It's interesting to see analyses of comic strips, because the medium itself is suffering as well. I'm in my twenties; until my teenage years, I never would have had a smartphone or anything with me, so the comics page from the newspaper was my entertainment in the morning before school. But I haven't read a comic strip regularly in years; I might read the occasional webcomic, but even those I don't check out very often.<p>Many of the strips weren't even ones I liked a ton, but I read them because they were there and there were only a few. Now that we have unlimited latitude to choose what we read, and it's trivial to start a new webcomic (and they're not seen as institutions so much), we're probably looking at the end of the era of the long-running comic strip. Or maybe not — what do I know?<p>On the other hand, there are definitely still people like my dad who care about comic strips. But the audience is probably getting older and older, which I figure is a departure from a medium once popularly associated with children.