Comic Strips

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. more...

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In the UK and 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 Boy's Life.

Storytelling using pictures, often combined with words, 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, and Pearls Before Swine). Starting circa 1930, comic strips began to include adventure stories. Buck Rogers and Tarzan were two 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 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.

Daily Strips

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.

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