Sunday-Only Comics

I think that it's rarely a good sign when a great comic strip goes Sundays-only. Part of what makes the newspaper strip such a beautiful format is its combination of brevity with the ability to run long-term. You can tell a big story in short, meticulously paced daily chunks. A Sundays-only strip? No chance. Not only do you not have the advantage of being short and sweet, there's no real advantage to trying to serialize a story. A lot of what made a strip work can be lost.

Look at Doonesbury. I'm not much of a Doonesbury fan, but I see why it's become a staple of the comics page. Garry Trudeau is a solid writer and a good cartoonist. Since going Sundays-only, though, it's mostly devoted itself to the satirical aspects, losing what made the daily strips work: its characters. Doonesbury is basically Trudeau's political blog now. It was before to some extent, but it combined it with very well-rounded, even three-dimensional characters to convey the political ideas. In going Sundays-only, Garry Trudeau got rid of the best part of his strip.

Another example is FoxTrot. Don't get me wrong: I adore FoxTrot. I'm subscribed to the mailing list and I read FoxTrot Classics on GoComics every day. At its peak, its writing is some of the best the comics page has ever seen. But in 2007, it went Sundays-only. It doesn't have enough space to let its characters live their lives anymore. We can't have hilarious storylines like Fun-Fun Mountain, or Jason accidentally admitting he likes a girl. Instead, we're treated to brief sketches of the Fox family's life, maybe a bit with Jason parodying the latest tech fads. It's still amusing, but it's nowhere near the heights that the strip reached back in the 90s.

Of course, Sundays-only strips are not even close to the greatest threats that newspaper comics face. Local comics-carrying newspapers are still dropping like flies, more and more newspapers are choosing to run old strips instead of amplifying young cartoonists, and "zombie" strips resurrected after their creators die continue to be a scourge on the medium. But letting strips lose what made them work just for the sake of continuing isn't doing comics any favors, either.

That being said, I will continue to read FoxTrot always and forever because Bill Amend is a legend.