Newspaper comic-strip format
The
Sunday comics
or
Sunday strip
is the
comic strip
section carried in most Western newspapers. Compared to weekday comics, Sunday comics tend to be full pages and are in color. Many newspaper readers called this section the
Sunday funnies
, the
funny papers
or simply the
funnies
.
[1]
The first US newspaper comic strips appeared in the late 19th century, closely allied with the invention of the color press.
[2]
Jimmy Swinnerton
's
The Little Bears
introduced sequential art and recurring characters in
William Randolph Hearst
's
San Francisco Examiner
. In the United States, the popularity of color comic strips sprang from the newspaper war between Hearst and
Joseph Pulitzer
. Some newspapers, such as
Grit
, published Sunday strips in black-and-white, and some (mostly in
Canada
) print their Sunday strips on Saturday.
Subject matter and genres have ranged from adventure, detective and humor strips to dramatic strips with
soap opera
situations, such as
Mary Worth
. A continuity strip employs a narrative in an ongoing storyline. Other strips offer a gag complete in a single episode, such as
Little Iodine
and
Mutt and Jeff
. The Sunday strip is contrasted with the
daily comic strip
, published Monday through Saturday, usually in black and white. Many comic strips appear both daily and Sunday, in some cases, as with
Little Orphan Annie
, telling the same story daily and Sunday, in other cases, as with
The Phantom
, telling one story in the daily and a different story in the Sunday. Some strips, such as
Prince Valiant
appear only on Sunday. Others, such as
Rip Kirby
, are daily only and have never appeared on Sunday. In some cases, such as
Buz Sawyer
, the Sunday strip is a spin-off, focusing on different characters than the daily.
Popular strips
[
edit
]
Famous American full-page Sunday strips include
Alley Oop
,
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith
,
Blondie
,
Bringing Up Father
,
Buck Rogers
,
Captain Easy
,
Flash Gordon
, and
Thimble Theatre
. Such classics have found a new home in book collections of recent years. On the other hand, numerous strips such as
Bob Gustafson
's
Specs
and
Virgil Partch
's
The Captain's Gig
are almost completely forgotten today, other than a brief display in the Stripper's Guide site run by comics historian
Allan Holtz
.
Many of the leading cartoonists also drew an accompanying
topper
strip to run above or below their main strip, a practice which began to fade away during the late 1930s. Holtz notes, "You'll hear historians say that the topper strip was a victim of World War II paper shortages. Don't believe a word of it?it's the ads that killed full-page strips, and that killed the topper. World War II only exacerbated an already bad situation."
[3]
Mauricio de Sousa
's popular newspaper strips helped him become the most successful comic book artist in Brazil. In 2021, Pipoca e Nanquim released a library collecting his
Horacio
full-color Sunday comics, originally published in the children's supplement of
Folha de S.Paulo
between 1963 and 1992.
[4]
[5]
Role of the color press
[
edit
]
After the publisher of the
Chicago Inter-Ocean
saw the first color press in Paris at the offices of
Le Petit Journal
, he had his own color press operating late in 1892.
[6]
At the
New York Recorder
, manager George Turner had R. Hoe & Co. design a color press, and the
Recorder
published the first American newspaper color page on April 2, 1893. The following month, Pulitzer's
New York World
printed cartoonist
Walt McDougall
's "The Possibilities of the Broadway Cable Car" as a color page on May 21, 1893. In 1894, Pulitzer introduced the Sunday color supplement.
The Yellow Kid
is usually credited as one of the first US newspaper comic strips. However, the artform combining words and pictures evolved gradually, and there are many examples of proto-comic strips. In 1995,
King Features Syndicate
president Joseph F. D'Angelo wrote:
- It was in Joseph Pulitzer's
New York World
that cartoonist Richard Outcault's legendary
Yellow Kid
made his newspaper debut in 1895, but it was Hearst's
New York Journal
that cannily snatched the Kid away from the rival sheet and deployed him as a key weapon in the historic newspaper circulation wars. The Kid led the charge in Hearst's trailblazing
American Humorist
comic supplement, with its famous motto: "Eight Pages of Iridescent Polychromous Effulgence That Makes The Rainbow Look Like A Lead Pipe!" Pulitzer fought back by hiring another artist to draw Outcault's character for the
World
. The publishers' fierce battle over the bald urchin in the yellow nightshirt led bystanders to refer to sensational, screaming-headline style newspaper combat as "yellow journalism." The popularity of that expression tainted the early comics as a less-than-genteel entertainment, but it also made it clear that the "funnies" had become serious business, seemingly overnight.
