Jane was a comic strip created and drawn by Norman Pett exclusively for the British tabloid newspaper The Daily Mirror from 5 December 1932 to 10 October 1959.^[1]

Characters and story[link]

Originally entitled Jane's Journal, Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, the salacious comic strip featured the misadventures of the title ingenue. The heroine had a habit of frequently (and most often inadvertently) losing her clothes. Her intimate confidant was a pet dachshund named Fritz. Her full name was Jane Gay, a play on the name Lady Jane Grey. The name "Gay" was a reference to her cheerful, fun-loving character and did not connote the modern homosexual implication.

The original model was Pett's wife Mary, but the comic strip became more successful when he began to use Chrystabel Leighton-Porter as the model. The strip became very popular during the Second World War and was considered morale-boosting, inspiring a similar American version, Milton Caniff's comic strip Male Call. Until 1943, Jane rarely stripped to more than her undergarments, but then she made a fully nude appearance when getting out of a bath and clumsily falling into the middle of a crowd of British soldiers.^[2]

Norman Pett's assistant Michael Hubbard continued beginning 1948 developing the cartoons' original version storyline until ending in 1959 - with charmer Georgie giving Jane a happy marriage and ending the series. The Mirror tried to revive the character on several occasions. One such comic strip was Jane, Daughter of Jane, who was apparently the original's grown-up offspring, but she lacked her mother's charm and innocence. Another attempt was made during the 1980s.

Jane visits America[link]

During 1945, King Features Syndicate attempted to distribute Jane in the United States.^[3] However, the nudity was too much for prudish American audiences, and the attempt ceased during 1946.^[4]

Other comics in the tradition of, and possibly inspired by, Jane include Male Call, Sally the Sleuth and Little Annie Fanny.^[5]

Adaptations[link]

The strip inspired an eponymous stage play during the 1940s. Chrystabel Leighton-Porter, Pett's original model, featured in a 1949 movie, The Adventures of Jane, directed by Edward G. Whiting. A 1987 movie Jane and the Lost City was directed by Terry Marcel.

A television series was made by the BBC between 1982 and 1984, featuring Glynis Barber in the title role. The first season was titled simply Jane, while the second was titled Jane in the Desert. Despite the early evening scheduling slot, the show was decidedly risque with Jane continuously stripping down to her underwear, including stockings and suspenders. At the end of the second series' closing episode she appeared topless momentarily. Despite considerable publicity in the press at the time of its original screening, the show became somewhat obscure and has never had a commercial video or DVD release. The show was briefly revived during 1985 as a three-part sequence shown over a single morning on Breakfast Television but without Glynis Barber in the main role.

Further reading[link]

• Jane: A Pin-Up at War by Andy Saunders. Leo Cooper Ltd., Barnsley, 2005. ISBN 1-84415-292-8)
• "Jane's Journal" by Norman Pett. Published by Rylee Ltd., London.
• "Another Jane's Journal". By Pett. Published by Thomas's Publications Ltd.,Birmingham.
• "Another Journal" By Pett. Published by Rylee Ltd., London.
• "Jane Souvenir"
• The Misadventures of Jane by Norman Pett and J.H.G. ("Don") Freeman. Titan, 2009. Reprints 531 daily strips from October 1943 to June 1945.

References[link]

External links[link]

• The Adventures of Jane(1949) at the Internet Movie Database
• Jane (1982) at the Internet Movie Database
• Jane and the Lost City (1987) at the Internet Movie Database
• Racy Cartoons of the World War II Years: "Jane"
• An interview with the editor of the 2009 "Misadventures of Jane" collection David Leach

Jane may refer to:

• Jane (given name)
• Jane (surname)

Music[link]

• Jane (German band)
• Jane (American band)
• Jane (album), an album by Jane McDonald
• "Jane" (Barenaked Ladies song)
• "Jane", a song by Ben Folds Five from their 1999 album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner
• "Jane", a song by Brooks Williams
• "Jane", a song by Catie Curtis
• "Jane", a song by Elf Power
• "Jane", a song by EPMD from Strictly Business
• "Jane", a song by Jefferson Starship from Freedom at Point Zero
• "Jane", a song by the Loved Ones from Keep Your Heart
• "(Her Name Was) Jane", a song by The Pagans
• "Jane", a song by Sam Rosenthal
• "Jane", a song by Vance Gilbert
• "Jane (Stop This Crazy Thing!)" a song by MC Shan
• "(The Diary of) Jane" a song by Breaking Benjamin
• "Jane", a song by Raffi about Jane Goodall

Print media[link]

