Comic strip

This article is about the sequential art form. See also Sunday strip. For the British comedy group, see The Comic Strip.

A comic strip is a drawing or sequence of drawings that tells a story. Written and drawn by a cartoonist, such strips are published on a recurring basis (usually daily or weekly) in newspapers and on the Internet. In the UK and the rest of Europe they are also serialized in comic magazines, with a strip's story sometimes continuing over three pages or more. Comic strips have also appeared in US magazines such as Boys' Life.

Storytelling using pictures has existed at least since the ancient Egyptians, and examples exist in 19th Century Germany and England. The American comic strip developed this format into the 20th century. It introduced such devices as the word balloon for speech, the hat flying off to indicate surprise, and random typographical symbols to represent cursing. The first comic books were collections of newspaper comic strips.

As the name implies, comic strips can be humorous (for example, "gag-a-day" strips such as Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Pearls Before Swine, and On A Claire Day). Starting circa 1930, comic strips began to include adventure stories. Buck Rogers, Tarzan and The Adventures of Tintin were some of the first. Soap-opera continuity strips such as Judge Parker and Mary Worth gained popularity in the 1940s. All are called, generically, "comic strips", though cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that "sequential art" would be a better name for them.

Newspaper comic strip

Newspaper comic strips are comic strips that are first published in newspapers, instead of, for example, on the web, or in comic books or magazines. The first newspaper comic strips appeared in America in the early years of the twentieth century. The Yellow Kid is usually credited as being the very first newspaper comic strip, but this is now regarded as inaccurate, but the art form, mixing words and pictures, evolved gradually, and there are many examples of proto-comic strips. In addition, several clearly identifiable comic strips existed prior to 'The Yellow Kid's' first appearance in 1894. Newspaper comic strips are divided into daily strips and Sunday strips. Most newspaper comic strips are syndicated; that is, a syndicate hires people to write and draw the strip, and then distributes the strip to many newspapers for a fee. A few newspaper strips are exclusive to one newspaper. For example The Louisiana Purchase by John Chase ran only in the New Orleans Times Picayune.

Daily strips

The Phantom daily strip from 2005. Art by Paul Ryan.

A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip that appears in newspapers Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip which appears on Sunday. Daily strips are usually in black and white, though a few newspapers, beginning in the later part of the twentieth century, published them in color. The major formats are strips, which are wider than they are tall, and panels, which are square, circular, or taller than they are wide. Strips usually, but not always, are broken up into several smaller panels, with continuity from panel to panel. Panels usually, but not always, are not broken up and lack continuity. The daily Peanuts is a strip, and the daily Dennis the Menace is a panel.

Early daily strips were large, often running the entire width of the newspaper, and were sometimes three or more inches in height. At first, one newspaper page only included one daily strip, usually either at the top or the bottom of the page. By the 1920s, many newspapers had a comics page on which many strips were collected. Over the years, the size of daily strips became smaller and smaller, until by 2000 four standard daily strips could fit in the area once occupied by a single daily strip.

NEA Syndicate experimented briefly with a two-tier daily strip, Star Hawks, but after a few years, Star Hawks dropped down to a single tier.

In Flanders, the two-tier strip is the standard publication style of most daily strips like Spike and Suzy and Nero. They appear Monday through Saturday, as until recently there were no Sunday papers in Flanders. In the last decades, they have switched from black and white to color.

Sunday strips

Flash and Thun rush to stop the wedding of Ming and Dale.
An excerpt from the March 4, 1934, strip, very early in Alex Raymond's original run.

Sunday strips appear in Sunday newspapers, usually in a special color section. Early Sunday strips, such as Thimble Theatre and Little Orphan Annie, filled an entire newspaper page, a format known to collectors as full 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 Daily News. When Sunday strips began to appear in more than one format, it became necessary for the cartoonist to allow for rearranged, cropped, or dropped panels. 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. Today, most Sunday strips are smaller than the daily strips of the 1930s.

Origins

Example of a proto-comic strip from a 13th century Catalan manuscript.

In America, the great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The Little Bears was the first American comic with recurring characters, while the first color comic supplement was published by the Chicago Inter-Ocean sometime in the latter half of 1892; Mutt and Jeff was the first successful daily comic strip, first appearing in 1907.

Proto-comic strips exist from the time of ancient Egypt, and include medieval manuscript illumination and English cartoons. The 1865 German strip Max and Moritz, about two trouble-making boys, had a direct influence on the American comic strip. Max and Moritz was a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children's stories such as Struwwelpeter ("Shockheaded Peter"); in one, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill, and consumed by a flock of geese. Max and Moritz provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids in 1897. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, speech and thought balloons, and sawing logs for snoring originated in Dirks' strip.

