What's the longest run by one creative team on a comic?

Cerebus. Or are we specifically talking franchise comics run by multiple creative teams? That probably takes out Krazy Kat and Schulz.

if you include all the different Duck books he worked on I guess Carl Barks is a contender (1942 to 1966, I think).

Cerebus ran for shorter than 33 years.

Cerebus does comfortably beat the FF though. And Barks was never the only creator on Donald/Scrooge, so he doesn't count. Jesse Marsh on Tarzan I believe should be mentioned, though I don't have the figures. There must be lots in comic strips, though I'm struggling to think of the good answers. I'll ask my friends - at least one of them will have all the facts on this.

Yeah, I think the idea was just "really long runs." Since multiple were mentioned in the first post.

My friend Steve, who knows more about comics than almost anyone, says:

I can help with comicbooks but not so much with syndicated strips.

There are bound to be some worldwide syndicated records from the 20th
Century there - eg:

how long did Frank Dickens do Bristow?
How long did Crepax do Valentina?
How long did Herge & Co do TinTin?
How long has Sanpei Shirato been doing Kamui?

Beetle Bailey has prolly managed a long life as a strip too.

Comicbook-wise there's Gaylord DuBois & Jesse Marsh's uninterrupted run on Dell's Tarzan that stretched from 1946 to 1965 (DuBois continued to write it until 1972)

I think Dillin & Cudeira (sp?) spent an insane amount of time on Blackhawk in the 50s & 60s but the writers may well have varied

Manny Stallman drew every issue of Adventures of the Big Boy from 1967 until his death in the 1990s & I think he wrote them too (big deal)

Bob Kane was still claiming he did Batman from that first appearance in 1939 in the mid-60s so he might be the biggest liar about unbroken runs

's all I can come up with this late

And my good friend Nigel mentions: Dan DeCarlo drew Betty and Veronica from c1951 'til 2000 or 2001, but there are a number of writers involved there.

Back to Martin: we've got various measures here - time, issues, page count. I was writing about Lone Wolf & Cub on Freaky Trigger just now, and it occurs to me that that is nearly four times as long, in page count, as Kirby's FF run, even though it was all produced in just six years. How many pages of Astro Boy did Tezuka produce over three decades?

Beetle Bailey switched from Mort Walker to his sons (& other family members) about 10-15 years ago, I think.

Yeah, but Walker started it in the fifties, so it's still a damn long run.

Tintin started in a Belgian newspaper in 1929, and "Tintin and the Picaros", the last book, was published in 1976, I think. There were long breaks between the last Tintin stories, though.

Also, Bob Karp and Al Taliaferro did the Donald Duck newspaper strip from the thirties to the fifties or sixties. Can't remember the exact years.

Addendum from my pal Steve:

I checked out BLACKHAWK for you Martin.

The Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera team drew the strip uninterrupted from #67 in 1953 (when it was still a Quality title)) to #241 in 1968.

There are many stories inked by Moldoff in the early 60s but Cuidera's inks are in every issue.

Sadly Dillin did NOT draw #210 - its by Jim Mooney & Cuidera. If not for this, the only lapse I can find, it'd be 174 consecutive issues. DuBois & Marsh only managed 153 Tarzans for Dell/Gold Key + two initial Four Colors in 1947 despite their longer exclusive stay.

And Andrew L, who used to post in these parts, adds:

How long has Johnny Hart been doing BC? I dunno if he uses assistants or not, if or not that counts...

Egads, what about WIZARD OF ID?

Its got to be DRAGONBALL Z! other candidates might be Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix.. , or even Rose of versailles Any of the manga epics... The assistant thing applies again in some cases though..

Dragonball Z??!! Somehow I doubt that title has even existed before the nineties...

The manga (just Dragonball at that point, I think) was actually running for a good decade or so before it hit the US, but even so, there's plenty of stuff up thread to beat it. (I have no idea if the DB stuff has always had the same creative team or not, I've only read a couple stories in anthologies.)

Phoenix is just 12 stories, running to about 3000 pages - that hardly compares to Cerebus (~7k pages) or Lone Wolf & Cub (8,500 pages), and my pal Steve mentioned Kamui, which ran much longer.

yeah - of course - your right Martin.. .. as you mentioned above astro boy would have been a better bet (didnt phoenix have a very stretched out lifespan though?).. . but a lot of the HUGE Manga series' have never been translated.. im sure for every lone wolf there's a hundred other awful shonen or shoji epics..

any-way the point is - its probably a japanese comic.... though not Dragonball (z). the original story ran from 85-94.. and it was all done by one guy though: Akira Toriyama.. (though im not much of a fan myself, 'Dr Slump' is much better)

I do have a candidate though: Kochikame (or 'this is the police box in front of Kameari Park in Katsushika') by Osamu Akimoto which has been running weekly in Shonen jump since 1976!! with over 1,100 issues.. and what, 30,000(?) pages, it has to be the winner...

Yeah, Phoenix was spread over at least three decades, I think more. There were other people involved at times on Astro Boy, including writing and drawing stories, though the majority have Tezuka in charge, of course.

I like the sound of your last nomination! Is it any good?

Sorry Martin.. off sick from the internet the last few days...

I havent actually read Kochikame, as my japanese is limited to sound effects.. heres the link:

http://www.freetype.net/features/anime/kochikame/index.html

Does anything by Tezuka qualify in your opinion? How long is the complete version of Buddha?

Whenever I read any of Tezuka's manga i think of the incredible fact that he drew a page of manga a day for every day that he lived..... its quite humbling really..

Bear in mind that Japanese artists, very much including Tezuka, use far more assistants than American artists. Nonetheless, Tezuka's productivity was astounding, as he certainly did a great deal of the work himself, by all accounts. I'm not sure any of his series quite count in the really big league for this question - Astro has the most material, but there were other people involved as more than assistants at times.