This 1984 TV special Those Fantastic Funnies hosted by Loni Anderson is absolutely priceless to us at ImaSportsphile….cuz there is nothing more American than the funnies…..as along with sports, the comic strips are maybe the best of the complex culture and society known as the USA
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative….which is often serialized with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st….these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers….while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections….and with the development of the internet….they began to appear online as webcomics. There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in south korea 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 (for example, “gag-a-day” strips such as Blondie, Bringing Up Father, Marmaduke, and Pearls Before Swine with several of these being featured in this video herewith).
Starting in the late 1920s, comic strips expanded to feature adventure stories such 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 1940’s. All are called, generically, comic strips, though cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that “sequential art” would be a better genre-neutral name. In the UK and the rest of Europe, comic strips are also serialized in comic book magazines ….with a strip’s story sometimes continuing over three pages or more.
The longest running American comic strips are the Katzenjammer Kids 1909 – present – 109 yrs….Gasoline Alley (1918 – present)….Ripley’s Believe It or Not (1918 – present)….Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (1919 – present)….Little Orphan Annie (1924 – 2010 – 86 yrs)….Blondie (1930 – present)….as most newspaper comic strips are syndicated….which means a syndicate hires people to write and draw a strip and then distributes it to many newspapers for a fee. Some newspaper strips begin or remain exclusive to one newspaper….for example, the Pogo comic strip by Walt Kelly originally appeared only in the New York Star in 1948 and was not picked up for syndication until the following year.
Newspaper comic strips come in two different types….daily strips and Sunday strips…so in the United States….a daily strip appears in newspapers on weekdays, Monday through Saturday….as contrasted with a Sunday strip….which typically only appears on Sundays….with daily strips usually are printed in black and white….while Sunday strips are usually in color.
The beauty of this video is the historic perspective of Those Fabulous Funnies that is provided herewith….for it defines a genre of artistic comedic animation that has been an influential driving force which indicates the American way of life.