Hugely popular, Katzenjammer Kids was responsible for one of the first comic-strip copyright ownership suits in the history of the medium. When Dirks left Hearst for the promise of a better salary under Pulitzer (unusual, since cartoonists regularly deserted Pulitzer for Hearst) Hearst, in a highly unusual court decision, retained the rights to the name "Katzenjammer Kids", while creator Dirks retained the rights to the characters. Hearst promptly hired a cartoonist named Harold Knerr to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks renamed his version Hans and Fritz (later, The Captain and The Kids). Thus, two versions distributed by rival syndicates graced the comics pages for decades. Dirks' version, eventually distributed by United Feature Syndicate, ran until 1979.

Hundreds of comic strips followed, with many running for decades.

Conventions and genres

The Angriest Dog in the World by David Lynch

Most comic strip characters are unageing throughout the strip's life, but in some strips, like Lynn Johnston's award-winning For Better or For Worse, characters age. The first strip to feature aging characters was Gasoline Alley.

The history of comic strips also includes series that are not humorous, but tell an ongoing dramatic story. Examples include The Phantom, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Mary Worth, Modesty Blaise and Tarzan. Sometimes these are spin-offs from comic books, for example Superman, Batman, and The Amazing Spider-Man.

A number of strips have featured animals as main characters. Some are non-verbal (Marmaduke, The Angriest Dog in the World), some have verbal thoughts but aren't understood by humans, (Garfield, Snoopy in Peanuts), and some can converse with humans (Bloom County, Get Fuzzy, Calvin And Hobbes,and Pooch Cafe). Other strips are centered entirely on animals, as in Pogo and Donald Duck. Gary Larson's The Far Side was unusual, as there were no central characters. Instead The Far Side used a wide variety of characters including humans, monsters, aliens, chickens, cows, worms, amoebas and more. John McPherson's Close to Home also uses this theme, though the characters are mostly restricted to humans and real-life situations. Wiley Miller not only mixes human, animal and fantasy characters, he does several different comic strip continuities under one umbrella title, Non Sequitur. Bob Thaves's Frank & Ernest began in 1972 and paved the way for some of these strips as its human characters were manifest in diverse forms — as animals, vegetables, and minerals.

Major issues in American newspaper comic strips

Since around the 1960's, comic strip presentation in newspapers and the business itself has considerably changed.

In the past few decades, many cartoonists have voiced their concern about the present and future of comic strips, most notably Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist, Bill Watterson.

Size

The issue most commonly addressed was that of the swiftly declining size of newspaper comic strips. While 4 or 5 decades ago, all Sunday comics received a full page and daily strips generally the width of the page, today only one newspaper, the Reading Eagle, continues this. Sunday strips are also cropped to two-thirds of their full size in many newspapers, causing many cartoonists to use only that space.

Bill Watterson spoke extensively on the issue, claiming that it reduced both the potential and the freedom of a cartoonist and his strip. When Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes grew to fame, he in fact insisted that his strip was published without cropping and at a half-page size, a move criticised by newspaper editors and few cartoonists, including Family Circus cartoonist, Bill Keane.

Many daily strips are compacted and sometimes distorted to fit a comic page, often making the text small and illegible.

Second author

Many older strips are no longer drawn by the original cartoonist, who has either died or retired. A cartoonist, paid by the syndicate, or sometimes a relative of the original cartoonist continues writing the strip, a tradition that was commonplace in the early half of the 20th century. Hagar the Horrible and Frank and Ernest are both drawn by the son of the creator. Also, many strips, some of which are still in affiliation with the original creator, are drawn or written by multiple people or entire companies, such as Jim Davis' Garfield and Lynn Johnston's For Better or for Worse.

This act is commonly criticised by, primarily modern, cartoonists including Bill Watterson and Pearls Before Swine's Stephan Pastis. The issue was in fact addressed in six consecutive Pearls strips. Charles Schulz, of Peanuts fame, requested that the strip was not continued by another cartoonist upon his retirement. Schulz also rejected the idea of hiring an inker or letterer, comparing it to a golfer hiring a man to make his putts.

The problems cited with attaining a second cartoonist state that the second cartoonist is generally less funny or compelling than the creator, and also the cartoonist is not as familiar with the characters. Also, many have said that continuing retired strips stops newer cartoonists from breaking through.

Censorship

A more recent and less spoken issue is that of censorship in comics. Stephan Pastis has stated that the "unwritten" censorship code is "stuck somewhere in the 1950's." Generally, comics are not allowed to include such words as "damn," "sucks," "screwed," and "hell," although there are exceptions. In addition, many images such as naked backsides, and shooting guns can not be shown, as stated by Dilbert cartoonist, Scott Adams.