• Jane (magazine)
• Jane (comic strip)
• Jane (play), a play by S.N. Behrman, based on Maugham short story
• Jane (novel), a 1900 novel by Marie Corelli
• "Jane" (novel), a novel by April Linder

Organizations[link]

• Jane Collective, an abortion provider c. 1970
• Jane's Information Group or Jane's, a publisher
• Jane, a part of Estée Lauder Companies

Fictional characters[link]

• Jane Porter (Tarzan), later Jane Clayton, wife of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (Tarzan) in the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Jane (Ender's Game), a character in Orson Scott Card's Ender Saga
• Jane, in Jane and the Dragon franchise
• Jane, any of 3 in The P.L.A.I.N. Janes, 2007 comic & sequels, by Cecil Castellucci
• Jane, the eldest Bennet sister from Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice
• Jane, a vampire from the Volturi clan in the Twilight series, portrayed by Dakota Fanning in the films
• Jane, a character in The Catcher in the Rye, one of the few girls whom Holden both respects and finds attractive.
• Jane Vaughn in Degrassi: The Next Generation

Ships[link]

• Jane (ship), a ship that disappeared in 1816
• USS Jane II (SP-1188), a United States Navy patrol boat in commission from 1917 to 1918

Other uses[link]

• Jane (dinosaur), juvenile specimen
• Jane Street, in Toronto
• Jane (TTC), a Toronto subway station

See also[link]

• Janes (disambiguation)
• "Jane Jane", a song by Golden Earring from their 1986 album The Hole
• "Jane, Jane, Jane", a song by The Kingston Trio
• All pages beginning with "Jane"
• Jain (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (January 2012)

Comic strip

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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.^[1]

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).

Starting in the early 1930s, 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.^[2]

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. Comic strips have appeared in American magazines such as Liberty and Boys' Life and also on the front covers of magazines, such as the Flossy Frills series on The American Weekly Sunday newspaper supplement.

History[link]

Storytelling using a sequence of pictures has existed through history. One medieval European example in textile form is the Bayeux Tapestry. Printed examples emerged in 19th-century Germany and in 18th-century England, where some of the first satirical or humorous sequential narrative drawings were produced. William Hogarth's 18th century English cartoons include both narrative sequences, such as A Rake's Progress, and single panels.

The Biblia pauperum ("Paupers' Bible"), a tradition of picture Bibles beginning in the later Middle Ages, sometimes depicted Biblical events with words spoken by the figures in the miniatures written on scrolls coming out of their mouths—which makes them to some extent ancestors of the modern cartoon strips.

In China, with its traditions of block printing and of the incorporation of text with image, experiments with what became lianhuanhua date back to 1884.^[3]

Newspapers[link]

The first newspaper comic strips appeared in North America in the late 19th century.^[4] The Yellow Kid is usually credited as the first. However, the art form combining words and pictures evolved gradually, and there are many examples of proto-comic strips.

The Swiss teacher, author and caricature artist Rodolphe Töpffer (Geneva, 1799–1846) is considered the father of the modern comic strips. His illustrated stories such as Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1827), first published in the USA in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck or Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (1831), inspired subsequent generations of German and American comic artists. In 1865, the German painter, author and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created the strip Max and Moritz, about two trouble-making boys, which had a direct influence on the American comic strip. Max and Moritz was a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children's stories such as Struwwelpeter ("Shockheaded Peter"); in one, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill and consumed by a flock of geese. Max and Moritz provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids in 1897. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, sawing logs for snoring, speech balloons and thought balloons originated in Dirks' strip.^[5]

Hugely popular, Katzenjammer Kids occasioned one of the first comic-strip copyright ownership suits in the history of the medium. When Dirks left William Randolph Hearst for the promise of a better salary under Joseph Pulitzer, it was an unusual move, since cartoonists regularly deserted Pulitzer for Hearst. In a highly unusual court decision, Hearst retained the rights to the name "Katzenjammer Kids", while creator Dirks retained the rights to the characters. Hearst promptly hired Harold Knerr to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks renamed his version Hans and Fritz (later, The Captain and the Kids). Thus, two versions distributed by rival syndicates graced the comics pages for decades. Dirks' version, eventually distributed by United Feature Syndicate, ran until 1979.

