[0219] A Short History Of Newspaper Comic Strips
└ posted on Monday, 22 November 2010, by Novil
The height of the 3rd panel on my 19″ monitor is 7.4 cm. If your monitor has the same or a similar physical resolution, you can have a look at this scaled version in which the 3rd panel is exactly 4.8 cm high.
- Caption: A short history of newspaper comic strips
- Caption: 7.6 cm x 24.2 cm
Original full-page format at
the beginning of the last century
- Caption: 5.8 cm x 18.4 cm
Commonly used format of
daily strips in the last
century until the 1990’s
- Caption: 4.8 cm x 15.2 cm
Commonly used format
of daily strips today
- Sandra: The walls are getting closer!
- Woo: I’m scared.
- Caption: 3.8 cm x 12.1 cm
Format of a daily
strip printed in
The Arizona Republic
Yep, I’ll agree with that!
That can’t be good for their mental health…..
On the plus side, the artists don’t have to worry so much about the background.
The question is how about newspaper comic size formats in Germany and Indonesia? are they illustrator friendly or just a small spot in the land of pulp?
If this keeps up, I dare not think where we will end in 2030
MrGBH wrote:
But Mike, smaller format will limit how they will interpret some actions, like when you throw bodies when fighting head alien right?
Draco Blair wrote:
For the better I hope, with lack of trees for pulp we will use e-ink, and the fact that many earth population were eaten by ctulhu.
Uh-ho!!! Does this means that it could be the end of our favorite characters and/or of the series if the image formats become any more little? I dare not think about the consequences of it!
*gulp!*
It’s even worse than you depict. Strip sizes were reduced during WWII (I’m American and can only speak of what happened here) to conserve paper, with the expectation that they’d re-enlarge after the War. But editors found readers would accept the smaller size, so they stayed small.
Then, a comic was introduced in 1950 specifically designed with minimal drawing and no backgrounds so it could fit into even less space. That was a major selling point when it was “pitched” to editors. That was Charles Shultz’s “Peanuts” and it ultimately led to the demise of the “illustrated” comic strip since there was no longer room for well-executed artwork.
Even the Sunday color comics, which used to occupy a full page (or maybe 2/3rds of a page with a “topper”) have been squeezed to 1/3 or even 1/4 page formats. Maybe you’ll find “Prince Valiant” in the 1/2 page size. Maybe.
To see what strips _used_ to look like, go to http://www.ilovecomixarchive.com/galleries and look at Gasoline Alley, or On Stage, or Oaky Doakes, or a dozen others. (Point cursor at top right corner of strip to select size.)
For _really_ old images, see http://www.barnaclepress.com
@ Neutrino:
Damn you, Charles Shultz!
Nooo!
They just fixed that fourth wall!
Ahhh… just SMELL that fourth wall breaking goodness!!!
Well, they tend to fill the newspaper with a lot of BS, so why not get more comics than “facts”
Wonderful commentary and wonderful comic!
@ Lax:
Simple. That would be entertaining and they can’t profit from that well. “Truth” sells
Well, in graphic printing, space is money when it comes to newspapers, they don’t waste a centimeter of it, cuz they fill the rest with advertising xD
No time for strips in there. :T
I find it odd that the the concept of beauty in comics has become more limited as well.
A clever way of showing changes in the comic format! And especially clever (or perhaps sneaky) that as the panels become smaller, the characters become larger to emphasize the effect (Sandra is about 2.5 times larger in the last panel). Has there been an inflation of characters to go along with the shrinking paper space? And was the board game in the first frames replaced with a smart phone game?
Breaking the ever shrinking fourth wall!
you read the arizona republic? your from arizona? AWSOME!
vally of the sun FTW
(if you couldn’t guess, i live in arizona)
http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2008/12/24/
Bill Watterson made a comment on it back in the day in “The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book.”
