TheSunday comics orSunday strip is thecomic strip section carried in some Western newspapers. Compared to weekday comics, Sunday comics tend to be full pages and are in color. Many newspaper readers called this section theSunday funnies, thefunny papers or simply thefunnies.[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'sThe Little Bears introduced sequential art and recurring characters inWilliam Randolph Hearst'sSan Francisco Examiner. In the United States, the popularity of color comic strips sprang from the newspaper war between Hearst andJoseph Pulitzer. Some newspapers, such asGrit, published Sunday strips in black-and-white, and some (mostly inCanada) print their Sunday strips on Saturday.
Subject matter and genres have ranged from adventure, detective and humor strips to dramatic strips withsoap opera situations, such asMary Worth. A continuity strip employs a narrative in an ongoing storyline. Other strips offer a gag complete in a single episode, such asLittle Iodine andMutt and Jeff. The Sunday strip is contrasted with thedaily comic strip, published Monday through Saturday, usually in black and white. Many comic strips appear both daily and Sunday, in some cases, as withLittle Orphan Annie, telling the same story daily and Sunday, in other cases, as withThe Phantom, telling one story in the daily and a different story in the Sunday. Some strips, such asPrince Valiant appear only on Sunday. Others, such asRip Kirby, are daily only and have never appeared on Sunday. In some cases, such asBuz Sawyer, the Sunday strip is a spin-off, focusing on different characters than the daily.
Famous American full-page Sunday strips includeAlley Oop,Barney Google and Snuffy Smith,Blondie,Bringing Up Father,Buck Rogers,Captain Easy,Flash Gordon, andThimble Theatre. Such classics have found a new home in book collections of recent years. On the other hand, numerous strips such asBob Gustafson'sSpecs andVirgil Partch'sThe Captain's Gig are almost completely forgotten today, other than a brief display in the Stripper's Guide site run by comics historianAllan Holtz.
Many of the leading cartoonists also drew an accompanyingtopper 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 hisHorácio full-color Sunday comics, originally published in the children's supplement ofFolha de S.Paulo between 1963 and 1992.[4][5]
After the publisher of theChicago Inter-Ocean saw the first color press in Paris at the offices ofLe Petit Journal, he had his own color press operating late in 1892.[6] At theNew York Recorder, manager George Turner had R. Hoe & Co. design a color press, and theRecorder published the first American newspaper color page on April 2, 1893. The following month, Pulitzer'sNew York World printed cartoonistWalt 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:
In 1905, Winsor McCay'sLittle Nemo in Slumberland began. Stephen Becker, inComic Art in America, noted thatLittle 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 inMemphis, 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 asFlash Gordon,Little Orphan Annie,Prince Valiant,Dick Tracy andTerry and the Pirates. Leading the lists of classic humor strips areBringing Up Father,Gasoline Alley,Li'l Abner,Pogo,Peanuts andSmokey Stover. Some newspapers added their own local features, such asOur Own Oddities in theSt. Louis Post-Dispatch. There were educational strips, such as King Features'Heroes of American History. In addition to the comic strips, Sunday comics sections also carried advertisements in a comics format, single-panel features, puzzles, paper dolls and cut-and-paste activities.The World Museum gave readers instructions for cutting pictures apart and assembling them into adiorama, often with a subject from nature, such asTheGrand Canyon orBuffalo Hunt. A page oncovered wagons carried the headline, "Covered wagons shown in an easy-to-build model: Scissors, paste and wrapping paper are all you need to make this Western set."
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 mayorFiorello H. La Guardia read comic strips over the radio.
Early Sunday strips filled an entire newspaper page. Later strips, such asThe Phantom andTerry and the Pirates, were usually only half that size, with two strips to a page in full-size newspapers, such as theNew Orleans Times Picayune, or with one strip on a tabloid page, as in theChicago Sun-Times.[10] When Sunday strips began to appear in more than one format, it became necessary for the cartoonist to follow a standardized strip layout, which provides newspapers with the greatest flexibility in determining how to print a strip.[9]One notable distinction among Sunday comics supplements was the supplement produced in a comic book-like format, featuring the characterThe Spirit. These sixteen-page (later eight-page) standalone Sunday supplements ofWill Eisner's character (distributed by theRegister and Tribune Syndicate) were included with newspapers from 1940 through 1952.DuringWorld War II, because of paper shortages, the size of Sunday strips began to shrink. After the war, strips continued to get smaller and smaller, to save the expense of printing so many color pages. The last full-page comic strip was thePrince Valiant strip for 11 April 1971. The dimensions of the Sunday comics continued to decrease in recent years, as did the number of pages. Sunday comics sections that were 10 or 12 pages in 1950 dropped to six or four pages by 2005. One of the last large-size Sunday comics in the United States is in theReading Eagle, which has eight Berliner-size pages and carries 36 comics. Its banner headline is "Biggest Comics Section in the Land".[10] Another big-size comic section is that ofThe Washington Post which carries 41 strips in eight broadsheet pages although it also contains a sudoku and a Jumble puzzle. Canadian newspaper comic sections are unique not only because of being printed on Saturdays, but these usually are also part of the entertainment or lifestyle section. A notable exception is that of theWinnipeg Free Press which publishes an eight-page comic-only tabloid section.
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 lastfull-page Sunday strip wasPrince Valiant, which was published as a full page in some newspapers until 1971. Shortly after the full-pagePrince 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 lastPrince 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]
During the 1950s, there were a few short-lived attempts to revive the full-page Sunday strip. Examples such asLance byWarren Tufts andFrank Giacoia'sJohnny Reb and Billy Yank proved artistic, though not commercial, successes.
Other formats for Sunday strips include thehalf-page, thethird of a page, the quarter page, the tabloid page ortab, and thehalf tab, short for half of a tabloid page. Today, with the ever-shrinking size of Sunday strips, many other smaller formats abound.[10]
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 "throwaway gag," knowing that the public may not see them, and making them integral to the plot would likely be wasteful. Exceptions to this rule includeSteve Canyon and, until its last few years,On Stage, which are complete only in thethird format. An alternative is to have a separate strip, a "topper" (though it may appear at the bottom), so with the topper it comprises a three-tier half-page, and without it comprises a two-tier third-page.
Half-page Sunday strips have at least two different styles. TheKing Features, theCreators' and the Chicago Tribune syndicates use nine panels (with only one used for the title), whileUnited Features andUniversal Press' half-page Sunday strips (most of them use a third-page format instead) use two panels for the title (except forJim Davis'U.S. Acres—which used the nine-panel format- during the 1980s, when most UFS strips -particularly Davis' more successfulGarfield—would have a throwaway gag).
Currently, the largest and most complete format for most Sunday strips, such asPeanuts, is thehalf page. A few strips have been popular enough for the artist to insist on the Sunday strip being run in a half-page format, though not necessarily in a half-page size.Calvin and Hobbes was the first strip to do this, followed byOutland and laterOpus.TheReading Eagle is one of the few newspapers that still run half-page Sunday strips.[10] Today,Slylock Fox & Comics for Kids is a popular example of a three tier half-page standard Sunday strip.
In some cases today, the daily strip and Sunday strip dimensions are almost the same. For instance, a daily strip inThe Arizona Republic measures 43⁄4" wide by 11⁄2" deep, while the three-tieredHägar the Horrible Sunday strip in the same paper is 5" wide by 33⁄8" deep.
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