Many issues including sex, drugs and terrorism cannot, or can very rarely, be openly discussed in strips. This has led many cartoonists to resort to double entendre and, as in the case of Luann cartoonist Greg Evans on several occasions, speak in a manner that could not be understood by youths.

Many of these words, images and issues are common in every day life, a reason that numerous young cartoonists have claimed they should be allowed in the comics.

Social and political influence

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Chester Gould's Dick Tracy strip for September 23, 1944

The comics have long held a distorted mirror to contemporary society, and almost from the beginning have been used for political or social commentary. This ranged from the staunch conservative values of Little Orphan Annie to the unabashed liberalism of Doonesbury. Pogo used animals to particularly devastating effect, caricaturing many prominent politicians of the day as animal denizens of Pogo's Okeefenokee Swamp. In a fearless move, Pogo's creator Walt Kelly took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, caricaturing him as a bobcat named Simple J. Malarkey, a megalomaniac who was bent on taking over the characters' birdwatching club and rooting out all undesirables.

Kelly also defended the medium against possible government regulation in the McCarthy era. At a time when comic books were coming under fire for supposed sexual, violent, and subversive content, Kelly feared the same would happen to comic strips. Going before the congressional subcommittee, he proceeded to charm the members with his drawings and the force of his personality. The comic strip was safe for satire.

Some comic strips, such as Doonesbury and The Boondocks, are often printed on the editorial or op-ed page rather than the comics page, because of their regular political commentary. Conservatives have long warred against Doonesbury, and were recently successful in convincing a major printer of Sunday comics sections to refuse to print the strip. In another case, Dilbert is sometimes found in the business section of a newspaper instead of the comics page because of the strip's commentary about office politics.

Publicity and recognition

The world's longest comic strip is 88.9 metres long and on display at Trafalgar Square as part of the London Comedy Festival. The record was previously 81 metres and held in Florida. The London Cartoon Strip was created by fifteen of Britain's best known cartoonists and depicts the history of London.

The Reuben, named for cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is the most prestigious award for U.S. comic strip artists. Reuben awards are presented annually by the National Cartoonists' Society (NCS).

Today's comic-strip artists, with the help of the NCS, enthusiastically promote the medium, which is considered to be in decline due to fewer markets and ever-shrinking newspaper space. One particularly humorous example of such promotional efforts is the Great Comic Strip Switcheroonie, held on April Fool's Day, 1997. For that day, dozens of prominent comic-strip artists took over each other's strips. Garfield’s Jim Davis, for example, switched with Blondie’s Stan Drake, while Scott Adams (Dilbert) traded strips with Bil Keane (The Family Circus). Even the United States Postal Service got into the act, issuing a series of commemorative stamps marking the comic-strip centennial in 1996.

While the Switcheroonie was a one-time publicity stunt, for one artist to take over a feature from its originator is an old tradition in newspaper cartooning (as it is in the comic book industry). In fact, the practice has made possible the decades-spanning longevity of some of the genre's most popular strips. Examples include "Little Orphan Annie" (drawn and plotted by Harold Gray from 1924-44 and thereafter by a succession of artists including Leonard Starr and Andrew Pepoy), and "Terry and The Pirates" (started by Milton Caniff in 1934 and picked up by a string of successors, most notably George Wunder.)

A business-driven variation on the "switch" has sometimes led to the same feature continuing under a different name. In one case, in the early '40s, Don Flowers' "Modest Maidens" was so admired by William Randolph Hearst that he lured Flowers away from the Associated Press and to King Features Syndicate by doubling the cartoonist's salary, and renamed the feature "Glamor Girls" to avoid legal action by the AP. (The latter continued to publish "Modest Maidens" as drawn by Jay Allen, who aped Flowers' style to a tee.)

The majority of traditional newspaper comic strips now have some internet presence. Syndicates often provide archives of recent strips on their websites. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, started a trend by including his e-mail address in each strip.

Underground comic strips

The decade of the 1960s saw the rise of underground newspapers, which often carried comic strips, such as Fritz the Cat and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. College newspapers also began to carry their own strips. Bloom County and Doonesbury began as strips in college papers, and later moved to national syndication.

Underground comic strips covered subjects that are usually taboo in newspaper strips, such as sex and drugs. Many underground artists, notably Vaughn Bode, Dan O'Neill, and Gilbert Shelton went on to draw comic strips for magazines such as Playboy, The National Lampoon, and Pete Miller's Drag Cartoons.

See also

• List of comic strips
• Comic book
• List of films based on comic strips
• Webcomic
• Yonkoma - Japanese comic strip format
• Comic strip creator

External links

• Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library
• Reuben Awards