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 comic strip, daily, comic and/or strip:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“For a woman to get a rewarding sense of total creation by way of the multiple monotonous chores that are her daily lot would be as irrational as for an assembly line worker to rejoice that he had created an automobile because he tightened a bolt.”
—Edith Mendel Stern (1901–1975)
“The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)