Sunday comics
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
Famous American full-page Sunday strips include
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 Horácio 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
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
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
Sunday strip layout
Early Sunday strips filled an entire newspaper page. Later strips, such as
Early strips
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
During the 1950s, there were a few short-lived attempts to revive the full-page Sunday strip. Examples such as
Other formats
Other formats for Sunday strips include the
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 "
Half-page Sunday strips have at least two different styles. The
Currently, the largest and most complete format for most Sunday strips, such as
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 43⁄4" wide by 11⁄2" deep, while the three-tiered Hägar the Horrible Sunday strip in the same paper is 5" wide by 33⁄8" deep.
See also
- Comics
- Daily comic strip
- Graphic novels
- List of comic strip syndicates
- List of newspaper comic strips
References
- ^ "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.
- ^ "Página Cinco - Da tristeza suicida à confiança serena: as histórias completas de Horácio". www.uol.com.br (in Brazilian Portuguese). Retrieved 12 July 2023.
- ^ "Editora Pipoca e Nanquim publicará a coleção 'Horácio Completo', um 'resgate pré-histórico' do dinossauro filosófico criado por Mauricio de Sousa – Correio do Cidadão" (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
- ^ 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
- 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
- Avon
- Koenigsberg, Moses. King News, Moses Koenigsberg
- Robinson, Jerry, The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (1974) G.P. Putnam's Sons