In America, the great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war (1887 onwards) between Pulitzer and Hearst. The Little Bears (1893–96) was the first American comic with recurring characters, while the first color comic supplement was published by the Chicago Inter-Ocean sometime in the latter half of 1892, followed by the New York Journal's first color Sunday comic pages in 1897. On January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first full daily comic page in his New York Evening Journal.^[6] The history of this newspaper rivalry and the raid appearance of comic strips in most major American newspapers is discussed by Ian Gordon.^[7]

The longest running American comic strips are:

• 1. Katzenjammer Kids (1897-present)
• 2. Gasoline Alley (1918-present)
• 3. Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (1919-present)
• 4. Thimble Theater/Popeye (1919-present)
• 5. Little Orphan Annie (1924-2010)^[8]

Newspaper comic strips come in two different types: daily strips and Sunday strips. Most newspaper comic strips are syndicated; a syndicate hires people to write and draw a strip and then distributes it to many newspapers for a fee. A few newspaper strips are 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.^[9]

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. Daily strips usually are printed in black and white, and Sunday strips are usually in color. However, a few newspapers have published daily strips in color, and some newspapers have published Sunday strips in black and white. The two conventional formats for newspaper comics are strips and single gag panels. The strips are usually displayed horizontally, wider than they are tall. Single panels are square, circular or taller than they are wide. Strips usually, but not always, are broken up into several smaller panels with continuity from panel to panel. A horizontal strip can also be used for a single panel with a single gag, as seen occasionally in Mike Peters' Mother Goose and Grimm.

During the 1930s, the original art for a daily strip could be drawn as large as 25 inches wide by six inches high.^[10] As strips have become smaller, the number of panels have been reduced.

The popularity and accessibility of strips meant they were often clipped and saved; authors including John Updike and Ray Bradbury have written about their childhood collections of clipped strips. Often posted on bulletin boards, clipped strips had an ancillary form of distribution when they were faxed, photocopied or mailed. The Baltimore Sun's Linda White recalled, "I followed the adventures of Winnie Winkle, Moon Mullins and Dondi, and waited each fall to see how Lucy would manage to trick Charlie Brown into trying to kick that football. (After I left for college, my father would clip out that strip each year and send it to me just to make sure I didn’t miss it.)"^[11]

Proof sheets were the means by which syndicates provided newspapers with black-and-white line art for the reproduction of strips (which they arranged to have colored in the case of Sunday strips). Michigan State University Comic Art Collection librarian Randy Scott describes these as "large sheets of paper on which newspaper comics have traditionally been distributed to subscribing newspapers. Typically each sheet will have either six daily strips of a given title or one Sunday strip. Thus, a week of Beetle Bailey would arrive at the Lansing State Journal in two sheets, printed much larger than the final version and ready to be cut apart and fitted into the local comics page."^[12] Comic strip historian Allan Holtz described how strips were provided as mats (the plastic or cardboard trays in which molten metal is poured to make plates) or even plates ready to be put directly on the printing press. He also notes that with electronic means of distribution becoming more prevalent printed sheets "are definitely on their way out."^[13][14]

Cartoon panels[link]

Single panels usually, but not always, are not broken up and lack continuity. The daily Peanuts is a strip, and the daily Dennis the Menace is a single panel. J. R. Williams' long-run Out Our Way continued as a daily panel even after it expanded into a Sunday strip, Out Our Way with the Willets. Jimmy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time was often displayed in a two-panel format with the first panel showing some deceptive, pretentious, unwitting or scheming human behavior and the second panel revealing the truth of the situation.^[5]

Early daily strips were large, often running the entire width of the newspaper, and were sometimes three or more inches high.^[15] Initially, a newspaper page included only a single daily strip, usually either at the top or the bottom of the page. By the 1920s, many newspapers had a comics page on which many strips were collected together. Over decades, the size of daily strips became smaller and smaller, until by the year 2000, four standard daily strips could fit in an area once occupied by a single daily strip.^[15]

NEA Syndicate experimented briefly with a two-tier daily strip, Star Hawks, but after a few years, Star Hawks dropped down to a single tier.^[5]

In Flanders, the two-tier strip is the standard publication style of most daily strips like Spike and Suzy and Nero.^[16] They appear Monday through Saturday; until 2003 there were no Sunday papers in Flanders.^[17] In the last decades, they have switched from black and white to color.

Sunday comics[link]

Sunday newspapers traditionally included a special color section. Early Sunday strips, such as Thimble Theatre and Little Orphan Annie, filled an entire newspaper page, a format known to collectors as full page. Sunday pages during the 1930s and into the 1940s often carried a secondary strip by the same artist as the main strip. No matter whether it appeared above or below a main strip, the extra strip was known as the topper, such as The Squirrel Cage which ran along with Room and Board, both drawn by Gene Ahern.

During the 1930s, the original art for a Sunday strip was usually drawn quite large. For example, in 1930, Russ Westover drew his Tillie the Toiler Sunday page at a size of 17" × 37".^[18] In 1937, the cartoonist Dudley Fisher launched the innovative Right Around Home, drawn as a huge single panel filling an entire Sunday page.

