Daily Comic Strip
A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip format, appearing on weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which typically only appears on Sundays.
Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff is commonly regarded as the first daily comic strip, launched November 15, 1907 (under its initial title, A. Mutt) on the sports pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. The featured character had previously appeared in sports cartoons by Fisher but was unnamed. Fisher had approached his editor, John P. Young, about doing a regular strip as early as 1905 but was turned down. According to Fisher, Young told him, "It would take up too much room, and readers are used to reading down the page, and not horizontally." Other cartoonists followed the trend set by Fisher, as noted by comic strip historian R. C. Harvey:
- The strip's regular appearance and its continued popularity inspired imitation, thus establishing the daily "strip" form for a certain kind of newspaper cartoon. Until Mutt and Jeff set the fashion, newspaper cartoons usually reached readers in one of two forms: on Sunday, in colored pages of tiered panels in sequence (some like Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, intended chiefly for children to read): on weekdays, collections of comic drawings grouped almost haphazardly within the ruled border of a large single-frame panel (directed mostly to adult readers)... Then on that November day in 1907, Fisher made history by spreading his comic drawings in sequence across the width of the sports page. And when his editor consented to this departure from the usual practice, the daily comic strip format was on its way to becoming a fixture in daily newspapers."
In the early 1900s, William Randolph Hearst's weekday morning and afternoon papers around the country featured scattered black-and-white comic strips, and on January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first full daily comics page in his Evening Journal.
The reading of newspaper comics each day was a major entertainment activity during the first half of the 20th century. A Fortune poll in 1937 ranked the ten leading strips in popularity (with number one as the most popular):
- Little Orphan Annie
- Popeye
- Dick Tracy
- Bringing Up Father
- The Gumps
- Blondie
- Moon Mullins
- Joe Palooka
- Li'l Abner
- Tillie the Toiler
Read more about Daily Comic Strip: Formats and Color, Gag-a-day, Layout, Shrinkage, Archival Clippings, Commentary
Famous quotes containing the words daily, comic and/or strip:
“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”
—Paul Tillich (1886–1965)
“Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)