I'm going to write a little more on this topic of continuing newspaper comic strips after their originator quits or dies, and this probably won't be the last post about it. An e-mail this morn from my buddy Jim Korkis made me realize I may be guilty of oversimplifying this discussion to a useless degree. First off, here's Jim's message…
Aren't there some comic strips that actually were more popular or better received after the original creator passed away? While I know that comic strip historians love Frank King's version of Gasoline Alley, I much preferred Dick Moore's version. Many prefer Burne Hogarth's Tarzan to Hal Foster's. Some don't survive as well. I preferred Stan Lynde's original Rick O'Shay to the team that took over when he left the strip.
First off, I think we ought to differentiate something. There are comic strips that are essentially team efforts, if not when they start or achieve fame, then certainly by the time their creator exits. Often, three or four people are responsible in a serious creative capacity for a strip and when the creator dies, those collaborators are probably perfectly capable of carrying on the strip as essentially the same work. The worth of the material may be high or low but it isn't plunging because one guy died so that should not be the determining factor in its continuation. There are also cases where a whole new writer-artist — or writer(s) and artist(s) — come in and the strip is carried on by a stranger or strangers. I think those are two separate situations.
Yes, I think there are strips that were better received when in the hands of someone other than the creator. Sometimes, that's a matter of the new guy morphing the strip into his own. Fred Lasswell was picked by Billy DeBeck to assist on Barney Google and inherited it after DeBeck died…and eventually Fred turned it into the highly-successful Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, with the focus wholly on the latter. Ernie Bushmiller took over the Fritzi Ritz strip and it evolved into Nancy, which many hail as a classic of the funny pages. I don't believe Bushmiller was selected or trained by the originator of Fritzi Ritz, Larry Whittington. I think he was just a guy the syndicate hired to continue a strip they wanted to keep going.
But to me, the question of whether a strip is better or worse under new hands is a false question. The question to me is whether the new version is any good…or as good as the alternative. I never thought Hogarth's Tarzan was as wonderful as Foster's but I see no reason to expect that if they'd cancelled the Tarzan strip instead of giving it to Burne, what would have been in that space instead would have been better than Hogarth's Tarzan. (That's kind of a convoluted sentence but it's as clear as I can make it this morning.) And some of the other versions — Russ Manning's, especially — struck me as very good strips. An editor of a comic page has to pick from the best of what's available and if I'd been in such a position at the time, I'd sure have wanted Manning's Tarzan on my page. It was easily the best adventure strip of its period.
For the record: I thought Dick Moore's Gasoline Alley was one of the all-time great newspaper strips even if he didn't create it. I thought Secret Agent X-9 by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson was as good as any previous incarnation of that strip, maybe better. Floyd Gottfredson did not start the Mickey Mouse strip but for at least a decade or two, it was one of the best things in the newspaper. I'll probably think of more examples before I'm sick of this topic.
I agree with you about Rick O'Shay, which is one of those cases where a strip was handed to strangers. My inclination, and I haven't done the math on this, is to say the following: In instances where a strip is essentially a team effort — where the creator has reached the stage of working with or delegating to other writers and artists — the strip can usually be carried on without much (if any) loss of quality. In instances where it's turned over to folks who weren't already involved in its creation, it's very much a hit-or-miss decision. Then again, from the standpoint of the syndicates and newspaper editors, so is replacing that strip with a wholly new creation.
I think there are also strips that are such personal creations that it's hard to conceive of them controlled by others. I can't imagine Doonesbury without Garry Trudeau, who has done it since the start, aided only by a guy who inks and letters. I can imagine B.C. as done by the other guys who've written hundreds of gags for it and done a lot of the drawing.
I have to run out to a meeting so I'll post this and continue this discussion when I get back…or maybe tomorrow. I don't know. This may take a while. I probably need to discuss what I see as some of the intrinsic realities of the marketplace here and how it's pointless to discuss what "should" happen from a fan's point of view. See you later.