The golden age of comic strips

For the past several years I've been subscribing to King Features comic strips at dailyink.com .  It's mostly for the strips they've been reprinting from the classic era before 1960.  One of them is Alex Raymond's detective strip RIP KIRBY.  When I was 10 or 11 that was one of the only adventure strips in my local newspaper (by that time John Prentice had taken over), and he was the coolest guy in the world!  He was an intellectual (he wore glasses, didn't he?) but also a man of action ready for fist fights and gunplay.

Another classic strip I follow is BRICK BRADFORD.  The interesting thing about that strip is how wide-ranging Bradford's adventures are:  from latter-day Incas and Vikings to going inside an atom! (In later years it got into time travel and mystical powers in a big way.) Right now I'm reading a story about his pursuit of a stolen First Nations doll with diamond eyes, which allowed for some Dick Tracy-type gunplay and now has him heading to the Wild West.

Lee Falk's MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN and THE PHANTOM are guilty pleasures for me. (I also follow the present-day Mandrake, but that's sheer nostalgia:  now that Falk's dead, the stories are pretty lame.)

I also read FLASH GORDON (not Alex Raymond's golden age, but the '50s under Mac Raboy and Dan Barry, when it was still pretty darn good), Roy Crane's BUZ SAWYER, Stan Drake's THE HEART OF JULIET JONES (my favorite character's her erratic little sister Eve), John Cullen Murphy's BIG BEN BOLT (from the time when a Caucasian boxing champion wasn't laughable), Mort Walker's BEETLE BAILEY and the squarer police strip PAT OF THE RADIO PATROL.

One skill I value highly in cartoonists is the ability to draw pretty women.  In heaven the girls are drawn by artists like Raymond, Crane and Murphy!

There are some present-day strips I keep up with too, but that's mostly stuff like MARY WORTH and MARK TRAIL that I only read because Josh Fruhlinger writes about them (and makes fun of them) at his "The Comics Curmudgeon" blog at joshreads.com .
But I must mention that FUNKY WINKERBEAN has improved remarkably over the years:  it started out as a strip about high-schoolers but the characters have aged over the years GASOLINE ALLEY-style and it's now a remarkably mature strip about middle-aged people.