L. Johnson (probably not Lyndon) writes to ask…
In the R.C. Harvey article you linked to, it said that Johnny Hart's syndicate said "In 2001, Hart was inducted into the Guinness World Records as 'the most syndicated living cartoonist' because the combined circulation of his strips hit 2,600, allegedly more than any other." What can you tell us about this?
Well, it's an improvement from when they once claimed that if you added the circulation of B.C. to the circulation of The Wizard of Id, it made Hart the most widely-read author in the world. I'm not sure that even by their rationale, the actual numbers proved that. At one point when Hart was claiming his two strips taken together topped any other cartoonist's one strip, the syndicate that then had Peanuts and Garfield was saying that wasn't so; that each of those strips individually beat his combined total. I think most of the industry presumed Hart's claim was faulty just in its math.
And the "most read" part was surely baseless. Just because I received a newspaper that carried his two strips doesn't mean I read them. When I used to get home delivery of newspapers (yes, people once did that), there were lots of sections I never opened. So that claim was kinda like saying your TV show is the "most watched" because it's available on a channel that goes into the most homes.
Also, when you hear that a newspaper strip is in X papers, the arithmetic is a bit phony. They count the daily strips and the Sunday strips separately. If you do a newspaper strip that runs seven days a week in The Picayune Post-Dispatch, most people would say you were in one newspaper. You would say you were in two. In Johnny Hart's case, if the Post-Dispatch carried both his strips every day, he would say he was in four newspapers. The claim that he's in "2,600 newspapers" has to be understood in that context. To the extent it's suggesting a lot of readers, it's counting some people four times.
The raw number of papers is also not an indicator of circulation since many of those papers are very small. If my strip was in 300 newspapers that paid the minimum fee for it and yours was just in the L.A. Times and nowhere else, yours would be more successful in every meaningful way. You would make more money and there would be more copies of your strip printed and available each day than mine. My claim that I was in 300 times as many newspapers as you would be rather misleading. Not that I wouldn't say it.
Hart's two strips were very successful though and they continue to be. Since his passing, they've been continued by a little group that includes some members of his family. When I see them, I always think they're well-drawn and funny — in many cases, funnier than what Mr. Hart was doing with them his last decade or so.