Peanuts and the Death of Comics

Good grief! Charlie Brown is 60 years old. No strip, notes Salon, will ever be as beloved or as important.

From the piece...

From the international headquarters of Things Ain't What They Used to Be, a bulletin: This weekend marks the 60th anniversary of "Peanuts," which debuted Oct. 2, 1950. After honoring the date by revisiting Fantagraphic Books' handsomely designed anthologies of Charles Schulz's strips -- highly recommended to any "Peanuts" fan -- I want to pose a couple of questions here.

First, is there any recent-vintage daily comic strip being published regularly in North America that's as widely recognized, never mind beloved, as "Peanuts"?

And second, is such a scenario even possible?

I'm pretty sure the answer to both questions is "no." But I'm throwing them out anyhow in hopes that someone will persuade me otherwise. I love the comic strip form, but I feel fairly certain it's either dead or doomed -- because even if there were somebody out there doing early Schulz-quality work, who would know about it? I mean, besides die-hards who consciously go spelunking for good new strips online and spread the word when they find something? Seriously, does anyone even do that? The world has changed to the point where that's less possible, maybe impossible.