American comics developed out of such magazines as Puck, Judge, and Life….with the success of illustrated humor supplements in the New York World and later the New York American, particularly Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, led to the development of newspaper comic strips….as early Sunday strips were full-page and often in color.
A comic strip or The Funnies are a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative….which was often serialized with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st….the comic strips 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. 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 newspapers alone each day for most of the 20th century….with a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes.
The Funnies are written and drawn by a comics artist or cartoonist…..as the name implies….as comic strips can be humorous….with examples being “gag-a-day” strips such as Blondie, Beatle Bailey, Marmaduke, Peanuts, Hagar the Horrible, B C and so many more.
Starting in the late 1920’s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories….as seen in Popeye, Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, Prince Valiant and The Adventures of Tintin….when soap-opera continuity strips such as Judge Parker and Mary Worth gained popularity in the 1940’s. All are called, generically, comic strips or The Funnies.
In this video seen herewith, the lovely actress Loni Anderson hosts a television specials called Those Fabulous Funnies…..in which she covers the history of comic strips….along with insights into the cartoonists who created the most popular funnies ever to grace a newspaper…..plus the music that came out of The Funnies.….which is special and rare…..for we at ImaSportsphile are “tickled pink” to have this program in our treasure chest of vintage memories.
