Growing the Beard/Newspaper Comics

Peanuts: in the first few years after its 1950 debut, it was a basic gag strip about children, with a few odd quirks (a kid playing Beethoven on a toy piano, a smart dog, etc.). Then in a 1956 sequence, Charlie Brown got his kite caught in a tree, and was so angry he decided to just stay there. This went on for over a week, with other characters walking by and making sarcastic or inane comments. Charles M. Schulz himself later identified this sequence as the moment when the strip's unique brand of humor finally took shape.
- Another often-cited (by critics and creator alike) example of a turning point in Peanuts is Snoopy's Anthropomorphic Shift: gradual for the most part, but one day he began walking on his hind legs, and there was no turning back.
Doonesbury was originally about a group of kids in college for the first decade or so of its run. Gary Trudeau took a 2-year hiatus and then began drawing the strip again, developing the art style and real-time storyline that the strip is known for today.
- While the art definitely improved after his hiatus, the writing of the strip had always been top notch. See Trudeau's Pulitzer he won in 1975 as evidence of that.
Similarly, Berke Breathed acknowledged that Bloom County didn't really take off until Opus, Binkley and Milo became the central focus. He admitted that early on, he didn't know what direction to take the strip (leading to a massive Retcon of nearly the entire first year and a half), and that he often cribbed Doonsebury in the earliest strips.
Dick Tracy has suddenly^[when?] come back to life with the retirement of Dick Locher and the hiring of a new team.
Calvin and Hobbes opened up emotionally with the baby raccoon arc. It opened up creatively with the transmogifier arc.
Sally Forth started out as a prosaic 'liberated wife/mother in the workplace' strip, until Francesco Marciuliano was hired as writer, putting a cheerfully goofy-yet-grounded spin on things.