US newspaper comic tier list

N/A: Any newspaper comics that started after webcomics were a thing, or started as a webcomic. There are many good ones, they're just not rankable on the same scale. Phoebe and Her Unicorn, the new Nancy, F Minus, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee

S: Calvin and Hobbes. Undisputed all-time great. The pupil surpassed the master.

A: Peanuts. The master. Overstayed its welcome, still the best thing the medium had going for three of its five decades.

B: Political satire strips that were good at the time but you basically can't read without Wikipedia open today, and they still often don't make much sense. Doonesbury, Bloom County. Honorable mention: Pogo. Ended before I was born, no way to read it, but by all accounts probably pretty good.

B-minus: Single-panel absurdist gag strips. The Far Side, Non-Sequitur, Bizarro. New Yorker comics for the rest of us.

C-plus: Modern family-oriented strips. The “ABC's TGIF” of the Newspaper. Foxtrot, Zits, Baby Blues, Boondocks.

C: All the irony-poisoned 90s gen X comics riding the Simpsons wave. Dilbert, Mother Goose and Grimm, Pearls before Swine, Get Fuzzy.

C-minus: Garfield. Gotta respect the hustle.

D: All the god-awful painfully unfunny gag strips that have been around for 150 years and no one has the decency to let die. Blondie, B.C., Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois.

D-minus: All the other god-awful etc. Family Circus, Marmaduke, is Marmaduke still going?, Ziggy, Hagar the Horrible, Dennis the Menace. Who's still reading this garbage?

F: Dramatic strips. May be good, but no one will ever read two sentences of a novel every day for 50 years to find out. Rex Morgan, Mary Worth, Gil Thorp, Prince Valiant.

F-minus: Pluggers