Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions.
In the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in Popeye, Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and Terry and the Pirates.
Other leading British caricaturists produced strips as well; for example James Gillray in Democracy;-or-a Sketch of the Life of Buonaparte.
Original published in parts between 1809 and 1811 in Rudolf Ackermann's Poetical Magazine, in book form The Tour of Doctor Syntax in search of the picturesque ran to 9 editions between 1812 and 1819, spun off two sequels, a prequel, numerous pirate imitations and copies including French, German, Danish and translations.
In the story's final act, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill, and consumed by a flock of geese (without anybody mourning their demise).
While radio, and later, television surpassed newspapers as a means of entertainment, most comic strip characters were widely recognizable until the 1980s, and the "funny pages" were often arranged in a way they appeared at the front of Sunday editions.
The Baltimore Sun's Linda White recalled, "I followed the adventures of Winnie Winkle, Moon Mullins and Dondi, and waited each fall to see how Lucy would manage to trick Charlie Brown into trying to kick that football.
Thus, a week of Beetle Bailey would arrive at the Lansing State Journal in two sheets, printed much larger than the final version and ready to be cut apart and fitted into the local comics page.
[26] In 1937, the cartoonist Dudley Fisher launched the innovative Right Around Home, drawn as a huge single panel filling an entire Sunday page.
Beginning January 26, 1941, it ran on the front covers of Hearst's American Weekly newspaper magazine supplement, continuing until March 30 of that year.
[27][28] 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.
Many underground artists, notably Vaughn Bode, Dan O'Neill, Gilbert Shelton, and Art Spiegelman went on to draw comic strips for magazines such as Playboy, National Lampoon, and Pete Millar's CARtoons.
Examples include The Phantom, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Mary Worth, Modesty Blaise, Little Orphan Annie, Flash Gordon, and Tarzan.
Wiley Miller not only mixes human, animal, and fantasy characters, but also 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.
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.
In 1995, the United States Postal Service issued a series of commemorative stamps, Comic Strip Classics, marking the comic-strip centennial.
Today's strip artists, with the help of the NCS, enthusiastically promote the medium, which since the 1970s (and particularly the 1990s) has been considered to be in decline due to numerous factors such as changing tastes in humor and entertainment, the waning relevance of newspapers in general and the loss of most foreign markets outside English-speaking countries.
Garfield's Jim Davis, for example, switched with Blondie's Stan Drake, while Scott Adams (Dilbert) traded strips with Bil Keane (The Family Circus).
While the 1997 Switcheroonie was a one-time publicity stunt, an artist taking over a feature from its originator is an old tradition in newspaper cartooning (as it is in the comic book industry).
The competition between papers for having more cartoons than the rest from the mid-1920s, the growth of large-scale newspaper advertising during most of the thirties, paper rationing during World War II, the decline on news readership (as television newscasts began to be more common) and inflation (which has caused higher printing costs) beginning during the fifties and sixties led to Sunday strips being published on smaller and more diverse formats.
In an issue related to size limitations, Sunday comics are often bound to rigid formats that allow their panels to be rearranged in several different ways while remaining readable.
Some cartoonists have complained about this, with Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, openly voicing his discontent about being forced to draw his Sunday strips in such rigid formats from the beginning.
Since then, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson has written extensively on the issue, arguing that size reduction and dropped panels reduce both the potential and freedom of a cartoonist.
After a lengthy battle with his syndicate, Watterson won the privilege of making half page-sized Sunday strips where he could arrange the panels any way he liked.
Opus won that same privilege years after Calvin and Hobbes ended, while Wiley Miller circumvented further downsizes by making his Non Sequitur Sunday strip available only in a vertical arrangement.
Few newspapers still run half-page strips, as with Prince Valiant and Hägar the Horrible in the front page of the Reading Eagle Sunday comics section until the mid-2010s.
However, quite a few cartoonists (e.g.: George Herriman and Charles Schulz, among others) have done their strips almost completely by themselves; often criticizing the use of assistants for the same reasons most have about their editors hiring anyone else to continue their work after their retirement.
By 1999 both Tribune Media Services and United Feature had begun granting ownership rights to creators (limited to new and/or hugely popular strips).
Said Edward Leech of Scripps, "We don't think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks... boobs and undesirables.
