There's a decent 5 years of strips in the run of 50 years, scattered but mostly front-loaded, though you also have to skip the first couple. But even the decent strips are low-key and subtle, and you may have needed to be able to connect to some of the characters more than you may have been able too. (I wasn't "Charlie Brown" as a kid per se, but I connected more than others might have.)

I know this because I read them when I was younger, pre-internet. Peanuts can't compete in a world of abundant webcomics. They range from the top to the bottom of quality, but given their sheer quantity, that means there's an awful lot of the "top" out there. The only syndicated strip I know that can stand up next to the top webcomics is Calvin and Hobbes.

(And even then, while the line art stands up, many webcomics' coloring blow away what Mr. Watterson was capable of doing in newspapers. Please note my phrasing on that; I'm blaming technical limitations, not Watterson's ability. IIRC he had some watercolors or something like that he'd done in the back of some of his books... his skill was beyond what newspapers of the day were physically capable of showing.)

I liked Calvin and Hobbes a lot, but it all depends on one's tastes; I make no claim that any of them are objectively 'good' or 'bad'. I do think C&H seems to have a lot more effort and thought behind it than Garfield or many of the Peanuts strips.

I don't feel like I'm going too far out of my way to suggest that a lot of newspaper syndicated strips are objectively bad, because the artists complain about the same issues themselves. They've been boxed in to such a small literal physical area that it becomes hard to do anything "artistic".

A few of them still manage to do some good work, but great work is almost physically impossible now.

And if what you want is merely good work, there's probably a dozen "good" webcomics now for every "good" syndicated comic out there. In fact I think I stumble on a "good" webcomic every three months or so, only to notice that it has 5+ years of archives available. (I do this on purpose; in many cases, the webcomic that is "good" when I find it really wasn't particularly good in the first couple of years.)

Calvin and Hobbes's creator really liked Schulz's work: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119214690326956694

Yeah, I know, but I guess I don't share his view on that.

I think The Far Side also stands up relatively well (although of course he retired around the time that webcomics started to take off).

Try http://3eanuts.com/ which is Peanuts with the last panel cut off.

Wow, some of those are absolutely astounding.

Once you realize that he was America's greatest absurdist, it's breathtaking.

Also, the collection Chip Kidd designed is a great doorway into understanding how it could have become so popular. [1]

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156.Peanuts

I agree that Peanuts isn't funny, but it's darker than it looks. If happiness is a warm puppy in the Peanuts-verse, it's because people are often cruel and hateful, and life is full of endless disappointment. Just like Garfield, really, in that it's supposedly light fare that's deeply melancholic under the surface.

I 'read' a friend's compendium of Peanuts and was shocked at the cruel, dark humor of the initial years. It really was aimed at adults until Snoopy started to become more prominent and the strips played for laughs rather than insight into society.

I read some of the Peggy Jean (Charlie Brown's girlfriend from 1990-1999) strips. It's brilliant comic gold, filled with both hope and cruelty throughout. I don't think Schultz ever played anything for just laughs. His brilliance was he captured all parts of humanity, light and dark, in his strips, even until the end.

Ok, much as I find Charlie Kaufman's films the same, but why bother? Do people not get that you whittle down your audience when you go out of your way to insult things people value.

Perhaps there are individuals that don't feel the need to cater to a broad audience?