Jimmy Johnson has some interesting thoughts on his blog this morning.
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Jimmy Johnson has some interesting thoughts on his blog this morning.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Back in the 90s, The Tacoma WA News Tribune ran the daily comics in color, just like Sunday. They still might, I haven’t got their daily paper in years…anyway, I was riding in a vanpool to and from work and I would kill time at the end of the day and read that paper while sitting and waiting in the van. One of the other riders thought I colored the comics during the day at work. Not many papers run them in color, but some do.
Thanksgiving 1976, the local newspaper — as a holiday special — published all the comics in color. I really have no idea how they worked that logistically: I can’t believe the syndicate offered them that option, and up to that point I had never seen a non-Sunday comic in color.
Watterson played with monochromatic issues a long time ago:
P.S. In the “10th Anniversary” collection, Watterson commented that the dialog in the final panel was based on an exchange he had with his syndicate on the subject of licensing rights.
P.P.S. Watterson also wrote that it was a “fun challenge” to draw the black and white images just using contrasting shapes, with no outlines at all.
San Francisco Chronicle runs comics in color all week. Since I read that occasionally (my parents get it, I don’t) and otherwise read online, I’m used to color now.
In a side note – the weekday and Sunday colorist(s) is/are not the same people, apparently – there have been continuity strips where the Sunday strip had the characters in different color clothes than they were wearing on Friday, in the middle of the same scene. Can’t tell in a gag strip, of course.
@ jjmcgaffey – I’ve seen evidence (both here and at GoComics) that the amateurish coloration for some daily strips has been performed with a “fill” tool (such as found in PC-Paint).
the weekday and Sunday colorist(s) is/are not the same people, apparently”
Or by the same people at really different times. Sunday strips have a deadline that is a couple of weeks earlier than the daily strips on either side of them. This is because a lot of papers didn’t want to invest in a color press, so they had the Sunday comics section printed somewhere else, in advance, and shipped to them for assembly into the final Sunday paper. This is why many continuity strips had non-continuity Sundays… keeping the continuity straight on two different schedules was a headache they didn’t want to take on.
The Houston Chronicle prints a little over half of their comics in color daily (they print two comics pages, one color and one B&W which is only about 70% comics) … well, some of the time. At least once a week, the color comics page is printed in B&W, but they do not print the B&W versions of those comics, they print the color versions in grayscale. What a mess of hard to read gray blobs. This is rather frustrating, especially when it happens 2-3 times a week.
More irritating is their Friday comics page. On Fridays, the comics are split up from the “Star” section (arts/entertainment/lifestyle stuff) they otherwise appear in, and placed on their own broadsheet (“Star” becomes a local-entertainment-oriented tabloid-style section). Due to this, they feel the need to chop two comics off of the color page to make room for a header at the top that says “comics”… *sigh*
“Not many papers run them in color, but some do.”
Really? I would have assumed nearly all do.
Hmm, actually I guess the San Jose Mercury still runs them in Black and White now that I think about it. I think the Monterey Herald and the Sacramento Bee run them in color but maybe I’m assuming they do. I did just assume it was the majority.
The Post-Dispatch has run some in color, some B&W for a long time.
In a side note – the weekday and Sunday colorist(s) is/are not the same people, apparently – there have been continuity strips where the Sunday strip had the characters in different color clothes than they were wearing on Friday, in the middle of the same scene.
That was really evident in Sally Forth years ago when Ted was coaching their Little League team. The uniform colors on Sundays were radically different than dailies. Here are some examples from 2006.
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/idn/cnfeed/zone/js/content.php?file=aHR0cDovL3NhZnIua2luZ2ZlYXR1cmVzLmNvbS9TYWxseUZvcnRoLzIwMDYvMDgvU2FsbHlfRm9ydGguMjAwNjA4MjFfOTAwLmdpZg==
https://safr.kingfeatures.com/idn/cnfeed/zone/js/content.php?file=aHR0cDovL3NhZnIua2luZ2ZlYXR1cmVzLmNvbS9TYWxseUZvcnRoLzIwMDYvMDgvU2FsbHlfRm9ydGhfbnRiLjIwMDYwODIwXzkwMC5naWY=
“Many continuity strips had non-continuity Sundays”
I always figured this was because there were people who bought weekday papers and not Sunday papers and vice versa. Which was often why Monday strips tended to recap what happened on Sunday.
Even if you get the newspaper every day, it may not be the same one on Sundays. In Pittsfield, MA, the Berkshire Eagle publishes only Monday through Saturday, so people tend to get the Albany Times-Union or the New York Sunday News on Sunday.
“I always figured this was because there were people who bought weekday papers and not Sunday papers and vice versa.”
The difference in deadline used to be about 4 weeks; I don’t know what it is now. The other big issue for continuity strips was that the cartoonist could never be sure that all the Sunday panels would get used by a particular paper. The standard layout for Sunday strips allowed them to be cut and spliced to fit a number of formats, with some of the formats omitting the first two panels or the second and third. Gag-a-day strips fixed this by putting two gags in the Sunday strip… one self-contained in the “throwaway” panels, and one in the rest. Now, most of them just seem to cut-and-paste in a big logo for the strip into those panels…. or maybe it was my imagination.
“The difference in deadline used to be about 4 weeks; I don’t know what it is now.”
Pretty sure the cartoonist can figure out the logistics.
“The other big issue for continuity strips was that the cartoonist could never be sure that all the Sunday panels would get used by a particular paper”
This is, at worst, pretty much the same as the “some people get the daily papers and not the Sunday papers” issue.
Watterson’s comment on the coordination issue was that in addition to the problem of readers with access only to dailies or only to Sundays, he was almost never far enough ahead on the daily strips to permit melding the two.
P.S. As a kid I used to enjoy reading “The Phantom“. Lee Falk had a simple solution: the daily and Sunday strips were completely independent, separate story lines.
There were a few Calvin and Hobbes arcs with Sunday continuity, but not many. One was when Hobbes was “lost” in the woods:
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/09/26
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/09/27
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/09/28
My dad explained to me that the Sunday comics have a different story line as not everyone who gets the daily paper gets the Sunday one and not every one who gets the Sunday paper gets the daily paper, so the story lines are separate or people would be confused with what was missing in the story line.
I know that the regional paper did not print a paper on Sundays until I was in junior high or maybe even high school, so if the story lines continued we would have been missing a sizeable part of it every week.