Editing Comic strip (section)

===Size===

In the early decades of the 20th century, all [[Sunday comic]]s received a full page, and daily strips were generally the width of the page. The competition between papers for having more cartoons than the rest from the mid-1920s, the growth of large-scale newspaper advertising during most of the thirties, paper [[rationing]] during [[World War II]], the decline on news readership (as television newscasts began to be more common) and [[inflation]] (which has caused higher printing costs) beginning during the fifties and sixties led to Sunday strips being published on smaller and more diverse formats. As newspapers have reduced the page count of Sunday comic sections since the late 1990s (by the 2010s, most sections have only four pages, with the back page not always being destined for comics) has also led to further downsizes.

Daily strips have suffered as well. Before the mid-1910s, there was not a "standard" size", with strips running the entire width of a page or having more than one tier. By the 1920s, strips often covered six of the eight columns occupied by a traditional broadsheet paper. During the 1940s, strips were reduced to four columns wide (with a "transition" width of five columns). As newspapers became narrower beginning in the 1970s, strips have gotten even smaller, often being just three columns wide, a similar width to the one most daily panels occupied before the 1940s.

In an issue related to size limitations, Sunday comics are often bound to rigid [[Comic strip formats|formats]] that allow their panels to be rearranged in several different ways while remaining readable. Such formats usually include throwaway panels at the beginning, which some newspapers will omit for space. As a result, cartoonists have less incentive to put great efforts into these panels. ''[[Garfield]]'' and ''[[Mutts (comic strip)|Mutts]]'' were known during the mid-to-late 80s and 1990s respectively for their throwaways on their Sunday strips, however both strips now run "generic" title panels.

Some cartoonists have complained about this, with Walt Kelly, creator of ''[[Pogo (comic strip)|Pogo]],'' openly voicing his discontent about being forced to draw his Sunday strips in such rigid formats from the beginning. Kelly's heirs opted to end the strip in 1975 as a form of protest against the practice. Since then, ''[[Calvin and Hobbes]]'' creator [[Bill Watterson]] has written extensively on the issue, arguing that size reduction and dropped panels reduce both the potential and freedom of a cartoonist. After a lengthy battle with his syndicate, Watterson won the privilege of making half page-sized Sunday strips where he could arrange the panels any way he liked. Many newspaper publishers and a few cartoonists objected to this, and some papers continued to print ''Calvin and Hobbes'' at small sizes. [[Opus (comic strip)|''Opus'']] won that same privilege years after ''Calvin and Hobbes'' ended, while [[Wiley Miller]] circumvented further downsizes by making his ''[[Non Sequitur (comic strip)|Non Sequitur]]'' Sunday strip available only in a vertical arrangement. Most strips created since 1990, however, are drawn in the unbroken "third-page" format. Few newspapers still run half-page strips, as with ''[[Prince Valiant]]'' and ''[[Hägar the Horrible]]'' in the front page of the ''[[Reading Eagle]]'' Sunday comics section until the mid-2010s.