Ad Space in Sunday Comics
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32-page, full-color section with most of the comic strips occupying a full page.
But did you know that in the early days, there were never any advertisements in
those comic sections?
Eventually, however, the newspapers started
considering the Sunday color comic section to be a favorite feature of the
readers – like the sports section or the financial pages or the crossword
puzzle. And readership surveys began proving that more people read the Sunday
comics than just about any other section. So, after about 30 years, it finally
dawned on some astute advertising executive to place an ad for his product
there. Something along the lines of a Lionel train, or an erector set, or a BB
gun, or a Charles Atlas course to beef up spindly teenagers.
Throughout
the 1930s, the volume of advertising space increased as advertisers learned that
the comic pages were a good place to put their ads. But they didn’t increase
the size of their comic sections, so something had to give…and that something
was the size of the printed strip. So strips that had once been full pagers,
like Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, Tarzan, Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, and
Popeye (Thimble Theatre), started to be published in a half page format
or sometimes even in the dreaded third page format.
Printing a strip in
the one-third or (gasp) one-fourth page format involved dropping some panels to
make it fit properly.
When Hal Foster was doing Tarzan, for
example, in 1931-1937, the strip ran as a full page in the Sunday paper.
Sometime in the 1940s, however, most papers went to a half-page Tarzan,
and then later to a third-page Tarzan.
That’s why the comic
strips of the 1890s through the early 1930s are so beautiful to look at: the
comics were printed large and the artist had much more space to work
in.
And no ads interrupt your reading the entire section.
Here,
we have pictured several half-page and full-page strips with the ads included.
While oftentimes humorous and always entertaining, you can see how disruptive
they still are to the your reading of the actual comics!
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