satirizing before they could get the gag. It's a tough sell." Just as Sam struggled to make his strip a hit, his creators did the same, and Sam's Strip never gained more than sixty newspapers before being cancelled on June 1, 1963. In 1977, Walker and Dumas reemployed Sam and his sidekick for a new strip with a "new" concept called Sam and Silo, about a pair of bumbling cops in a quiet little town. While not as imaginative or innovative (Don Markstein's Toonopedia calls it "just a typical comic strip"), it was far more popular. New Sam and Silo strips were still being produced, solely by Dumas, until his death in late 2016. Critical analysis “Walker and Dumas clearly take pleasure in working in callbacks to classic comic strips [and] many of the metatextual gags are funny and fun," wrote The Comics Journal'''s Shaenon Garrity, adding that "Dumas’s drawings of classic comic-strip characters are excellent.” Andrew Williams of Den of Geek agreed that "the strips that chip away at the fourth wall in particular frequently raise a smile, and occasionally even a laugh." Comic Book Resources' Chad Nevett elaborated that "Walker and Dumas are very adept at making most of those jokes [featuring run-ins with other strip characters] work on two levels, where the character’s role is obvious to those unaware of its pre-existence, while those in the know will get an extra kick out of it." But Christopher Barat felt "that the creators didn't use [the] inter-strip get-togethers nearly as much as they should have. Instead, they whiled away a lot of their time with politically themed, time-dependent gags trading on the 'New Frontier' administration of John Kennedy and the contemporary Cold War atmosphere." Books One paperback collection, Sam's Strip Lives!, was published in small quantities under the aegis of the Museum of Cartoon Art. In December 2008, Fantagraphics Books released a 208-page paperback book containing the entire run of Sam's Strip''. It includes brief introductions by Dumas and Walker, unpublished sketches, original artwork, photographs, and sales brochures. Plus there are select annotations by Dumas and comics historian Brian Walker. "These strips aren't perfect and some gags are repeated far too many times," wrote Chad Nevett, "but this collection made me laugh at least once on nearly every page. ... Once again, Fantagraphics delivers a stellar package." Andrew Williams' review agreed with that last statement: "[T]he near-flawless execution