Comic strip formats

Comic strip formats vary widely from publication to publication, so that the same newspaper comic strip may appear in a half-dozen different formats with different numbers of panels, different sizes of panels and different arrangement of panels.

The first distinction in comic strips formats is between the daily comic strip and the Sunday strip. A daily strip is usually carried on a standard newspaper page, often alongside other strips and non-comics matter (such as crossword puzzles). It is usually printed as either a horizontal strip (longer than it is tall) or a box (roughly square) in black and white, although in recent years syndicates have offered daily strips in color, and newspapers with the ability to print it as such have done so.

There is a much greater variety in Sunday strip formats. Sunday strips are usually in color, published in a special newspaper section, the Sunday comics section. Comics sections usually come in one of two sizes, full page or tabloid. A few newspapers ran their comics in a comic-book size section from the mid-to-late 1970s to the mid-1980s (billed as "collectable comics"), and some strips have appeared in the Sunday magazine of newspapers, such as the 1990 Dick Tracy reprints in the Daily News Magazine of the New York Daily News.

A single comic strip may appear in numerous variations; there is a "full" version, to appear at a given size, which may have parts eliminated, be shrunk, or have the panels cut up and re-arranged.

Expendable parts may include a topper (a small separate comic strip, no longer used in mainstream comics), "throwaway" panels (a short throw-away gag, still common), or a large title panel or tier. Due to the desire to re-arrange, comics may use a conventional layout of the panels (as demonstrated below) to allow them to be cut up and displayed on a varied number of tiers.

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