[7]
In 1905, Winsor McCay's
Little Nemo in Slumberland
began. Stephen Becker, in
Comic Art in America
, noted that
Little Nemo in Slumberland
was "probably the first strip to exploit color for purely aesthetic purposes; it was the first in which the dialogue, occasionally polysyllabic, flirted with adult irony.
[6]
By 1906, the weekly Sunday comics supplement was commonplace, with a half-dozen competitive syndicates circulating strips to newspapers in every major American city. In 1923,
The Commercial Appeal
in
Memphis, Tennessee
, became among the first in the nation to acquire its own radio station, and it was the first Southern newspaper to publish a Sunday comic section.
[8]
For most of the 20th century, the Sunday funnies were a family tradition, enjoyed each weekend by adults and kids alike. They were read by millions and produced famous fictional characters in such strips as
Flash Gordon
,
Little Orphan Annie
,
Prince Valiant
,
Dick Tracy
and
Terry and the Pirates
. Leading the lists of classic humor strips are
Bringing Up Father
,
Gasoline Alley
,
Li'l Abner
,
Pogo
,
Peanuts
and
Smokey Stover
. Some newspapers added their own local features, such as
Our Own Oddities
in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. There were educational strips, such as King Features'
Heroes of American History
. In addition to the comic strips, Sunday comics sections also carried advertisements in a comics format, single-panel features, puzzles, paper dolls and cut-and-paste activities.
The World Museum
gave readers instructions for cutting pictures apart and assembling them into a
diorama
, often with a subject from nature, such as
The
Grand Canyon
or
Buffalo Hunt
. A page on
covered wagons
carried the headline, "Covered wagons shown in an easy-to-build model: Scissors, paste and wrapping paper are all you need to make this Western set."
Some radio stations across the United States featured Sunday morning programs in which an announcer read aloud from the Sunday comics section, allowing readers to follow action in the panels as they listened to the dialogue. Most notably, on July 8, 1945, during a New York newspaper deliverers' strike, New York mayor
Fiorello H. La Guardia
read comic strips over the radio.
Sunday strip layout
[
edit
]
Sunday comic strip panel layout, designed to fill half a newspaper page.
[9]
Sunday comic strip panel layout, designed to fill a third of a newspaper page. Note that the top two panels are omitted entirely.
[9]
Sunday comic strip panel layout, designed to fill a quarter of a newspaper page.
[9]
Early Sunday strips filled an entire newspaper page. Later strips, such as
The Phantom
and
Terry and the Pirates
, were usually only half that size, with two strips to a page in full-size newspapers, such as the
New Orleans Times Picayune
, or with one strip on a tabloid page, as in the
Chicago Sun-Times
.
[10]
When Sunday strips began to appear in more than one format, it became necessary for the cartoonist to follow a standardized strip layout, which provides newspapers with the greatest flexibility in determining how to print a strip.
[9]
One notable distinction among Sunday comics supplements was the supplement produced in a comic book-like format, featuring the character
The Spirit
. These sixteen-page (later eight-page) standalone Sunday supplements of
Will Eisner
's character (distributed by the
Register and Tribune Syndicate
) were included with newspapers from 1940 through 1952.
During
World War II
, because of paper shortages, the size of Sunday strips began to shrink. After the war, strips continued to get smaller and smaller, to save the expense of printing so many color pages. The last full-page comic strip was the
Prince Valiant
strip for 11 April 1971. The dimensions of the Sunday comics continued to decrease in recent years, as did the number of pages. Sunday comics sections that were 10 or 12 pages in 1950 dropped to six or four pages by 2005. One of the last large-size Sunday comics in the United States is in the
Reading Eagle
, which has eight Berliner-size pages and carries 36 comics. Its banner headline is "Biggest Comics Section in the Land".
[10]
Another big-size comic section is that of
The Washington Post
which carries 41 strips in eight broadsheet pages although it also contains a sudoku and a Jumble puzzle. Canadian newspaper comic sections are unique not only because of being printed on Saturdays, but these usually are also part of the entertainment or lifestyle section. A notable exception is that of the
Winnipeg Free Press
which publishes an eight-page comic-only tabloid section.
Early strips
[
edit
]
Early Sunday strips usually filled a full newspaper page, but over decades they shrank in size, becoming smaller and smaller. Currently, no Sunday strips stand alone on a page, and some newspapers crowd as many as eight Sunday strips on a single page. The last
full-page
Sunday strip was
Prince Valiant
, which was published as a full page in some newspapers until 1971. Shortly after the full-page
Prince Valiant
was discontinued,
Hal Foster
retired from drawing the strip, though he continued to write it for several more years. Manuscript Press published a print of his last
Prince Valiant
strip in full-page format; this was the last full-page comic strip, though it did not appear in that format in newspapers.
