I followed lots of weekend color comic strips when I was little: stuff like Peanuts, Li'l Abner, Blondie, Dick Tracy. The first daily story strip I followed was Alley Oop, featuring a caveman who met some time-machine people from the 20th century and went through a wide range of adventures in various ages. (In one he climbed a beanstalk into a land of giants!) He had a pet dinosaur, a sidekick called Foozy who spoke in rhyme, and a sometime girlfriend Ooola who was smarter than him!
Back then The Star Weekly also had weekend comics, which they somehow arranged to release a week before the regular papers! Their strips included The Heart of Juliet Jones (my favorite character was her single sister Eve), Doonesbury (which I didn't get) and Prince Valiant.
When I was eleven or twelve, the coolest guy in the world was the brainy comic-strip detective Rip Kirby. That's who my father would have been if he'd been a man of action!
When I was twelve, we spent a year near Toronto and subscribed to The Toronto Star. Among their daily strips, the best was Little Orphan Annie (which was actually in reruns from the '30s), and the worst were Nancy and The Family Circus. Their weekend section introduced me to Mary Perkins On Stage (set in the theatre world) and Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, which teamed an investigative reporter and a truck driver!
For a while I bought Sunday comics on Ebay. I have a big collection of stuff like Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. I also got a complete collection of The Menomonee Falls Gazette, which reprinted a whole lot of strips in the early '70s and introduced me to stuff like Britain's Modesty Blaise and Australia's Air Hawk.
These days I subscribe to a couple of comic strip websites. Among new strips, I particularly like Brooke McEldowney's 9 Chickweed Lane and Pibgorn.
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