I said earlier that Gus Arriola and his newspaper strip Gordo fell short of beating Russell Myers' record for drawing a newspaper strip all by himself. A couple of e-mails (especially one from Mark Mayerson) make me realize Arriola's run, though impressive in both length and quality, falls even shorter than I thought.
For one thing, he did occasionally use assistants. For another, there was a period in the mid-fifties when for medical reasons, Arriola took a month off from the strip and other cartoonists filled-in for him. And while Gordo did indeed start November 24, 1941 and end March 2, 1985, Arriola took almost a year off to fight in World War II and when he resumed the strip, it was for Sunday only for a while and then the daily strip restarted a few years later. So he did a lot less than 15,804 strips and not all were unassisted.
It was a great strip, though…always clever, often changing form and style. I was right about the part when I said it was underrated. If you ever come across the reprint collections — there were some but not enough — you'll see what I mean.