Creator's Pet/Newspaper Comics


 * Moon Maid (and to a lesser extent, the Moon People) of Dick Tracy. The daughter of the Moon's supreme ruler, her first appearance had her display abilities that had Mary Sue written all over them. Serving as a liaison between the Moon people and the humans, she started to cheerfully be the Punisher of her time while Dick Tracy, the embodiment of established law and order, unaccountably all but cheered on her murderous vigilantism. She eventually married Dick Tracy Jr. (the title character's adopted son) and had a daughter. Fan demand and the Apollo 11 mission combined to make the strip's creator Chester Gould tone down, but not completely eliminate, her and the sci-fi elements that introduced her. His successor, Max Allan Collins, had Moon Maid die in a car bomb intended for Dick Tracy, and her funeral strip noted that this marked the severance of all ties between Earth and the Moon People.
 * Anthony Caine of For Better or For Worse. Once Lynn Johnston decided to bring Liz "back home" and pair her up with her nice-but-dull first love, Johnston made every effort to make the reader love him as much as she obviously did (and pretty much retroactively vilifying his ex-wife, Therese, in the process). This extended to her having Liz's father John, the strip's patriarch, explicitly put down Liz's other boyfriends, and fawn over Anthony to the extent that he seriously appears to want his daughter to marry the guy mostly because he himself has a crush on him (that Liz's stated goal is to marry a guy just like her father only adds to the Freudian fun). The readership, by and large, rejected any and all attempts at this, as signified by his detractor nicknames "Blandthony", "Granthony" (due to the fact that he looks way older than Elizabeth) and "That Fucking Mustache Guy".
 * Perhaps reacting to her readership, Lynn 'improved' Anthony by removing his ostensible one flaw - his moustache. And of course, it was Therese who made him grow it against his will in the first place. Despite this concession, the backlash eventually got so bad that Johnston published a defense of the character on her website, in which it turned out that Anthony's overt blandness was in fact the reason we should all love him: he had excellent prospects (specifically, as a mid-level accountant at a local used-car dealership) and besides which Liz' parents knew him and trusted him. Why, yes, the author has proudly admitted to being a "Child of The Fifties", why do you ask?
 * The relationship was parodied beautifully by Kate Beaton.
 * Everyone who talks about how Peanuts lost its edge (and yes, early on it had one. A huge one) in later years almost always mentions Snoopy's older brother Spike and Rerun, Lucy and Linus's baby brother. Rerun in particular gets justifiable hate because he LITERALLY upstaged the rest of the cast, to the point that the last four-five years of the series revolved solely around Rerun pestering Snoopy to play with him and Charlie Brown and Lucy existing mainly to react to Rerun's various storylines, with Peppermint Patty, Marcie, and Linus all being shoved off-stage to make room for Rerun.
 * Which is pretty bad for a character whose very name lampshades the fact that he's just an attempt at a "smaller and cuter" retread of Linus.
 * Frank - ostensibly the central character of Liberty Meadows. At first just the foil for the antics of the Funny Animal cast, towards the end of the strip's newspaper run, he became more and more the focus of events, particularly lead female Brandy's wedding. As the strip made it more obvious that Frank and Brandy were meant to be together, there were fewer and fewer answers to the question "Why, exactly?" Especially given that A) Brandy's fiance was everything Frank wasn't (rich, good-looking, smooth, and actually able to tell Brandy how he felt) and B) Brandy had already told him he'd blown his shot with her by being wishy-washy.