See also Comic strip and Daily strip.

A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and virtually always in full color. It is contrasted with daily strip, where strips are published Monday through Saturday, usually in black and white. Many comic strips appear both daily and Sunday, in some cases, as with Little Orphan Annie, telling the same story daily and Sunday. In other cases, as with The Phantom and Flash Gordon, the Phantom still do and Flash Gordon did for most of its long run, tell different stories daily and Sunday. Some strips, such as Prince Valiant appear only on Sunday; others, such as Rip Kirby, are daily only, and have never appeared on Sunday.

Early strips

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Early Sunday strips usually filled a full newspaper page, but with time they have grown smaller and smaller, until today there are no Sunday strips that stand alone on a page, and some newspapers crowd as many as eight Sunday strips on a single page. The last full page Sunday strip was Prince Valiant, which was published as a full page in some newspapers until 1970. Shortly after the full page Prince Valiant was discontinued, Hal Foster retired from drawing the strip, though he continued to write it for several more years. Manuscript Press published a print of his last Prince Valiant strip in full-page format; this was the last full page comic strip, though it did not appear in that format in newspapers.

Other formats

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Other formats for Sunday strips include the half-page, the third of a page, the quarter page, the tabloid page or tab, and the half tab, short for half of a tabloid page. Today, with the ever shrinking size of Sunday strips, many other, smaller formats abound.

Usually, only the largest format is complete, with the other formats dropping or cropping one or more panels. Exceptions to this rule include Steve Canyon and, until its last few years, On Stage, which are complete only in the third format.

Currently, the largest and most complete format for most Sunday strips, such as Prince Valiant, is the half page. A few strips have been popular enough for the artist to insist on the Sunday strip being run in a half page format, though not necessarily in a half-page size. Calvin and Hobbes was the first strip to do this, followed by Outland and later Opus. The Asbury Park Press is one of the few newspapers that still run half-page Sunday strips.

Famous full-page Sunday strips include Prince Valiant, Bringing Up Father, Flash Gordon, Thimble Theater, Little Orphan Annie, Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Blondie, and Alley Oop. Many of these pages also included a topper.

During the 1950s, there were a few short-lived attempts to revive the full page Sunday strip, tet such examples as Lance and Frank Giacoia's Johnny Reb and Billy Yank proved artistic though not commercial successes.

Comics | Newspapering