BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Ten years ago there were dire predictions of the death of the comic strip. Dwindling newspaper readership and the looming shadow of the Internet were the main reasons cited. And then there was the retirement of three of the medium's biggest stars. Gary Larson of the Far Side, Bloom County's Berk Breathed and Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes. As Watterson left the building he grumbled there was no point continuing because the glory days of the comic strip were long gone. What a difference a decade makes, as OTM's Benjamen Walker reports.

Benjamen WALKER: The Reuben Awards are to cartoonists what the Oscars are to Hollywood. And last year the Reuben for Best Newspaper Comic Strip went to Pearls Before Swine.

STEPHAN PASTIS: It's got a rat and a pig, a very mean rat at that. They don't move. They don't show expression, and they talk about death a lot. [LAUGHS] So the odds of Pearls succeeding were slim.

Benjamen WALKER: That's Stephan Pastis, creator of Pearls Before Swine. He may be laughing now but just a few years ago the idea that a strip like Pearls could find a place on the comics page and win the Reuben as well, in less than three years at that, really was inconceivable. The comics page has never been a friendly place for cutting edge or even contemporary humor. And not even the star power of Larson, Breathed and Watterson could change this. But after 1995, after the big three retired, things actually got worse.

STEPHAN PASTIS: When newspaper readership started to decline, editors turned the wrong way in many places and they became more conservative. They began to only buy strips that had a set demographic. And by that I mean here's a strip for women under 20, here's a strip for Hispanics, here's a strip for people on the right side of the political scale. And I think what got lost was how about just a strip that's, you know, supposed to make people laugh?

HILARY PRICE: A lot of strips fall into certain genres of this is a family strip, this is a work strip. I'd like to think that my strip is about how we are when we're not in those roles, how we are as just kind of an individual navigating the world.

Benjamen WALKER: That's Hilary Price, the creator of the comic strip Rhymes With Orange.

HILARY PRICE: My aunt had once told me that nothing rhymed with orange. I felt that the strip was something different on the comics page, and I felt that the title would reflect that.

Benjamen WALKER: She started in 1996. And yes, her syndicate did push her as a cartoonist for the young woman demographic. Ten years later she is still the youngest female syndicated cartoonist. But today her strip appeals to many different groups of readers. One of the main reasons Rhymes With Orange and Pearls Before Swine stand out on today's comics page is because the majority of the strips are old, really old. The Lockhorns, 1968; Blondie, 1930; Snuffy Smith, 1919.

STEPHAN PASTIS: I mean, could you imagine nowadays in the movies if Gone With the Wind was--still playing in movie theaters, if Milton Berle was still on in prime time, if Bob Hope was still at the, you know, Sunset Comedy Club? [LAUGHS] I mean, it's absurd. And yet comics, that's where most of comics is.

DARBY CONLEY: One of the things I try to do all the time is to make the strip relevant, at least in the sense that the language and the topics and the imagery is colloquial; it's not sort of stuck in the fifties.

Benjamen WALKER: Darby Conley is perhaps the most successful cartoonist of the new generation. His strip, Get Fuzzy, is in over 500 papers and is the fastest-selling strip in comics history. At first glance Get Fuzzy looks like an updated version of Garfield, a mean cat, a dumb dog and a hapless owner. But Darby's changed the formula.

DARBY CONLEY: You know, you try to phrase it delicately but I really try to make it funny, like I try to make a joke in there, rather than just a little sort of ah moment or something like that.

Benjamen WALKER: Darby Conley, Hilary Price and Stephan Pastis are part of a revolution that is not only creating a new generation of comic strips, but a new generation of readers as well. So how did this happen? Well, every cartoonist I spoke with credits the African-American cartoonist Aaron McGruder and his Japanese manga-style comic strip Boondocks that exploded onto the comics page in 1998. Aaron McGruder could not make time to talk with us for this story. His assistant said that he's too busy with the Boondocks television show. According to an April profile in The New Yorker magazine these days Aaron literally phones in the jokes to an assistant who does all the drawing. The comic strip has always competed with television and Hollywood for new talent, but ten years ago another player emerged, the Internet. Today lots of people are reading the comics on the Web, rather than in the newspapers. And this is something that worries all the cartoonists I spoke with.

HILARY PRICE: The only way that cartoonists make money is by the number of papers that they're in, not by their Internet presence. So if you learn about the cartoon by seeing it in the Globe and then you look at it on line, and then the Globe cancels it, there's not a lot of incentive for you to call up the Globe and shake your fists at them and scream and cry and that kind of thing.

Benjamen WALKER: Even though Stephan Pastis echoes Hilary Price's concerns, the Internet, he says, has played an undeniable positive role in the revolution taking place on the comics page.

STEPHAN PASTIS: No Internet, no Pearl. I mean, I only got in papers 'cause the Internet convinced them that Pearls was viable.

Benjamen WALKER: In 1999 Stephan's syndicate put Pearls Before Swine up on its comic site, comics.com to see what would happen. It started out with about 1,000 hits a day. But then Dilbert's Scott Adams endorsed Pearls to all his fans in his newsletter.

STEPHAN PASTIS: And in one day I went from 2,000 hits to 75,000 hits. [LAUGHS] And the next day I think I had 130,000 hits. So that helped. [LAUGHS] And because of its Internet following, they decided to put it in newspapers. And that has since sort of become the model.

Benjamen WALKER: But with all this talk of new models and new types of humor, is there a danger of losing sight of why comics are beloved by millions in the first place?

PATRICK McDONALD: I think more and more there are strips that are mean spirited and cruel and more edgy, as they say.

Benjamen WALKER: That's Patrick McDonald, the creator of the multi-Reuben Award-winning strip Mutts. McDonald's Mutts just celebrated its tenth anniversary, making Patrick the older wiser brother to this new generation. McDonald believes that while brash in-your-face edginess can be funny, it is also something extremely difficult to sustain, and that all the great comic strips have a rhythmic, almost poetic edginess that's lasting.

PATRICK McDONALD: The people that I've admired could still be printed in the paper today and still be, I think, considered modern. I mean, when I read Popeye or Krazy Kat or Charles Schultz's Peanuts, I see comic strips more as poetry. And I think the really good ones have a timelessness to 'em.

Benjamen WALKER: Every large bookstore now has a well-stocked graphic novel section, and animated movies and television series are doing better than ever. And thanks to this new generation of newspaper cartoonists, the comic strip, the heart and soul of the comics art form, isn't going to get left out of the renaissance. For On the Media, I'm Benjamen Walker.