Six Ways to Sunday!
This Week in Drabble History: February 9th, 10th, 11th, & 12th (1980, 1984, 1990, 2002, 2003, 20024)
Hi everybody!
Today we have several classic Drabble Sunday strips for you spanning about 45 years. Sunday strips were always very important, especially to newspapers. When you would see a Sunday paper on sale in a newsstand or at the market, you would usually see the comics on the front of the paper. That was a big selling point. Kids (and adults) would see their favorite comic strip on the front (usually Peanuts or Garfield or Blondie). Occasionally Drabble, but usually it was one of the all-time classics.
Sparky used to say that the main job of a cartoonist was to help editors sell newspapers. He did quite a job of it, and I think he took his Sunday strip very seriously. His Sunday strips always had “drop boxes.” There were usually two of them. Some newspapers ran his Sunday strips in 3 tiers, the top level had the logo plus the first box, which was not really necessary to the gag. Many papers just ran the lower two tiers, which contained the main body of the joke. But even then, there were papers that needed to reconfigure his strip further for layout reasons. So even in the lower 2 tiers, there were a couple of drop boxes in case it still didn’t fit the available space. It might have just been a picture of one of the characters not saying anything or thinking about something. Without those boxes, the reader would still get the joke.
All of that was done to precise calculations. Sections of the strips were drawn so they would always fit correctly. It was unbelievable to me how it was all calculated. I wish I had talked to him about it more, but later in his career, he was less worried about those problems. In both his daily strip and Sundays, we would occasionally draw one large comic instead of breaking it into sections. When Peanuts began, it was always 4 boxes with a break in the middle so newspapers could run 2 boxes on top of the others. Drabble too. Sometime in the 80’s, he reduced them to (usually) three boxes. I think he might have felt that the newspapers could now more accommodating.
I remember Sparky telling me that after he had drawn a Sunday strip, he was done for the day. By the way, Drabble Sunday strips were not drawn at the same dimensions as Peanuts. It’s meant to fit in 2 different spaces in the paper depending on the size of the Drabble logo that is used.
February 9, 2003
February 10, 1980