Full-page strips were eventually replaced by strips half that size. Strips such as The Phantom and Terry and the Pirates began appearing in a format of two strips to a page in full-size newspapers, such as the New Orleans Times Picayune, or with one strip on a tabloid page, as in the Chicago Daily News. When Sunday strips began to appear in more than one format, it became necessary for the cartoonist to allow for rearranged, cropped or dropped panels. During World War II, because of paper shortages, the size of Sunday strips began to shrink. After the war, strips continued to get smaller and smaller because of increased paper and printing costs. The last full-page comic strip was the Prince Valiant strip for 11 April 1971.

Comic strips have also been published in Sunday newspaper magazines. Russell Patterson and Carolyn Wells' New Adventures of Flossy Frills was a continuing strip series seen on Sunday magazine covers. Beginning January 26, 1941, it ran on the front covers of Hearst's American Weekly newspaper magazine supplement, continuing until March 30 of that year. Between 1939 and 1943, four different stories featuring Flossy appeared on American Weekly covers.

Sunday comics sections employed offset color printing with multiple print runs imitating a wide range of colors. Printing plates were created with four or more colors—traditionally, the CMYK color model: cyan, magenta, yellow and "K" for black. With a screen of tiny dots on each printing plate, the dots allowed an image to be printed in a halftone that appears to the eye in different gradations. The semi-opaque property of ink allows halftone dots of different colors to create an optical effect of full-color imagery.^[19][20]

Underground comic strips[link]

The decade of the 1960s saw the rise of underground newspapers, which often carried comic strips, such as Fritz the Cat and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Zippy the Pinhead initially appeared in underground publications in the 1970s before being syndicated.^[21] Bloom County and Doonesbury began as strips in college newspapers under different titles, and later moved to national syndication. Underground comic strips covered subjects that are usually taboo in newspaper strips, such as sex and drugs. Many underground artists, notably Vaughn Bode, Dan O'Neill, Gilbert Shelton and Art Spiegelman went on to draw comic strips for magazines such as Playboy, National Lampoon and Pete Millar's CARtoons. Jay Lynch graduated from undergrounds to alternative weekly newspapers to Mad and children's books.

Webcomic[link]

Webcomics, also known as online comics and internet comics, are comics that are available to read on the Internet. Many are exclusively published online, while some are published in print but maintain a web archive for either commercial or artistic reasons. Two of the most popular are Penny Arcade, focused primarily on video gaming, and User Friendly, which bases its humor on the Internet and other computer-user issues. The majority of traditional newspaper comic strips have some Internet presence. King Features Syndicate and other syndicates often provide archives of recent strips on their websites. Some, such as Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, include an email address in each strip.

Conventions and genres[link]

Most comic strip characters do not age throughout the strip's life, but in some strips, like Lynn Johnston's award-winning For Better or For Worse, the characters age as the years pass. The first strip to feature aging characters was Gasoline Alley.

The history of comic strips also includes series that are not humorous, but tell an ongoing dramatic story. Examples include The Phantom, Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Mary Worth, Modesty Blaise and Tarzan. Sometimes these are spin-offs from comic books, for example Superman, Batman and The Amazing Spider-Man.

A number of strips have featured animals ('funny animals') as main characters. Some are non-verbal (Marmaduke, The Angriest Dog in the World), some have verbal thoughts but are not understood by humans, (Garfield, Snoopy in Peanuts), and some can converse with humans (Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, Mutts, Citizen Dog, Buckles, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine and Pooch Cafe). Other strips are centered entirely on animals, as in Pogo and Donald Duck. Gary Larson's The Far Side was unusual, as there were no central characters. Instead The Far Side used a wide variety of characters including humans, monsters, aliens, chickens, cows, worms, amoebas and more. John McPherson's Close to Home also uses this theme, though the characters are mostly restricted to humans and real-life situations. Wiley Miller not only mixes human, animal and fantasy characters, he does several different comic strip continuities under one umbrella title, Non Sequitur. Bob Thaves's Frank & Ernest began in 1972 and paved the way for some of these strips as its human characters were manifest in diverse forms — as animals, vegetables, and minerals.^[5]

Social and political influence[link]

The comics have long held a distorted mirror to contemporary society, and almost from the beginning have been used for political or social commentary. This ranged from the conservative slant of Little Orphan Annie to the unabashed liberalism of Doonesbury. Pogo used animals to particularly devastating effect, caricaturing many prominent politicians of the day as animal denizens of Pogo's Okeefenokee Swamp. In a fearless move, Pogo's creator Walt Kelly took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, caricaturing him as a bobcat named Simple J. Malarkey, a megalomaniac who was bent on taking over the characters' birdwatching club and rooting out all undesirables. Kelly also defended the medium against possible government regulation in the McCarthy era. At a time when comic books were coming under fire for supposed sexual, violent and subversive content, Kelly feared the same would happen to comic strips. Going before the Congressional subcommittee, he proceeded to charm the members with his drawings and the force of his personality. The comic strip was safe for satire.

