Forced to strip naked comics

Strip Search: Directed by Sidney Lumet. With Austin Pendleton, Tom Guiry, Fred Koheler, Zack Manzella. Strip Search follows several parallel stories examining personal freedoms vs. national security in the aftermath of 9/11; two main subplots involve an American woman detained in China and an Arab man detained in New York City.

Strips are written and drawn by a comics artist, known as a

Every day in American newspapers, for most of the 20th century, there were at least 200 different comic strips and cartoon panels, which makes 73,000 per year.

While in the early 20th century comic strips were a frequent target for detractors of “yellow journalism”, by the 1920s the medium became wildly popular. While radio, and later, television surpassed newspapers as a means of entertainment, most comic strip characters were widely recognizable until the 1980s, and the “funny pages” were often arranged in a way they appeared at the front of Sunday editions. In 1931, George Gallup’s first poll had the comic section as the most important part of the newspaper, with additional surveys pointing out that the comic strips were the second most popular feature after the picture page. During the 1930s, many comic sections had between 12 and 16 pages, although in some cases, these had up to 24 pages.

The two conventional formats for newspaper comics are strips and single gag panels. The strips are usually displayed horizontally, wider than they are tall. Single panels are square, circular or taller than they are wide. Strips usually, but not always, are broken up into several smaller panels with continuity from panel to panel. A horizontal strip can also be used for a single panel with a single gag, as seen occasionally in

Proof sheets were the means by which syndicates provided newspapers with black-and-white line art for the reproduction of strips (which they arranged to have colored in the case of Sunday strips).

Sunday newspapers traditionally included a special color section. Early Sunday strips (known colloquially as “the funny papers”, shortened to “the funnies”), such as

The history of comic strips also includes series that are not humorous, but tell an ongoing

The comics have long held a distorted mirror to contemporary society, and almost from the beginning have been used for political or social commentary. This ranged from the conservative slant of Harold Gray’s

Today’s strip artists, with the help of the NCS, enthusiastically promote the medium, which since the 1970s (and particularly the 1990s) has been considered to be in decline due to numerous factors such as changing tastes in humor and entertainment, the waning relevance of newspapers in general and the loss of most foreign markets outside English-speaking countries. One particularly humorous example of such promotional efforts is the

While the 1997 Switcheroonie was a one-time publicity stunt, an artist taking over a feature from its originator is an old tradition in newspaper cartooning (as it is in the comic book industry). In fact, the practice has made possible the longevity of the genre’s more popular strips. Examples include