A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip format, appearing on weekdays, Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip, which typically only appears on Sundays.
Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff is commonly regarded as the first daily comic strip, launched November 15, 1907 (under its initial title, A. Mutt) on the sports pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. The featured character had previously appeared in sports cartoons by Fisher but was unnamed. Fisher had approached his editor, John P. Young, about doing a regular strip as early as 1905 but was turned down. According to Fisher, Young told him, "It would take up too much room, and readers are used to reading down the page, and not horizontally." Other cartoonists followed the trend set by Fisher, as noted by comic strip historian R. C. Harvey:
In the early 1900s, William Randolph Hearst's weekday morning and afternoon papers around the country featured scattered black-and-white comic strips, and on January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first full daily comics page in his Evening Journal.
The reading of newspaper comics each day was a major entertainment activity during the first half of the 20th century. A Fortune poll in 1937 ranked the ten leading strips in popularity (with number one as the most popular):
The two conventional formats for daily newspaper comics are strips and single gag panels. The strips are usually displayed horizontally, wider than they are tall. Strips are usually, but not always, are broken up into several smaller panels with continuity from panel to panel. Single panels are square, circular or taller than they are wide. One of the leading single gag panels for decades, Grin and Bear It, was created in 1932 by George Lichty and syndicated by Field Enterprises.