In 1995, King Features Syndicate president Joseph F. However, the artform combining words and pictures evolved gradually, and there are many examples of proto-comic strips. The Yellow Kid is usually credited as one of the first US newspaper comic strips. In 1894, Pulitzer introduced the Sunday color supplement. 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. design a color press, and the Recorder published the first American newspaper color page on April 2, 1893. At the New York Recorder, manager George Turner had R. World War II only exacerbated an already bad situation.' Role of the color press Īfter 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. Don't believe a word of it-it's the ads that killed full-page strips, and that killed the topper. Holtz notes, 'You'll hear historians say that the topper strip was a victim of World War II paper shortages. 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. On the other hand, numerous strips such as Bob Gustafson's Specs and Virgil Partch's The Captain's Gig are almost completely forgotten today, other than a brief display in the Stripper's Guide site run by comics historian Allan Holtz. Such classics have found a new home in book collections of recent years. With Ray Moore art, this was the first Phantom Sunday strip.įamous full-page Sunday strips include Alley Oop, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Flash Gordon, and Thimble Theatre. In some cases, such as Buz Sawyer, the Sunday strip is a spin-off, focusing on different characters than the daily.Īn example of an action-adventure strip is The Phantom (May 28, 1939). Others, such as Rip Kirby, are daily only and have never appeared on Sunday. Some strips, such as Prince Valiant appear only on Sunday. 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. The Sunday strip is contrasted with the daily comic strip, published Monday through Saturday, usually in black and white. Other strips offer a gag complete in a single episode, such as Little Iodine and Mutt and Jeff. A continuity strip employs a narrative in an ongoing storyline. Subject matter and genres have ranged from adventure, detective and humor strips to dramatic strips with soap opera situations, such as Mary Worth. Some newspapers, such as Grit, published Sunday strips in black-and-white, and some (mostly in Canada) print their Sunday strips on Saturday. In the United States, the popularity of color comic strips sprang from the newspaper war between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Jimmy Swinnerton's The Little Bears introduced sequential art and recurring characters in William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. The first US newspaper comic strips appeared in the late 19th century, closely allied with the invention of the color press. Many newspaper readers called this section the Sunday funnies, the funny papers or simply the funnies. The Sunday comics or Sunday strip is the comic strip section carried in most western newspapers, almost always in color.

An example of a classic full-page Sunday humor strip, Billy DeBeck's Barney Google and Spark Plug (January 2, 1927), showing how an accompanying topper strip was displayed on a Sunday page.

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