Comic strip

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

A comic strip is a short strip or sequence of drawings that tells a story. Drawn by a cartoonist, or an artist, such strips are published on a recurring basis (usually daily or weekly) in newspapers or on the Internet. In the UK and Europe they are also published within comic magazines, with a strip's story sometimes continuing over three pages or more. They usually communicate to the reader via speech balloons.

As the name implies, they can be humorous (as in "gag-a-day" strips like Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois, or Hägar the Horrible). Soap-opera continuity strips (like Judge Parker or Little Orphan Annie) have serious story lines in serial form. They are, however, nonetheless known as "comics" – though the term "sequential art", coined by cartoonist Will Eisner, is also used.

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Newspaper Comic Strip

Newspaper comic strips are, obviously, 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 the artform, mixing words and pictures, evolved gradually, and there are many examples of proto-comic strips. Newspaper comic strips are divided into daily strips and Sunday strips.

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Daily Strip

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 -- wider than they are tall -- and panels -- 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 continuitity. The daily Peanuts is a strip, 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

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Origins

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; The Yellow Kid the first color comic, part of the first Sunday comic section in 1897 and the source of the term "yellow journalism"); Mutt and Jeff the first daily comic strip, first appearing in 1907.

The comic strip, in a manner of speaking, began in 1865 in Germany with Max and Moritz, a strip about two trouble-making boys. It was more a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children's stories like "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 did provide an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, leading to the debut of Katzenjammer Kids in 1897, probably the first comic strip in the modern sense of the term. 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.

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Conventions and genres

Most comic strip characters are unageing throughout the strip's life, but in 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 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.

All the comic strips mentioned so far in this article are centered on human beings, but a number of strips have also included animals as main characters. Some are non-verbal (Marmaduke), some have verbal thoughts but aren't understood by humans, (Garfield, Snoopy in Peanuts), and some can converse with humans (Get Fuzzy). Other strips have centered entirely on animals, as in Pogo or Donald Duck. Gary Larson's The Far Side was unique, as there were no central characters. Instead The Far Side used a wide variety of characters such as humans, monsters, aliens, chickens, cows, worms, amoebas and more. Wiley Miller not only mixes human, animal and fantasy characters, he does several different comic strip continuities under one umbrella title, Non Sequitur.

Newspaper comic strips come in two formats, daily strips and Sunday strips. Daily strips usually run Monday through Saturday, and are usually in black and white. Sunday strips are much larger and are usually in color.

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Social and political influence

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. The aforementioned 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 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 because of the strip's commentary about office politics.

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.

With the coming of Web 2.0 hype in the second part of 2000's decade, old ways of creating and publishing webcomics started to mutate. Some strip generators appear on the web, giving a chance and motivation to amateurs to publish their own comic strips in seconds. Most of these webcomics generators were based on pre-fixed scenarios or more modern ones, on drag-and-drop of comic figures and objects. In the middle of this webcomics 2.0 revolution, some projects, like MaiNada Comics enable the author to draw himself directly online, avoiding the trouble of uploading files and publish them on a site. Now anyone, without further work can just login and draw away his sketches and publishing his art automatically, in seconds.

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See also

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External links

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