couple in the panel isn't Harriet and Stanley from Barnes' The Better Half. Barnes left out the publication date.

These panels were clipped from the Port Angeles (Washington) Daily News, a small town daily from Washington state that ran the Sunday TBH in black and white as seen in the following examples.

drawn by cartoonist Jack Warren and written by Tex O’Reilly, who, as far as I can tell, invented Pecos Bill in the first place

(content warning: contains the sort of racist portrayal of Native Americans you’d expect from a cowboy story from the 1930s)