17 Facts About Comic strips

Comic strips strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions.

Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with daily horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in newspapers, while Sunday papers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections.

Examples of these gag-a-day Comic strips are Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Marmaduke, and Pearls Before Swine.

Comic strips have appeared inside American magazines such as Liberty and Boys' Life, but on the front covers, such as the Flossy Frills series on The American Weekly Sunday newspaper supplement.

Newspaper comic strips come in two different types: daily strips and Sunday strips.

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Daily Comic strips usually are printed in black and white, and Sunday Comic strips are usually in color.

In 1931, George Gallup's first poll had the comic section as the most important part of the newspaper, with additional surveys pointing out that the comic strips were the second most popular feature after the picture page.

Popularity and accessibility of Comic strips meant they were often clipped and saved; authors including John Updike and Ray Bradbury have written about their childhood collections of clipped Comic strips.

The Comic strips are usually displayed horizontally, wider than they are tall.

Early daily Comic strips were large, often running the entire width of the newspaper, and were sometimes three or more inches high.

Over decades, the size of daily Comic strips became smaller and smaller, until by 2000, four standard daily Comic strips could fit in an area once occupied by a single daily strip.

When Sunday Comic strips began to appear in more than one format, it became necessary for the cartoonist to allow for rearranged, cropped or dropped panels.

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 and inflation beginning during the fifties and sixties led to Sunday Comic strips being published on smaller and more diverse formats.

Actually, most Comic strips created since 1990 are drawn in the unbroken "third-page" format.

Many older Comic strips are no longer drawn by the original cartoonist, who has either died or retired.

Some Comic strips which are still in affiliation with the original creator are produced by small teams or entire companies, such as Jim Davis' Garfield, however there is some debate if these Comic strips fall in this category.

Comic strips rejected the idea of hiring an inker or letterer, comparing it to a golfer hiring a man to make his putts.