Do you ever get the feeling that all the great comic strips are disappearing?

There used to be at least three or four strips that I made the effort to see every single day -- Doonesbury, Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, Tank McNamara. Now two of them are gone and I haven't seen Tank in a long time. Only Garry Trudeau keeps plugging away. He's now in his fifth decade doing Doonesbury, which I'm sure is a surprise even to him.

[caption id="attachment_1651" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Peanuts"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/images.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1651" title="images" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/images.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="202" /></a>[/caption]

You may notice I didn't mention the greatest strip of them all. When Charles Schulz died in 2000, he was only a few months shy of doing 50 years worth of <a title="Peanuts" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanuts">"Peanuts."</a> At its peak it appeared in more than 2,600 newspapers and was translated into 21 languages. There were books, stuffed animals, television specials and even a successful Broadway show ("You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown"). The strip and all its incarnations and merchandising earned more than $1 billion for Schulz.

He did all the inking, lettering and writing from beginning to end. "Peanuts" might have been the greatest one-man show in history.

Starting a few years after Schulz's death, Fantagraphics Books began publishing a complete record of every single daily and Sunday strip in two-year volumes. Most other strips that are anthologized are "best of" collections, but "Peanuts" was so good that you could open any one of the books to any random page and get a good laugh for yourself.

If there were to be a vote to choose the most iconic character from a comic strip, you'd have to figure Charlie Brown -- the most lovable loser ever -- would top the list.

Unless Snoopy did.

Other strips have come and gone, but 12 years after Schulz stopped drawing "Peanuts," reruns of the strips still appear in most American newspapers. The topical references to Bob Dylan turning 30 or to Howard Cosell broadcasting football may be dated, but the characters will never fade.

At some point, I'll collect the entire set of Fantagraphics Books. I'll read them myself, but mostly I'll keep them for the pleasure they will bring Maddie and Lex, my two grandchildren.

Who knows? It just might be that Charles Schulz and his "Li'l Folks" will be the closest thing to Shakespeare when it comes to lasting writing from the second half of the 20th century.

We could do a lot worse.

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