This thread is about comic strips only, not comic books.
I was rather surprised when the Sunday Phantom comic strip started a story line teaming him with Mandrake The Magician. Then I read the Dick Tracy strip today and who shows up but Daddy Warbucks and company, hinting at a future major story line involving a missing Annie. Does this happen often in comic strips, outside of occasional cameos and gags, where whole stories involve characters from other strips?
Both strips were created and written by Lee Falk until his death in 1999, and has had crossovers before this.
I also see that Dick Tracy has recently hopped into the Batman universe by having the brother of Oswald Cobblepot(The Penguin) as a villain.
Recently in the comic strip “Lio”, Calvin and Hobbes showed up and spent a week there.
Link, please? I’d love to see that.
This shows one day’s strip. I’m kind of busy now, so I don’t have time to look for another. I found it by googling lio comic calvin and hobbes
Sam’s Strip, which ran briefly in the 60s, had crossovers from dozens of older comic strips; it was about comic strips and characters from other comics appeared several times each week.
One** Peanuts **continuity had Charlie Brown seeing the sun as a baseball each morning. The find strip had the sun rising, and finally it wasn’t a baseball – it was Alfred E. Neuman.
Pearls Before Swine has often poked fun at Family Circus over the years, and recently featured that strip’s Jeffy as a character in an ongoing storyline.
No need to search-your link allows back and forth strip search(pun unintended).
Not so much anymore, but Beetle Bailey used to occasionally visit his sister, Lois, of Hi and Lois. Both by Mort Walker.
Just wanted to mention that the aforementioned Dick Tracy storyline involves the return of Moon Maid.
Yay!
This one seems pretty awesome. There are a bunch more in that thread, too.
Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft are in the same continuity, and often cross over to some extent. Like this past week, when one of the Crankshaft characters filled in some of Lisa’s backstory.
I recall at least one crossover when I was kid in the 60s. Same with Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates. Also Hi and Lois did an occasional thing with Beetle Bailey, Beetle is Lois’ brother.
And then there was April 1, 1997.
And on September 8, 2005, Blondie and Dagwood celebrated their 75th Anniversary.
And nearly everyone was there. I don’t seem to find a link to that strip but, quote:
Marking a first-of-its-kind event for the funny pages, the comic industry’s top talent across the syndicates – from legendary “Garfield” creator Jim Davis, “Mutts” writer/illustrator Patrick McDonnell and the renowned “Zits” creative team of Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman, to the writers and illustrators of such other popular strips as “Beetle Bailey,” “Hagar The Horrible,” “For Better or For Worse,” “Mother Goose and Grimm,” “B.C.,” “Wizard of Id,” “The Family Circus,” “Marvin,” “Dick Tracy,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Curtis” and “Bizarro” –will cleverly include the “Blondie” anniversary party storyline somewhere in their strips during the months of mid-August through September.
Meanwhile, Dean Young will prominently feature these beloved comic characters, among many others cartoon greats, including “Dilbert” and “Dennis the Menace,” in the “Blondie” strip throughout the anniversary storyline’s duration. Even President and First Lady George and Laura Bush will make a very special appearance in caricature! The actual anniversary party will be a captivating full-color, Sunday display with appearances by all of the guest characters! It will run on Sept. 4 – just ahead of the actual 75th anniversary of the first “Blondie” appearance on Sept. 8 in 1930."
The cast of Pearls Before Swine (who weren’t invited) spent the week griping about it and planning to crash the party.
Except 10 years apart. Funky made the leap after Lisa’s death but Crankshaft is still in the present time. (Not that you can really tell 10-years-from-now Funkytime from the present day…if you didn’t know it was 10 years later, it would a)never even come up and b)make absolutely no difference to what you’re reading.)
You can see that Funky-Jeff is noticeably older than Cranky-Jeff, and he mentions that Pam is visiting Crankshaft at the nursing home while he talks to the Funky gang.
Ah, I was wondering about that. I figured that the difference in age was just an art glitch[sup]*[/sup], but couldn’t make sense of “Pam’s visiting her father at the nursing home”. I’d forgotten that the timeskip wasn’t synched. It was a bit jarring this morning when Jeff came back home in Crankshaft, but not back home from visiting the Funky gang.
And of course, that wasn’t even the first time Funky Winkerbean time-skipped-- There was also a skip where the main characters went through four years of college in about two weeks.
- As an aside, there was also an art glitch in Sally Forth: Nona’s hair mysteriously changed from red to blond this past week.
John Darling’s murder was solved in Funky Winkerbean. 9 Chickwood Lane and Pibgorn seem to overlap an awful lot. Sam & Silo, in its early glory days, crossed over with lots of other strips. Once in the late 70s, The Incredible Hulk and other Marvel superheroes showed up in Tank MacNamara. John Carter guest-starred in a lengthy Tarzan run, but never had his own newspaper strip, so that might not count.