HONEY, THEY SHRUNK THE COMICS!

Comic strips in newspapers have been shrinking, often unobtrusively, for years. Before World War II, comic strips in some newspapers were published at gigantic size: some ran across the entire page, side to side. Even in a smaller incarnation—say, five columns wide—strips measured 10 inches from beginning to end. Then came WWII.

In a patriotic ploy to support the war effort, newspapers strained to save newsprint, which was used in the manufacture of munitions. Strips were abbreviated by cropping off the bottom inch or so of artwork. You can find evidence of this maneuver on the original art from the period. Syndicate copyright lines were frequently affixed in two positions: across the very bottom of the artwork, and then again 1-1 3/4 inches higher up, where it would still be visible in print after some newspapers clipped off the bottom portion of the artwork. And the width of strips was reduced, too.

Most cartoonists assumed that their strips would revert to the pre-war size once the hostilities ceased. Alas, no. Having finagled the smaller dimension for patriotic purposes, editors retained it after the war for journalistic reasons: the less space they had to devote to comic strips, the more space they’d have to practice journalism. By 1955, strips that were 10 inches wide in 1940 were only 7 inches wide.

Then an insidious shrinkage set in. Over the years. The width of a newspaper page was reduced by fractions of an inch at a time. Today’s newspaper page is much narrower than yesterday’s newspaper page. So even comic strips that are printed half-a-page wide actually appear at a smaller size than before. And the struggle goes on apace.

At the Washington Post recently, Michael Cavna, whose blog ComicRiffs ponders newspaper comics on a regular basis, confronted the current state of affairs when the Post consolidated its funnies from three to two pages, resulting in over-all shrinkage. Said Cavna: “This reduction is widely perceived by editors to be a necessary evil, the cost of doing business now.” He goes on to acknowledge that by shrinking the funnies, newspaper editors are shooting themselves in their various feet: demographically, newspaper readers tend to be older, and their eyesight ain’t what it used to be. When they can’t see small strips to read them, they give up following the funnies.

“In other words,” Cavna acknowledged, “one kind of shrinkage begets another.” He even reports that one reader wrote in to say: “My wife's given up reading the comics in her 40s because you print them too small."

One of the reasons that Peanuts and Beetle Bailey succeeded so spectacularly in the 1950s (and thereafter) is that they are more simply drawn than, say, Steve Canyon or Judge Parker. Newspaper editors, looking for legibility in the new reduced post-war size of their comics pages, opted for simply drawn strips because they were still readable at the smaller dimension. A vicious cycle soon swung into place. As simply drawn humorous comic strips displaced the more illustrative strips like Terry and the Pirates and Steve Roper, newspaper editors realized they could reduce the size of comic strips even more because they were drawn simply enough to tolerate the reduction. And the smaller the comic strips were printed, the greater the demand for strips drawn simply enough to be published at diminutive size, a size that now approaches that of postage stamps.