Half page (comic strip)
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Half page is a Sunday strip format for newspaper comic strips. Today, it is the largest and most complete format for most Sunday strips, including Peanuts, Prince Valiant, and Doonesbury. The half page Sunday strip was introduced in the nineteen-twenties, to fit two Sunday strips on a single page. Some strips, such as The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and Terry and the Pirates were introduced in this format. Other strips, such as Flash Gordon and Blondie had panels rearranged, cropped, or removed to make the full page fit in a smaller size. During World War II, paper rationing caused most newspapers to cut back on the number of pages devoted to Sunday comics and, rather than drop strips, they often reduced the size. Beginning about this time, the half page became the standard size, and the third was introduced, fitting three strips on each page, one above another. A half page typically had three tiers, the third page either reduced, rearranged and cropped these panels, as was the case with Li'l Abner or, more commonly, just dropped the top tier, as was the case with Peanuts. Most newspaper readers did not realize there were only seeing part of what the artist drew, and the artists were forced into increasingly restrictive formats to make dropping panels possible. Today, only the Reading Eagle and a few other newspapers run any of their Sunday strips in the complete, half-page format. The Sunday Calvin and Hobbes comic strip was so popular that the artist was able to insist that it run half page, over the objections of newspaper editors. That strip has since ended, and today the only strip that requires the half page format, thought not necessarily the half page size, is Opus.
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