During the early 20th century, comic strips were widely associated with publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose papers had the largest circulation of strips in the United States. Hearst was notorious for his practice of yellow journalism, and he was frowned on by readers of The New York Times and other newspapers which featured few or no comic strips. Hearst's critics often assumed that all the strips in his papers were fronts for his own political and social views. Hearst did occasionally work with or pitch ideas to cartoonists, most notably his continued support of George Herriman's Krazy Kat. An inspiration for Bill Watterson and other cartoonists, Krazy Kat gained a considerable following among intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s.

Some comic strips, such as Doonesbury and The Boondocks, may be printed on the editorial or op-ed page rather than the comics page because of their regular political commentary. For example, the August 12, 1974 Doonesbury strip awarded a 1975 Pulitzer Prize for its depiction of the Watergate scandal. Dilbert is sometimes found in the business section of a newspaper instead of the comics page because of the strip's commentary about office politics, and Tank McNamara often appears on the sports page because of its subject matter.

Publicity and recognition[link]

The world's longest comic strip is 88.9-metre (292 ft) long and on display at Trafalgar Square as part of the London Comedy Festival.^{[citation needed]} The London Cartoon Strip was created by 15 of Britain's best known cartoonists and depicts the history of London.

The Reuben, named for cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is the most prestigious award for U.S. comic strip artists. Reuben awards are presented annually by the National Cartoonists Society (NCS).

Today's strip artists, with the help of the NCS, enthusiastically promote the medium, which is considered to be in decline due to fewer markets (today few strips are published in newspapers outside the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, mainly because of the smaller interest there, with translated versions of popular strips - particularly in Spanish - are primarily read over the internet) and ever-shrinking newspaper space. One particularly humorous example of such promotional efforts is the Great Comic Strip Switcheroonie, held in 1997 on April Fool's Day, an event in which dozens of prominent artists took over each other's strips. Garfield’s Jim Davis, for example, switched with Blondie’s Stan Drake, while Scott Adams (Dilbert) traded strips with Bil Keane (The Family Circus). Even the United States Postal Service got into the act, issuing a series of commemorative stamps marking the comic-strip centennial in 1996.

While the Switcheroonie was a one-time publicity stunt, for one artist to take over a feature from its originator is an old tradition in newspaper cartooning (as it is in the comic book industry). In fact, the practice has made possible the longevity of the genre's more popular strips. Examples include Little Orphan Annie (drawn and plotted by Harold Gray from 1924 to 1944 and thereafter by a succession of artists including Leonard Starr and Andrew Pepoy), and Terry and The Pirates, started by Milton Caniff in 1934 and picked up by George Wunder.

A business-driven variation has sometimes led to the same feature continuing under a different name. In one case, in the early 1940s, Don Flowers' Modest Maidens was so admired by William Randolph Hearst that he lured Flowers away from the Associated Press and to King Features Syndicate by doubling the cartoonist's salary, and renamed the feature Glamor Girls to avoid legal action by the AP. The latter continued to publish Modest Maidens, drawn by Jay Allen in Flowers' style.^[5]

Issues in U.S. newspaper comic strips[link]

As newspapers change, the changes have affected comic strips.

Size[link]

In the early decades of the 20th century, all Sunday comics received a full page, and daily strips were generally the width of the page. The competence between papers for having more cartoons than the rest from the mid-1920's, the growth of large-scale newspaper advertising during most of the thirties, paper rationing during World War II, the decline on news readership (as television newscasts began to be more common) and inflation (which has caused higher printing costs) beginning during the fifties and sixties made Sunday strips being published on smaller and more diverse formats. Daily strips have suffered as well, in 1910 the strips had an unlimited amount of panels, covering the entire width page, while by 1930 most "dailies" had four or five panels covering six of the eight columns occupied by a traditional broadsheet paper, by 1958 those four panels would be narrower, and those would have half of the space a 1910 daily strip had, and around 1998 most strips would have three panels only (with a few exceptions), or even two or one on an occasional basis, apart from strips being smaller, as most papers became slightly narrower. While most cartoonist decided to follow the tide, some cartoonists have complained about this, with Pogo ending in 1975 as a form of protest from its creators against the practice. Since then Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson has written extensively on the issue, arguing that size reduction and dropped panels reduce both the potential and freedom of a cartoonist. After a lengthy battle with his syndicator, Watterson won the privilege of making half page-sized Sunday strips where he could arrange the panels any way he liked. Many newspaper publishers and a few cartoonists objected to this, and some papers continued to print Calvin and Hobbes at small sizes. Opus won that same privilege years after Calvin and Hobbes ended, while Wiley Miller circumvented further downsizings by making his Non Sequitur Sunday strip available only in an extremely vertical (near-page-long) arrangement. Few newspapers still run half-page strips, as with Prince Valiant and Hagar the Horrible in the front page of the Reading Eagle Sunday comics section. Actually Universal Uclick and United Media practically have no half-page comics, with the remaining strips from both syndicates in this format are published only as "thirds", "fourths" and "sixths" (also called "third tabs").

