Sunday Comics - Sunday Strip Layout

Sunday Strip Layout

Sunday comic strip panel layout, designed to fill a third of a newspaper page. Note that the top two panels are omitted entirely. Sunday comic strip panel layout, designed to fill a quarter of a newspaper page.

Early Sunday strips filled an entire newspaper page. Later strips, such as The Phantom and Terry and the Pirates, were usually only half that size, with two strips to a page in full-size newspapers, such as the New Orleans Times Picayune, or with one strip on a tabloid page, as in the Chicago Sun-Times. When Sunday strips began to appear in more than one format, it became necessary for the cartoonist to follow a standardized strip layout, which provides newspapers with the greatest flexibility in determining how to print a strip. One notable distinction among Sunday comics supplements was the supplement produced in a comic book-like format, featuring the character The Spirit. These sixteen-page (later 8 page) standalone Sunday supplements of Will Eisner's character were included with newspapers from 1940 through 1952. During World War II, because of paper shortages, the size of Sunday strips began to shrink. After the war, strips continued to get smaller and smaller, to save the expense of printing so many color pages. The last full-page comic strip was the Prince Valiant strip for 11 April 1971. The dimensions of the Sunday comics continued to decrease in recent years, as did the number of pages. Sunday comics sections that were 10 or 12 pages in 1950 dropped to six or four pages by 2005. One of the last large-size Sunday comics in the United States is in the Reading Eagle, which has eight Berliner-size pages and carries 36 comics. It's banner headline is "Biggest Comics Section in the Land". Another big-size comic section is that of The Washington Post which carries 41 strips in eight broadsheet pages although it also contains a sudoku and a Jumble puzzle. Canadian newspaper comic sections are unique not only because of being printed on Saturdays, but these usually are also part of the entertainment or lifestyle section. A notable exception is that of the Winnipeg Free Press which publishes an eight-page comic-only tabloid section.

In some cases today, the daily strip and Sunday strip dimensions are almost the same. For instance, a daily strip in The Arizona Republic measures 43⁄₄" wide by 11⁄₂" deep, while the three-tiered Hägar the Horrible Sunday strip in the same paper is 5" wide by 33⁄₈" deep.