The classical newspaper comic strip is a form of sequential art. This particular cartooning form has undergone many changes over the years and some historical perspective can be quite revealing. It is interesting how things follow a cause and effect relationship, and even more interesting how policies can be implemented that create constraints that continue to exist even though the reason the policy was instituted has vanished. For newspaper comic strips this seems to be the case. Over time beginning in the late 70’s, newspapers began to reduce the space available for comic strips. They slowly began to squeeze the comics into increasingly smaller and smaller amounts of space. The first step was to cut the daily comic’s section from two pages down to one and a half pages and then down to a single page. This had the effect of killing off many good comic strips by reducing the number of strips that a paper would continue to publish. Shortly there after, the individual “footprint”, available space on the page, of each remaining strip got the big squeeze and four panel strips pretty much were forced down to three panels. Additionally this print size reduction made it increasingly difficult for the cartoonists to maintain their desired level of visual detail in their work. The smaller the print reduction the less detail.
This policy shift toward marginalizing comic strips in newspapers caused two resulting effects. First, it greatly tightened the field of opportunity for cartoonists to draw comic strips, less space meant papers bought fewer strips so drawing a comic strip became less accessible as a career. Secondly, smaller “footprints” forced cartoonists to move toward simpler more graphically stylized cartoons with minimal layouts. There was less white space, so there had to be less visual information in each panel. The age of the “clip art” comic strip was born.
Then along came the Internet and a whole new distribution medium for the sequential comic strip was born. This made self publishing possible and created new opportunities for cartoonist to return to drawing comic strips. But as many of these new breed web cartoonists were born after 1980, they had grown up in the post “clip art” comic strip era. They had little knowledge of the art form before the “big squeeze”. So as they approached drawing comic strips they continued to work under the policies of the newspapers even though the Internet held none of those restrictions. They were constrained by policies that had no reason to exist in their new world. The numbers of panels per day, the size of the space for the artwork, all were no longer restricted by some arbitrary publisher and yet these constraints were translated to the web. The new cartoonist didn’t realize they were blindly following policies that had no basis. In many cases this trend still continues. The Internet offers tremendous creative freedom and opportunity for the sequential comic strip, and a chance to explore new visual styles and formats. As I said in the beginning, it is interesting how things follow a cause and effect relationship, and even more interesting how policies can be implemented that create constraints that continue to exist even though the reason the policy was instituted has vanished.
In this and future articles I will be discussing my own work in developing a comic strip for viewing on the internet.