Format[link]

In an issue related to size limitations, Sunday comics are often bound to rigid formats that allow their panels to be rearranged in several different ways while remaining readable. Such formats usually include throwaway panels at the beginning, which some newspapers will omit for space. As a result, cartoonists have less incentive to put great efforts into these panels. Garfield and Mutts were known during the mid-to-late 80's and 1990's respectively for their throwaways on their Sunday strips, however both strips now run "generic" title panels.

With the success of The Gumps during the 1920s, it became commonplace for strips (comedy- and adventure-laden alike) to have lengthy stories spanning weeks or months. The "Monarch of Medioka" story in Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse comic strip ran from September 8, 1937 to May 2, 1938. Between the 1960s and the late 1980s, as television news relegated newspaper reading to an occasional basis rather than daily, syndicators were abandoning long stories and urging cartoonists to switch to simple daily gags, or week-long "storylines" (with six consecutive (mostly unrelated) strips following a same subject), with longer storylines being used mainly on adventure-based and dramatic strips. Strips begun during the mid-1980s or after (such as Get Fuzzy, Over the Hedge, Monty, and others) are known for their heavy use of storylines, lasting between one and three weeks in most cases.

The writing style of comic strips changed as well after the war. With an increase in the number of college-educated readers, there was a shift away from slapstick comedy and towards more cerebral humor. Slapstick and visual gags became more confined to Sunday strips, because as Garfield creator Jim Davis put it, "Children are more likely to read Sunday strips than dailies."

Second author[link]

Many older strips are no longer drawn by the original cartoonist, who has either died or retired. Such strips are known as "zombie strips". A cartoonist, paid by the syndicate, or sometimes a relative of the original cartoonist continues writing the strip, a tradition that became commonplace in the early half of the 20th century. Hägar the Horrible and Frank and Ernest are both drawn by the sons of the creators. Some strips which are still in affiliation with the original creator are produced by small teams or entire companies, such as Jim Davis' Garfield, however there is some debate if these strips fall in this category.

This act is commonly criticized by, primarily modern, cartoonists including Watterson and Pearls Before Swine's Stephan Pastis. The issue was in fact addressed in six consecutive Pearls strips in 2005.^[23] Charles Schulz, of Peanuts fame, requested that his strip not be continued by another cartoonist after his death. He also rejected the idea of hiring an inker or letterer, comparing it to a golfer hiring a man to make his putts. Schulz's family has honored his wishes and refused numerous proposals by syndicators to continue Peanuts with a new author.

The problems cited with attaining a second cartoonist state that the second cartoonist is generally less funny or compelling than the creator, and that the new cartoonist does not have the same style of writing or understand the characters as well. Also, some claim that continuing such strips, while a part of American folklore, stops newer cartoonists from breaking through. Most ended strips now run on newspapers as reruns, most notably Peanuts and Lynn Johnston's For Better or for Worse.

Assistants[link]

Since the consolidation of newspaper comics by the first quarter of the 20th century, most cartoonists have used a group of assistants (with usually one of them credited). However, quite a few cartoonists (e.g.: George Herriman and Charles Schulz, among others) have done their strips almost completely by themselves; often criticizing the use of assistants for the same reasons most have about their editors hiring anyone else to continue their work after their retirement.

