Wich2 wrote:
But comic BOOK characters have lead a much more accessible, publicly visible life over the recent decades than STRIP ones.

There's the rub.
In one sense, the comic strip characters have the advantage, in that, despite about thirty years of comic book based blockbusters from Christopher Reeve as Superman (and even earlier the very "comic book-ish" Star Wars) to Robert Downey, Jr. as Iron Man, getting caught on the subway reading a comic book does not remain as socially acceptable as reading a prose western novel or a prose detective novel or a prose Tom Clancy style technothriller. (I do not know if Star Wars and/or Star Trek have made reading a space opera pace Doc E.E. Smith/Lensmen or Barsoom socially acceptable. Have prose science fiction novels started to appear on best-seller lists as often as, say, a Lawrence Sanders style crime thriller?)

At least with newspaper comic strips (before newspapers started to disappear), people could easily flip around to see the comic strip section on the subway or during a break withtout anyone else knowing.