Newspaper Comics

Before the Internet and Web Comics, 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 40 years and Garfield has been coming out for over 30 years. Neither show any signs of stopping. Even more impressively, Blondie has run for well over 75 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 Web Comics 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.

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 Fan Service, 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. 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.

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. Web Comics 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:
- tropes inspired by newspaper comics
 * Born in the Funny Papers
 * Military and Warfare Comics


 * Nine Chickweed Lane
 * The Adventures of Jeremiah
 * Alex
 * Alley Oop
 * Andy Capp
 * Arnold
 * Baby Blues
 * Baldo
 * Barnaby
 * Barney and Clyde
 * BC
 * Beau Peep
 * Beetle Bailey
 * Between the Lines
 * Bizarro
 * Blondie
 * Bloom County
 * The Boondocks
 * Brewster Rockit Space Guy
 * Bringing Up Father
 * Buckles
 * Buck Rogers
 * Bus Stop
 * Calvin and Hobbes
 * Candorville
 * Carl Giles
 * Cathy
 * Chelsea Boys
 * Crankshaft
 * Cul De Sac
 * The Cursing Hedgehog
 * Curtis
 * Deflocked
 * Dennis the Menace US
 * Dick Tracy
 * Dilbert
 * Doonesbury
 * Dykes to Watch Out For
 * The Family Circus
 * The Family Upstairs
 * The Far Side
 * Flash Gordon
 * Fleep
 * Footrot Flats
 * For Better or For Worse
 * FoxTrot
 * Frank and Ernest
 * Frazz
 * Funky Winkerbean
 * Gallos Humor
 * Garfield
 * Gasoline Alley
 * Get Fuzzy
 * Hagar the Horrible
 * Heart of the City
 * Heathcliff
 * Hi and Lois
 * If...
 * Ink Pen
 * Jommeke
 * Judge Parker
 * Jump Start
 * Jungle Jim
 * The Katzenjammer Kids
 * De Kiekeboes
 * Krazy Kat
 * Kudzu
 * Liberty Meadows
 * Life in Hell
 * Lil Abner
 * Lio
 * Little Lulu
 * Little Nemo
 * Little Orphan Annie
 * The Lockhorns
 * Love Is
 * Luann
 * Mafalda, see also Quino
 * Mallard Fillmore
 * Mandrake the Magician
 * Mark Trail
 * Marmaduke
 * Marvin
 * Mary Worth
 * Minimum Security
 * Modesty Blaise
 * Mother Goose and Grimm
 * Mutts
 * My Cage
 * Nero
 * Nemi
 * Non Sequitur
 * Off the Mark
 * One Big Happy
 * On the Fastrack
 * The Optimist
 * The Outbursts of Everett True
 * Over the Hedge
 * Peanuts
 * Pearls Before Swine
 * The Perishers
 * The Perry Bible Fellowship
 * The Phantom
 * Piet Pienter En Bert Bibber
 * Pluggers
 * Pogo
 * Pondus
 * Pooch Cafe
 * Popeye
 * Prickly City
 * Prince Valiant
 * PVT Murphy's Law
 * Quino
 * Rasmus Klump
 * Retail
 * Rex Morgan MD
 * Rip Haywire (Webcomic parody of a newspaper comic strip.)
 * Rip Kirby
 * Robotman and Monty
 * Rose Is Rose
 * Rupert Bear
 * Safe Havens
 * Sally Forth Howard
 * Sally Forth Wood
 * Sams Strip
 * Scamp
 * Shermans Lagoon
 * Shoe
 * Slylock Fox
 * Snuffy Smith
 * Sovisa
 * Spider-Man
 * Stone Soup
 * Suske en Wiske
 * Terry and the Pirates
 * This Modern World
 * Tom the Dancing Bug
 * Tom Poes
 * US Acres
 * Urbanus
 * Wash Tubbs
 * What's New with Phil and Dixie
 * What the Duck
 * The Wizard of Id
 * The World of Lily Wong
 * Yenny
 * Ziggy
 * Zippy the Pinhead
 * Zits