Layout
Newspapers can display strips on separate pages randomly or thematically, such as placing a sports strip on the sports page. Initially, a newspaper page included only a single daily strip, usually either at the top or the bottom of the page. By the 1920s, many newspapers gathered the strips together on a single page, along with news articles, columns, puzzles and/or other illustrated features. In many newspapers, the width of the strips made possible an arrangement of the strips into two stacks displayed from the top to the bottom of the page.
Some newspapers would alter a horizontal strip to fit their page layout by placing the first two panels of a strip atop panels three and four. This then had a shape roughly similar to a gag panel and could be grouped with the gag panels.
The title of a strip was sometimes typeset and pasted into the first panel, enabling the strips to be closely stacked. This had the advantage of making space for additional strips but often resulted in a crowded, unattractive page design. More often during the 1930s and 1940s, the title was typeset (in all upper case letters) and positioned to the right in the white space area above that strip, with the byline on the right. An episode subtitle (in upper and lower case) was centered between the title and the byline. In later years, as continuity strips gave way to humor strips, the subtitles vanished. In a nod toward the classic daily strips of yesteryear, the cartoonist Bill Griffith continues the tradition by always centering a hand-lettered episode subtitle above each of his Zippy strips. In rare cases, some newspapers assembled pages of stacked strips minus titles, leaving more than a few confused readers.
Read more about this topic: Daily Comic Strip