“A comic strip might once have lured readers from one newspaper to another, but comics don’t lure people away from television. The comics are less helpful to newspapers than they used to be, so papers look at the comics page as one more place to cut costs. They cram more strips into less space, forcing cartoonists to write and draw more simply to stay legible. With fewer words and cruder drawings, the comics become less imaginative and less entertaining.”
He makes a few other points, but that seems most pertinent.
Well… If the walls are coming closer the only way out is breaking the fourth…
@ AckAckAck:
Concerning the german Newspapercomics I might be able to answer your question.
It simply depends on the Newspaper.
Some don’t have comics anymore, others have almost the space they had 10 years before.
One of the local newspapers here even has a comic that is even bigger.
(I’m bad at guessing sizes, so I can’t give you a value…)
The same Newspaper uses a whole page for comics once per week. (saturday I think)
But most newspapers leave the comics out entirely and use small incoherent strips for political satire instead.
And these small strips have a size similar to the 3rd pannel.
@Novil
BAD CREATOR, bad creator. You can be so cruel to your creations sometimes.
The smaller the panels, the more pictures can be fit into a comic 🙂
Hey I didn’t even realize this so far. Real interesting. 😀
But let’s just hope this won’t be applied for online comics as well. :p
To be fair, they wouldn’t really do much with that space anyway since about 75% of all newspaper comics are less entertaining than watching paint dry. I swear, if it wasn’t for Zits, Baldo, and Over the Hedge, I wouldn’t even glance at the comics section.
You left out the last panel, where the newspaper industry goes belly up and the comic collapses in on itself like the end of Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected.
@ Neutrino:
Ironically, papers I’ve seen that run Peanuts reruns often run them on the front page, at their original size. So when you read the paper you find a bunch of strips crammed down to take as little space as possible, all topped by a huge Peanuts comic.
I’d like to take a second here to promote the Comics Curmudgeon over at JoshReads.com . A snark blog mostly dedicated to making fun of newspaper comics themselves, but they often get into discussions about the state of the newspaper comics overall. I’m willing to bet several of you already read it, and those that don’t I think will enjoy.
EFFING AWESOMEEEE 😀
There’s only one newspaper comic I read anymore. Nemi, which runs in the Metro. Which is free. It’s also available on their website.
Maybe Gaboris was joking about on-line comics eventually shrinking as well — but I really wonder. After years and years of computer monitors getting bigger and bigger (and supporting higher resolutions) the trend has reversed.
Novil, I’m curious if you and Powree have to plan “Sandra and Woo” so it remains readable on a gadget someone keeps in a pocket.
Other places to see what’s been lost are “The Comics before 1945” and “The Comics since 1945” both by Brian Walker, and the two-volume “The Comic Strip Century” by Bill Blackbeard. All are hefty over-sized books with excellent reproductions and the Walkers also contain insightful commentary.
Newspapers are killing themselves:
1. “Hey, let’s print our comics so small that only people with 20/20 vision can read them.”
2. “That’s a great idea! And while we’re at it, let’s refuse all new cartoonists in favor of ones who have been around since the nineteen-twenties!”
3. “And, to show that we’re ‘hip’ with the times, let’s offer everything online for free!”
The next day, the obituaries have two rather odd columns; one says “newspapers,” the other says “rational thought.”
But the problem of breaking the fourth wall is self-solving…
As panels grow smaller, characters will be too big to fit through the hole that can be made in the fourth wall!
To be fair, the shrinking is a little exaggerated in this strip because of the visual technique of Larisa and Woo getting larger each panel.
Nevertheless, rather than setting less and less space aside for comic strips, I think that a “news”paper consisting almost entirely of comics would sell a lot better. I’d want that delivered to my house every day!
*edit: Did I really say Larisa? Ugh, I must be tired today…
The size of panels on Bazooka Joe gum are smaller than that, but allow room for some background from time to time.
People are just lazy.
*blink*
Oh, hey. I’ve read the Arizona Republic. But even the coupon inserts haven’t been enough to keep me subscribing to any paper. And certainly not the comic pages considering how they are both shrunken and in many cases just plain un-fun.
Yup! That’s pretty accurate right there! That’s about the size that panels are in my paper as well.
One day, the characters will take revenge on their creators that reduced their world.
Over the years comics have almost disappeared from newspapers except the 1 panel hacks like family circus. One paper in particular went from 2 pages of good comics to a partial page shared with the jumble and some Bridge (the card game) puzzle. This same paper attempted to dump the only smart comic it had left Doonesbury as being too controversial (yes it was in “the land of cotton”) but due to public outcry had to bring it back. But just to show they still had control they put it on the editorial page. This is truly why newspapers are dying. They are too conservative or too old to change with the times. When was the last time they did something innovative or new? Evolution works in business too.
the only newspaper and magazine comics i really liked were ‘Haeger the Horrible’ and ‘Knights of the Kitchen Table’…but they are long gone now…..occassionally Blondie and Nick Knatterton were readable. I even seen some nostalgia when Lucky Luke, Uhm Pah-Pah and Tin Tin were in the papers and not in their own comic books
And thus you see why no one reads the AZ Republic any more :). The only good content is getting restricted panels 😉
I found out about the Boondocks from reading the Las Vegas Weekly. Which is a free weekly magazine that you can usually find at gas stations and bus stops. every week there would be full pages of boondocks strips. Then all of a sudden the comics were gone… then the comic reviews were gone… and now it’s mostly avertisements for bars and clubs with movie reviews and entertainment stuff. The weekly was like getting a piece of cheescake covered in whipped topping, but all that’s left now is the pie crust.
Lopsy wrote:
That, my friend, is called a comic book.
@ fastbreak333:
but they could be more entertaining, if they had more space to work with…
i believe thats the point he’s trying to make
Art. Empathy. Intuition. Such underrated concepts.
O.K. – So how large is that in real measurements, (i.e. inches). It’s interesting to note that on the other side of the coin the panel size of comic books has been growing ever bigger. Which is to say the artists and writers only produce 1/3 as much of the story and art per issue as they used to. Talk about inflation!
No matter the scaling, something is off with the numbers in the captions: They suggest aspect ratios beyond 1:3 when the panels are more like 17:21 or 4:5.
@ das-g:
Or are the sizes for the whole strip, rather than single panels, like MAT suggested on the .de site? I guess it’s that.
das-g wrote:
Yes, that’s correct.
@ Draco Blair:
Actually, I quite expect by 2030, only the most change resistant of “news papers” will still be offering an actual printed news paper.
Back in 1990, I got most of my news via TV reports. My internet was barely a dial up. My computer ate up it’s own desk. And, I played games through 16 bit systems.
20 years later, I read my comics, on-line. My net can feed full videos from literally anyone. Logging on feeds me news, directly. I don’t even watch “TV”, anymore. My gaming system is probably more powerful then this netbook that I am using at the library. And, I happen to agree with a comment from another raccoon featuring comic that printed comics are probably on the way out. Not to mention that the latest in tech includes these I-Pad’s that are quite readable screens with touch access and something darn close to a (still) sci-fi notion of liquid paper…a tech where the computer screen, computer and all the works are as thin as paper, itself. Yet, as powerful as today’s PC. Plus, they are so affordable, that once the battery runs out, you crumple it up and toss it away for another $3 sheet of liquid paper. If India is successful in mass production, they shall give the world Unix driven versions of the I-Pad for $35…or, maybe even $10!
So, you see, twenty years down the road, presuming that 2012 doesn’t disrupt our evoluations in technology, I highly expect that everyone will be reading AND watching their news on whatever replaces the I-Pad…and probably it’s successor…over buying an expensive paper product that requires actually going out to get it, getting ink all over your fingers and then actually disposing of it. By then, that would be like having us 2010’ers going to work on a horse driven wagon. People on the cutting edge don’t do that. Though, it does make a great, romantic kind of ride for special occasions and decent sporting models for the Amish.
Woo (Peeking through a crack in the enclosing panel): “We are going to DIE.” D:
The characters get larger as the panels get smaller; nice touch.