You want an example of what happens when a comic strip is permitted to go on after the creator dies? It turns into total trash. A great example of this is the early 20th Century Comic Strip Gasoline Alley.
For those who would never bother to research old comic strips Gasoline Alley is quite possibly the most inventive American works of cartooning and definitely for its time. Gasoline Alley's creative gimmick was that the characters as aged along with its readership. What started as a silly strip of a mechanic adopting a baby left on his doorstep wound up having the characters age into old men. I think besides boring ass lefty circlejerk Doonesbury no other strip ever dared use such a gimmick. But that's not all the creator of Gasoline Alley was a brilliant artist and I assume the best newspaper funnies artist of his era. This one Sunday strip blew me away with the protagonists going into the world of art decades before Mario 64.
So why don't you ever hear about Gasoline Alley when other old works of pop art get the respect they deserve like The Addams Family? Because after the creator retired/died it was handed off to your run of the mill comic strip artists and now only a handful of people under 70 remember the strip. The same thing could have happened to Dilbert. And btw Dilbert is fucking garbage compared to Gasoline Alley but what made Dilbert popular was that Scott could make amusing observations on society.
