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- 1Charles Schulz
Charles Schulz drew "Peanuts" continuously for nearly 50 years, from its October 1950 debut until his death in February 2000, personally writing and drawing every single strip himself without the assistant artists many successful cartoonists eventually employed. His creation of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts cast became one of the most commercially successful comic strip franchises in history, syndicated in thousands of newspapers worldwide and expanded into numerous television specials, including "A Charlie Brown Christmas" in 1965. Schulz's work was notable for introducing genuine psychological complexity and melancholy into a medium that had previously been dominated by simpler gag-a-day humor, giving his child characters adult anxieties and existential doubts that resonated with readers far beyond the strip's ostensible young audience. His combination of nearly five decades of sole, uninterrupted authorship and his introduction of genuine emotional depth to the comic strip form has made Schulz one of the most influential and commercially significant cartoonists in American history.
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0 - 2Walt Disney
Walt Disney co-created Mickey Mouse in 1928 alongside animator Ub Iwerks, and Mickey's debut in "Steamboat Willie" that same year is widely credited as one of the first cartoons to successfully synchronize sound with animation, a technical breakthrough that helped establish Disney's studio as an industry leader almost immediately. Disney's studio released "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in 1937, the first full-length cel-animated feature film in American film history, a project many in the industry had predicted would fail commercially given the unprecedented scale of hand-drawn animation required. Disney personally voiced Mickey Mouse for two decades, and while his own direct animation drawing skills diminished as the studio grew, he remained deeply involved in story development and production oversight across the studio's growing catalog of animated features. His combination of co-creating one of the most recognizable cartoon characters ever drawn and his pioneering role releasing the first full-length animated feature film has made Disney one of the most historically significant figures in the entire history of American animation.
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0 - 3Bill Watterson
Bill Watterson drew "Calvin and Hobbes" from 1985 to 1995, ending the strip at the height of its popularity by his own choice rather than continuing it for commercial reasons, a decision widely admired within the cartooning industry for prioritizing artistic control over ongoing revenue. Watterson famously refused to license Calvin and Hobbes merchandise throughout the strip's run, rejecting the toys, apparel, and other tie-in products that most successful comic strips of the era relied on for substantial additional income, a stance that made the strip's eventual bootleg window-decal Calvin an ironic, unauthorized workaround. His insistence on expanded Sunday strip space, won through a specific 1988 negotiation with his syndicate, let Watterson experiment with more ambitious panel layouts and visual storytelling than the rigid grid format most newspaper strips were confined to at the time. His combination of ending the strip voluntarily at its commercial peak and his sustained refusal to license merchandise has made Watterson one of the most artistically uncompromising and widely respected cartoonists in the history of the medium.
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0 - 4Matt Groening
Matt Groening created "Life in Hell," a self-syndicated alternative comic strip featuring anthropomorphic rabbits, in 1977, years before he developed "The Simpsons" as a series of short animated segments for "The Tracey Ullman Show" in 1987. "The Simpsons" launched as its own half-hour series in December 1989 and went on to become the longest-running scripted primetime television series in American history, and Groening reportedly named the show's central family after his own parents and sisters, with the character Bart being an anagram of "brat." Groening later created "Futurama" in 1999, a science-fiction animated comedy that developed its own dedicated fanbase and demonstrated Groening's ability to build a second successful animated franchise beyond "The Simpsons." His combination of creating the longest-running scripted primetime series in American television history and his later success with "Futurama" has made Groening one of the most commercially significant cartoonists in the history of American animated television.
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0 - 5Jim Davis
Jim Davis created "Garfield" in 1978, and the strip went on to become one of the most widely syndicated comic strips in the world, appearing in thousands of newspapers across dozens of countries at its peak circulation. Davis has said he deliberately designed Garfield around universally relatable, low-stakes themes, including laziness, hunger for lasagna, and disdain for Mondays, specifically to maximize the strip's broad, easily translatable appeal across different cultures and age groups rather than relying on topical or culturally specific humor. Garfield's commercial licensing became a substantial business in its own right, with Davis building an extensive merchandising operation, Paws, Incorporated, that has kept the character present across toys, television specials, and film adaptations for more than four decades. His combination of Garfield's record-setting global newspaper syndication and his extensive standalone licensing business has made Davis one of the most commercially successful cartoonists in publishing history.
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0 - 6Stan Lee
Stan Lee co-created numerous major Marvel Comics characters throughout the 1960s alongside artists including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, including Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk, working as writer and editor while his artist collaborators handled the visual creation of the characters themselves. Lee's introduction of the "Marvel Method" of collaborative storytelling, in which writers and artists worked out plots together rather than the writer providing a fully scripted panel-by-panel breakdown in advance, became a significant and widely adopted approach within mainstream American comics production. His characters were notable for introducing more psychologically flawed, relatable superheroes than DC Comics' more traditionally idealized characters of the same era, with Spider-Man's Peter Parker specifically written as a financially struggling, socially awkward teenager rather than a conventionally heroic figure. His combination of co-creating dozens of Marvel's most enduring characters and his introduction of psychologically flawed superhero writing has made Lee one of the most commercially and culturally significant figures in the history of American comic books.
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