Censorship[link]

Starting in the late 1940s, the national syndicates which distributed newspaper comic strips subjected them to very strict censorship. Li'l Abner was censored in September 1947 and was pulled from papers by Scripps-Howard. The controversy, as reported in Time, centered on Capp's portrayal of the U.S. Senate. Said Edward Leech of Scripps, "We don't think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks... boobs and undesirables."^[24]

Because historically comics have been considered mostly for children, they have a significantly more rigid censorship code than other media. Stephan Pastis has lamented that the "unwritten" censorship code is still "stuck somewhere in the 1950s." Generally, comics are not allowed to include such words as "damn", "sucks", "screwed" and "hell", although there have been exceptions such as the September 22, 2010 Mother Goose and Grimm in which an elderly man says, "This nursing home food sucks," and a pair of Pearls Before Swine comics from January, 2011 with a character named Ned using the word "crappy".^[25][26][27] Naked backsides and shooting guns cannot be shown, according to Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.^[28] Such comic strip taboos were detailed in Dave Breger's book But That's Unprintable (Bantam, 1955).

Many issues such as sex, narcotics and terrorism cannot or can very rarely be openly discussed in strips, although there are exceptions, usually for satire, as in Bloom County. This led some cartoonists to resort to double entendre or dialogue children do not understand, as in Greg Evans' Luann. Young cartoonists have claimed commonplace words, images and issues should be allowed in the comics. Some of the taboo words and topics are mentioned daily on television and other forms of visual media. Web comics and comics distributed primarily to college newspapers are much freer in this respect.

See also[link]

Comics portal

• Biblia pauperum
• Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
• Comics Studies
• List of British comic strips
• List of cartoonists
• List of newspaper comic strips
• Military humor comic strips

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Blackbeard, Bill, ed. The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. (1977) Smithsonian Institution Press/Harry N. Abrams
• Castelli, Alfredo. Here We Are Again
• Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture (1998) Smithsonian Institution Press
• Goulart, Ron. Encyclopedia of American Comics
• Goulart, Ron. The Funnies
• Goulart, Ron. The Adventurous Decade
• Horn, Maurice. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. (1976) Chelsea House, (1982) Avon.
• Horn, Maurice. The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons
• Horn, Maurice. 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics
• Koenigsberg, Moses. King News, Moses Koenigsberg
• Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism
• Robbins, Trina. A Century of Women Cartoonists
• Robbins, Trina and Yronwode, Cat. Women and the Comics
• Robinson, Jerry. The Comics
• Sheridan, Martin. Comics And Their Creators
• Tebbell. The Compact History of the American Newspaper
• Strickler, Dave. Syndicated Comic Strips and Artists
• Walker, Brian (2004). The Comics: Before 1945. Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-4970-9. 
• Walker, Brian (2002). The Comics: After 1945. Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-3481-7. 
• Watson, Elmo Scott. A History of Newspaper Syndicates in the United States, Elmo Scott Watson
• Waugh, Coulton. The Comics

External links[link]

• National Cartoonists Society
• Leiffer, Paul, and Hames Ware, eds. The Comic Strip Project. WebCitation archive.
• Comic Art Collection at the University of Missouri
• Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University

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Look up strip in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Strip.

Strip, stripping, or stripped may refer to:

• Landing strip, runway where airplanes land
• Landing strip (hair), a type of pubic hairstyle
• Möbius strip, a surface with one side and one boundary component
• Power strip, strip of power sockets
• Test strip (disambiguation), various medical/biological testing material
• Strip (Unix), Unix command
• Strip bond, financial instrument
• Strip mall, small, neighborhood shopping area
• Strip mining, a practice of mining a seam of mineral by first removing a long strip of overlying soil and rock (the overburden)
• Strip search, removal of a person's clothing to check for contraband
• Strip steak, type of beef steak
• Striptease, act of removing one's clothes slowly to music
• Triangle strip, method for rendering computer graphics
• Stripping (chemistry), removal of one or more components from a liquid stream to a vapor stream
• Stripping (printing), preparation & assembly of printing negatives in pre-press
• Stripping (fiber), the act of removing the protective polymer coating around optical fiber in preparation for fusion splicing
• Hand stripping, a technique for grooming the coats of dogs
• Paint stripper, a solvent that removes paint
• Wire stripping, removing the insulation from the core of an electrical wire.
• Football strip, the shirts, shorts, and socks worn while playing association football.

Entertainment[link]

Comedy[link]

• Stripped (tour) (2009), a stand-up comedy tour by English entertainer Eddie Izzard

Comics[link]

• Comic strip, a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative
• Sunday strip, a newspaper comic-strip format
• Strip, a short-lived fortnightly comics anthology published by Marvel UK in 1990

Music[link]