[10]
Revivals
[
edit
]
During the 1950s, there were a few short-lived attempts to revive the full-page Sunday strip. Examples such as
Lance
by
Warren Tufts
and
Frank Giacoia
's
Johnny Reb and Billy Yank
proved artistic, though not commercial, successes.
Other formats
[
edit
]
Other formats for Sunday strips include the
half-page
, the
third of a page
, the quarter page, the tabloid page or
tab
, and the
half tab
, short for half of a tabloid page. Today, with the ever-shrinking size of Sunday strips, many other smaller formats abound.
[10]
Usually, only the largest format is complete, with the other formats dropping or cropping one or more panels. Such "throwaway" panels often contain material that is not vital to the main part of the strip. Most cartoonists fill the first two panels of their strips with a "
throwaway gag
," knowing that the public may not see them, and making them integral to the plot would likely be wasteful. Exceptions to this rule include
Steve Canyon
and, until its last few years,
On Stage
, which are complete only in the
third
format. An alternative is to have a separate strip, a "
topper
" (though it may appear at the bottom), so with the topper it comprises a three-tier half-page, and without it comprises a two-tier third-page.
Half-page Sunday strips have at least two different styles. The
King Features
, the
Creators'
and the Chicago Tribune syndicates use nine panels (with only one used for the title), while
United Features
and
Universal Press
' half-page Sunday strips (most of them use a third-page format instead) use two panels for the title (except for
Jim Davis
'
U.S. Acres
?which used the nine-panel format- during the 1980s, when most UFS strips -particularly Davis' more successful
Garfield
?would have a throwaway gag).
Currently, the largest and most complete format for most Sunday strips, such as
Peanuts
, is the
half page
. A few strips have been popular enough for the artist to insist on the Sunday strip being run in a half-page format, though not necessarily in a half-page size.
Calvin and Hobbes
was the first strip to do this, followed by
Outland
and later
Opus
.
The
Reading Eagle
is one of the few newspapers that still run half-page Sunday strips.
[10]
Today,
Slylock Fox & Comics for Kids
is a popular example of a three tier half-page standard Sunday strip.
In some cases today, the daily strip and Sunday strip dimensions are almost the same. For instance, a daily strip in
The Arizona Republic
measures 4
3
⁄
4
" wide by 1
1
⁄
2
" deep, while the three-tiered
Hagar the Horrible
Sunday strip in the same paper is 5" wide by 3
3
⁄
8
" deep.
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
"funnies"
.
Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary
.
- ^
Robinson, Jerry
(1974).
The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art
.
G. P. Putnam's Sons
.
- ^
Holtz, Allan. "Obscurity of the Day: Wimpy's Zoo's Who" March 17, 2008.
- ^
"Pagina Cinco - Da tristeza suicida a confianca serena: as historias completas de Horacio"
.
www.uol.com.br
(in Brazilian Portuguese)
. Retrieved
12 July
2023
.
- ^
"Editora Pipoca e Nanquim publicara a colecao 'Horacio Completo', um 'resgate pre-historico' do dinossauro filosofico criado por Mauricio de Sousa ? Correio do Cidadao"
(in Brazilian Portuguese). 24 March 2021
. Retrieved
12 July
2023
.
- ^
a
b
Becker, Stephen.
Comic Art in America
. Simon & Schuster, 1959.
- ^
"William Randolph Hearst and the Comics"
- ^
The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
- ^
a
b
c
d
Watterson, Bill (1995).
Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
. Andrews and McMeel. pp. 14?15.
ISBN
0-8362-0438-7
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
Holtz, Allan. Stripper's Guide Dictionary Part 1: Sunday Strips, August 14, 2007.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Blackbeard, Bill and Dale Crain,
The Comic Strip Century
, Kitchen Sink Press, 1995.
ISBN
0-87816-355-7
- Blackbeard, Bill and Martin Williams,
The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics
, Smithsonian Institution Press and Harry N. Abrams, 1977.
ISBN
0-8109-2081-6
- Horn, Maurice
,
The World Encyclopedia of Comics
(1976)
Chelsea House
, (1982)
Avon
- Koenigsberg, Moses.
King News
,
Moses Koenigsberg
- Robinson, Jerry,
The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art
(1974)
G.P. Putnam's Sons
External links
[
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]
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