I remember the Pogo strip as the Bloom County of its day — funny with an edge.
Other old comic strips…
Steven Canyon
The Heart of Juliet Jones
(in my memory those two have sort of blurred together)
Dick Tracy
The Phantom
(huge yawns on those two…was anyone reading them?)
Gasoline Alley
Alley Oop
(another blurred-together pair of yawners)
Oh, and Hatlo’s “They’ll Do it Every Time”, a sometimes-funny one-panel thing.
Indeed! Walt Kelly was a truly brilliant man, as was Al Capp. Where is a seegar chompin’ alleygator, and a herd of Shmoos when you needs, em? 
How about Gil Thorpe? The adventures of a high school coach who apparently coached every sport. I remember reading it back in the 70s and early 80s and then it sort of went away out of my local paper.
You seem to have seen more of this strip than I have. The only exposure I’ve had to “Smoky Stover” has been in books about the history of the comics. But from what few samples I’ve seen of the strip, it certainly did look a lot more outrageous than anything else on your standard 1940’s funny pages. In fact, the strip’s wild, non sequitur, cram-a-dozen-gags-into-every-panel style reminded me a lot of the humor later seen in Mad Magazine (especially the early years with Harvey Kurtzman).
As the youngest of the family, I think my comic tastes were influenced by parents and older siblings, who loved “Foo” and “1506 Nix Nix”, as well as the tail ribboned kitty. Moon Mullins is another that was pretty good.
We really have to give credit to Blondie-not the funniest strip, but look at her figure-she’s in her 90’s! 
What about Tank McNamara? I remember in my hometown, they ran it on the page with all of the sports agate.
Check out James Lileks’ collection of forgotten comics .
AS A kid, I was an avid reader of comic strips. It is indeed a dying genre…the heyday of comics was well before the 1970’s. I can remember strips like:
-Heckle and Jeckle
-Blondie
-The Little King
-Nancy
-Trazan
-Mutt and Jeff
By the 1950’s I think that most strips were done by contract artists- Mutt and Jeff ran for years after its creator (Bud Fisher) passed away). And, the reason that these strips were coherent stories was that you could follow them daya by day…they don’t make much sense if you just read them in the Sunday papers. Now that newspapers are in decline (most young adults rarely read them), I think you will see comic strips disappear in the next few years.
And which level of hell might that be?
Anyone remember “King Kat”? It wouldn’t be surprising if you didn’t. Debuting in 1979 (and created by Graham Allen and John Dodd), King Kat had a brief run in a few newspapers. Readers, however, weren’t amused, and they wrote in to complain about its senseless (and fairly unfunny) violence. Some of the quotes on the back of a King Kat book I own are as follows:
(When Texans don’t appreciate violence, you know something’s up. ;))
There’s even one strip with a televsion in the background, and the screen depicting a vampire stalking a woman. Whose breasts are bare and nipples erect. I dunno; it sounds like a winner to me.
Gil’s still around, runs daily in the Raleigh News & Observer. To give it credit, it does seem to be trying to deal with life problems in a passably realistic, albeit a trifle moralistic, way, these days.
Maybe I missed it, but what ever happend to the real “Dondi”?
Does anyone remember a comic strip from the 1980’s called Downstown? Josh & Jon were two “losers.” Chuck Laylo was another character, but seemed a little inconsistent. Sometimes he was a ladykiller, but other time he seemed like Larry Loungelizard. The strip was generally about “singles life”, and ended not too long after the strip’s creator got married.
The final strip showed one of the characters taking an ax to the bottom of panel, and all the characters falling through the final panel.
Thanks, Gamaliel. Now I know what happened to Rick O’Shay and Hipshot after I stopped reading it in, oh, 1972 or so.
But no mention there of Cappy Dick. I saw this every Sunday in the New York Daily News from the age of 5 until about 14 and the only thing I remember is the picture of Cappy Dick himself (an old salt if ever there was one–white hair, white hat, blue pea jacket, one eye closed, pipe sticking out of his craw) and some kind of drawing contest where you were to send your entry to the paper and they would announce winners each week.
Thanks for the reminder about Rick O’Shay. That strip would be in a contest with Winnie Winkle for terrible puns/wordplays on a name.
Son, you’re cruisin for a bruisin.
You’re bleatin for a beatin.
You’re strummin for a drummin.
You’re hankerin for a spankerin.
You’re floatin for a slit-throatin.
reused threats courtesy of Akbar and Jeff
Wow! I have a Sunday Downstown strip on my refrigerator! When I cut it out of the newspaper many years ago, I cut off the name of the strip. Thanks for reminding me!
My Web site’s not normally worth plugging, but I did write an essay about “Conchy” with examples of the strip that I like. I even received an e-mail from a few readers who googled upon it, including the son of the late creator, who was pleased that his father was still fondly remembered.
I followed “Rick O’Shay” in the Memonees (sp?) Falls Gazette, a comic strip newspaper which would run a whole week’s worth of a dozen strips at a time. It was pretty good. I was also fond of “Gordo” (a Mexican-flavored strip – I think the artist was Mexican), which featured people and animals, including a chiuaua.
There was also a Western strip whose name I have forgotten. Cowboys, Indians, weird humor. One of the indians was “Lotsa Luck” a little guy with a big ego.
As for Dondi, I still remember one storyline in which these nefarious characters came to town and opened a center where the kids could play that was stuffed with a pre-computer version of Chuck E. Cheese – rides, pinball machines, balloons. God knows what they wanted to do, but to a kid growing up in the '60s (no video games, no computer games, only three networks), it was like gazing unto heaven.