Before the Internet and
Webcomics, the only place to find daily, serialized comic strips was (and for many people, still is) the back page of your local mainstream or alternative newspaper.
Comic strips can cover a wide range of formats, topics, characters and artistic styles.
The Far Side and
The Family Circus are one-panel gag strips.
Bloom County and
Pogo, while light-hearted on the surface, were thick with
Story Arcs and
political commentary. Other strips, like
Peanuts and
Calvin And Hobbes, delightfully portray the experiences of childhood, and thus have broad, long-term appeal. There have been countless serialized adventure strips like
The Phantom, Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant and
Dick Tracy; soap opera/slice-of-life strips like
Gasoline Alley and
Rex Morgan M.D., and strips that fall in between, like
Little Orphan Annie.
Compared to other media, newspaper comics can have incredibly
long tenures. New
Peanuts strips appeared daily for over 49 years.
Doonesbury has been running for 42 years and
Garfield has been coming out for 34 years. Neither show any signs of stopping. Even more impressively,
Blondie has run for well over 80 years,
Gasoline Alley has run over 90 years, and most impressively of all
The Katzenjammer Kids has been running since 1897! A 10-year run is considered tremendous for a television show, but when
Calvin And Hobbes,
The Far Side and
Bloom County each ended production after a decade, it seemed far too soon.
On the flip side, one of the reasons why
Webcomics are 5-10 years ahead of Web-based indie music distribution (and 15-20 years ahead of non-corporate Web movies) is that "making it big" in sequential art has been traditionally defined as "being able to support a middle-class lifestyle without a day job". Only about 10 people in the whole 20th century got seriously stinking rich drawing
Newspaper Comics, and of those only two or three achieved actual
stardom (with Charles Schulz, Jim Davis and Al Capp being the most obvious examples).
The downside is that many newspaper comics have a reputation for
not being funny anymore and the
Long Runners often derisively described as "zombie strips". This is because, as far as a newspaper is concerned, comic strips are just advertising: they're there to lure in readers and make them more willing to fork over some subscription money. They're
Fanservice, basically. And the last thing you want to do with fanservice is serve up something that doesn't actually please the fans. As such,
Darker and Edgier humor, political- and/or current-events-based humor must be handled carefully, lest they cost the newspaper (or the
artist!) more subscriptions than they gain. Even worse, newspaper strips are written anywhere from six weeks to ten
months in advance of print date, which doesn't help topical humor. Newspapers have also been cutting down on the amount of space that comic strip artists are given in which to practice their visual, art-based medium, resulting in
Bowdlerized art and abbreviated storytelling.
note As Bill Watterson of Calvin And Hobbes fame said
of the space restrictions way back in 1989: "A beautiful strip like Pogo would be impossible to read at today's sizes." Of course it only got worse, and ultimately this was one of the factors that led to Watterson's decision to stop doing the strip. Along with a lot of the other stuff mentioned here.. Compare and contrast the
Infinite Canvas and complete lack of censorship offered by
Web Comics as a medium. And the newspaper itself has become a victim of the Information Age; not only can consumers get the news online, they can get
comics online too. So newspapers have to play it safe, and they do so by angling for broad, non-offensive humor with a wide appeal, often by recycling tired jokes and premises that sitcoms put to pasture years ago, though
Values Dissonance is slowly getting them
down the flush.
Successful newspaper comics usually find their way into
other media, but are most fondly remembered as simple pen-and-ink drawings on cheap newsprint.
Sometimes you'll hear the term
"Underground Comix"; in the USA, at least, this term refers to pen-and-ink comics not distributed by a syndicate and normally published in "alternative" papers, 'zines, etc.
Webcomics and the consolidation of the
supposedly "Alternative" newsweekly industry have put a dint in their circulation, but
Cerebus and
American Elf among others started out this way, and the latter still appears in alternative weeklies, or at least the one in the author's hometown.
Also, these have a very high chance of
Breaking the Fourth Wall, but
only when they do a very common "
look at the reader at some other person's comedy or comedy failure".
Newspaper Comics that have wiki pages:
