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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. They typically are smaller, 3–4 grids compared to the full page Sunday strip and are black and white.
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." The Comics Journal #289, April 2008, p.175. Other followed the trend set by Fisher, as noted by comic strip historian R. C. Harvey:
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.
Throughout the 20th century, daily newspaper strips were usually presented in black and white and Sunday strips in colour, but a few newspapers have published daily strips in colour, and some newspapers, such as Grit, have published Sunday strips in black and white. On the web, daily newspaper strips are usually in colour, and conversely, some , such as Joyce and Walky, has been created in black and white. Joyce and Walky
Traditionally, balloons and captions were hand-lettered with all upper case letters. However, there are exceptions such as a few strips which have typeset dialogue such as Barnaby. Upper and lower case lettering are used in Gasoline Alley.
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 centred between the title and the byline. In later years, the subtitles vanished as continuity strips gave way to humour strips. In a nod toward the classic daily strips of yesteryear, the cartoonist Bill Griffith continues the tradition by always centring 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.
During the 1930s, the original art for a daily strip could be drawn as large as 25 inches wide by six inches high. Live Auctioneers, Etta Kett, January 2, 1933. As strips have become smaller, the number of panels has been reduced. 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 4 3/4" wide by 1 1/2" deep, while the three-tiered Hägar the Horrible Sunday strip in the same paper is 5" wide by 3 3/8" deep.
Strips had an ancillary form of distribution when they were clipped and mailed, as noted by The Baltimore Sun's Linda White: "I followed the adventures of Winnie Winkle, Moon Mullins and Dondi, and waited each fall to see how Lucy would manage to trick Charlie Brown into trying to kick that football. (After I left for college, my father would clip out that strip each year and send it to me just to make sure I didn't miss it.)" White, Linda. "You can't go home again".
Collections of such clipped daily strips can now be found in various archives, including Steve Cottle's online I Love Comix Archive. Comics historian Bill Blackbeard had tens of thousands of daily strips clipped and organized chronologically. Blackbeard's San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, consisting of 2.5 million clippings, tearsheets and comic sections, spanning the years 1894 to 1996, has provided source material for books and articles by Blackbeard and other researchers. During the 1990s, this collection was acquired by the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, providing the Ohio State museum with the world's most extensive collection of daily newspaper comic strip tear sheets and clippings. In 1998, six 18-wheelers transported the Blackbeard collection from California to Ohio. San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection
The Comics Curmudgeon is a blog which provides an ongoing humorous and critical commentary of daily comic strips.
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