• Strip (Chris Brown song), a 2011 song by Chris Brown
• "Stripped" (song), a 1986 song by Depeche Mode; covered by Rammstein
• Strip (Adam Ant album), 1983
• Strip (The Chameleons album)
• Stripped (Christina Aguilera album), 2002
  • "Stripped Intro" and "Stripped Pt. 2", the title tracks of the album
  • Justified/Stripped Tour (2003), a co-headlining concert tour by Aguilera and Justin Timberlake
  • Stripped World Tour (2003), a world tour for the album
  • Stripped Live in the U.K. (2004), a 2004 concert DVD from the United Kingdom performances of the tour for the album
• Stripped (The Rolling Stones album), 1995
• Stripped (Pretty Maids album)

Television[link]

• Stripping (television), a practice of running a television series at the same time daily

Places[link]

• Agacher Strip War, 100-mile long strip of land in northeastern Burkina Faso
• Aouzou Strip, strip of land in northern Chad
• Caprivi Strip, narrow protrusion of Namibia
• Cherokee Outlet or Cherokee Strip, strip of land south of the Oklahoma-Kansas border
• Cherokee Strip (Kansas), disputed strip of land in southern Kansas
• Cotai Strip, name of Las Vegas Sands' casino resort project in Macau
• Frontier Strip, region of U.S. states from North Dakota south to Texas
• Gaza Strip, narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean, in the Middle East
• Las Vegas Strip, section of Las Vegas Boulevard South
• Mayor Magrath Drive or The Strip, roadway in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
• Sabine Free State or Neutral Strip, strip of land between America's Louisiana Purchase and Spanish Texas
• Strip District, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Sunset Strip, 1.5 mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, California, US
• Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
• Tarfaya Strip, strip of land located at the southernmost tip of Morocco
• Toledo strip, the cause of the Toledo War

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

See also[link]

• The Strip (disambiguation)
• All pages beginning with "Strip"
• All pages with titles containing "Strip"
• Stripe (disambiguation)
• Piece (disambiguation)
• Slice (disambiguation)
• Section (disambiguation)
• Segment (disambiguation)

Glynis Barber (born 25 October 1955) is a South African actress of Afrikaner descent, born and brought up in South Africa. She was born Glynis van der Riet.^[1] When she was five years old, her parents divorced, and she and her mother moved to Johannesburg. She is best known for her portrayal as Sgt. Harriet Makepeace in the British police drama Dempsey & Makepeace.

Acting career[link]

Television[link]

She studied at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. Acting since 1978, her popular breakthrough came in 1981 with her role as Soolin in the BBC science fiction television series Blake's 7.

In 1982 she took the title role in the television series Jane playing a World War II heroine. This series was filmed against a blue screen allowing for the addition of a cartoon background, an experimental technique in its day. However, Barber is best known for her mid-1980s role of Sgt. Harriet Makepeace in the British police drama Dempsey & Makepeace, where she met her future husband, Michael Brandon.

Since 1987, Barber has appeared frequently in plays, films and television series. She also starred in the LWT drama series Night and Day as Fiona Brake. In 2006 she joined the cast of ITV soap, Emmerdale, playing the character of DCI Grace Barraclough, investigating the death of Tom King on Christmas Day. She exited the soap in September 2007, when her character was killed.

In 2009, she appeared as hospital administrator Jean McAteer in The Royal, another ITV drama series set in Yorkshire ^[1] On 23 October 2009 it was announced she would play Glenda Mitchell the mother of Ronnie Mitchell, Roxy Mitchell and Danny Mitchell in EastEnders after Jill Gascoine withdrew from the role during her first day on set.^[2] On 27 February 2011 it was announced that Barber was to leave EastEnders in March 2011.

Theatre[link]

Her stage work has included Macbeth, Killing Time with Dennis Waterman, High Flyers with Hugh Grant and Make Me A Match and The Graduate. In 2011 Barber starred alongside Christopher Timothy and Denis Lil in Alan Ackbourne's Seasons Greetings playing Belinda.

Film[link]

She appeared as Lady Caroline in Michael Winner's 1983 remake of The Wicked Lady, which starred Faye Dunaway. She later appeared alongside Vanessa Redgrave in the 1997 film, Déjà Vu.

She appeared as Anthea Davis in On the Nose in 2001 along with Dan Aykroyd and Robbie Coltrane.

Personal life[link]

Barber married actor Paul Antony Barber, whom she met at drama school, in 1976. They were divorced in 1979.^[3]

Barber married her Dempsey & Makepeace co-star Michael Brandon on 18 November 1989; they have a son, Alexander Max Brandon (born November 1992).

Selected filmography[link]

• Tangiers (1982)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official Website
• Glynis Barber at the Internet Movie Database
• Filmography at TV.com
• Ellis, James (3 September 2003). "Glynis Barber". Metro (UK). http://www.metro.co.uk/fame/interviews/article.html?in_article_id=1070&in_page_id=11. Retrieved 10 February 2009.