Comic Strip Formats - Half Page

Half page is a Sunday strip format that is roughly 10 inches high and 14 inches wide. Today, it is the largest and most complete format for most Sunday strips, including Peanuts, Prince Valiant, and Doonesbury. The half-page Sunday strip was introduced in the 1920s to fit two Sunday strips on a single page. The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and Terry and the Pirates were introduced in this format. Other strips, such as Flash Gordon and Blondie had panels rearranged, cropped or removed to make the full page fit in a smaller size. WW II paper rationing caused most newspapers to cut back on the number of pages devoted to Sunday comics, and rather than drop strips, they often reduced the size. Beginning about this time, the half page became the standard size, and the third-of-a-page strip was introduced, fitting three strips on each page, one above another. A half page typically had three tiers; the third page either reduced, rearranged and cropped these panels, as seen in Li'l Abner strips, or more commonly, just dropped the top tier, as was the case with Peanuts. Most newspaper readers did not realize there were only seeing part of what the artist drew, and the artists were forced into increasingly restrictive formats to make dropping panels possible. Today, only the Reading Eagle and a few other newspapers run any of their Sunday strips in the complete half-page format. The Sunday Calvin and Hobbes comic strip was so popular that the artist insisted that it fill half of a page, although many editors ran a shrunken version of the same strip. That strip has since ended, and today the only strip that requires the half-page format, though not necessarily the half-page size, is Opus.