Sunday strip

A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in full color. It is contrasted with daily strip, where strips are published Monday through Saturday, usually in black and white. Many comic strips appear both daily and Sunday, in some cases, as with "Little Orphan Annie", telling the same story daily and Sunday, in other cases, as with The Phantom, telling one story in the daily and a different story in the Sunday. Some strips, such as "Prince Valiant" appear only on Sunday; others, such as "Rip Kirby", are daily only, and have never appeared on Sunday.

Format

Early strips

Early Sunday strips usually filled a full newspaper page, but with time they have grown smaller and smaller, until today there are no Sunday strips that stand alone on a page, and some newspapers crowd as many as eight Sunday strips on a single page. The last full page Sunday strip was "Prince Valiant", which was published as a full page in some newspapers until 1970. Shortly after the full page "Prince Valiant" was discontinued, Hal Foster retired from drawing the strip, though he continued to write it for several more years. Manuscript Press published a print of his last "Prince Valiant" strip in full-page format; this was the last full page comic strip, though it did not appear in that format in newspapers.

Other formats

Other formats for Sunday strips include the half-page, the third of a page, the quarter page, the tabloid page or tab, and the half tab, short for half of a tabloid page. Today, with the ever shrinking size of Sunday strips, many other, smaller formats abound.

Usually, only the largest format is complete, with the other formats dropping or cropping one or more panels. Such "throwaway" panels often contain material that is not vital to the main part of the strip. Most cartoonists fill the first two panels of their strips with a "throwaway gag," knowing that the public may not see them, and making them integral to the plot would likely be wasteful. Exceptions to this rule include "Steve Canyon" and, until its last few years, "On Stage", which are complete only in the third format.

Currently, the largest and most complete format for most Sunday strips, such as "Peanuts", is the half page. A few strips have been popular enough for the artist to insist on the Sunday strip being run in a half page format, though not necessarily in a half-page size. "Calvin and Hobbes" was the first strip to do this, followed by "Outland" and later "Opus". "The Reading Eagle" is one of the few newspapers that still run half-page Sunday strips.

Famous full-page Sunday strips include "Prince Valiant", "Bringing Up Father", "Flash Gordon", "Thimble Theater", "Little Orphan Annie", "Buck Rogers", "Captain Easy", "Blondie", and "Alley Oop". Many of these pages also included a topper.

During the 1950s, there were a few short-lived attempts to revive the full page Sunday strip. Examples such as "Lance" by Warren Tufts and Frank Giacoia's "Johnny Reb and Billy Yank" proved artistic though not commercial successes.