There are 16,000 strips and counting in our database, and although our search engine is very sophisticated, it’s not perfect. If you can’t find a strip that you know is in here, please email us with as much info as possible and we’ll try to help.

Here are some ways to boost your search results:

1. Most effective: search for part of the punchline in quotes.

If you search for “i want it now”, you’ll get a better result than searching for i want it now. Putting your search terms in quotation marks will tell the search engine to search for exactly those words in that order.

2. Try searching for uncommon keywords related to that strip.

Less-common keywords will give you fewer results. If you know you want a strip with Elly ironing, search for ironing and not Elly.

We’ve made a few tweaks to our search engine to make keyword searches easier. For example searching for hamsters will return strips with hamster. Searching for ana will get you banana and anatomy.

In some cases, we’ve used synonym matching; for example searching for “housecoat” will get you strips with the keyword “bathrobe”.

3. Narrow down your results with plus and minus.

• For example, to get strips that include both Elizabeth and coffee, search for Elizabeth +coffee.
• To get strips where Dixie appears, but not Edgar, search for dixie -edgar.
• Try searching for Christmas -daily to get only Sunday Christmas strips.

4. Leave out small words like “a” or “in”.

The search engine doesn’t see words smaller than three letters. If you want to find April having a tantrum, search for April +tantrum instead of April has a tantrum.

5. Sometimes it’s easier to browse than search.

Want a specific holiday strip? We’ve organized them by season and special occasion here.
We’ve also collected the important storylines together on this page.

6. Search by date.

Use this format to search for a specific date: April 22, 1982.