Comic strip
A
comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these were published in newspapers, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in American newspapers alone each day for most of the 20th century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes. Strips are written and drawn by a comics artist or cartoonist. As the name implies, comic strips can be humorous. Starting in the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in
Popeye,
Captain Easy,
Buck Rogers,
Tarzan, and
The Adventures of Tintin. Soap-opera continuity strips such as
Judge Parker and
Mary Worth gained popularity in the 1940s. All are called, generically, comic strips, though cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that "sequential art" would be a better name.