Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed for January 23, 2024

Spuds Mackenzie

Finally some peace and quiet.

An advantage of digital comics is you can enlarge the image to read the small print.

More strength to your arms, comrades.

make the comics all word balloons

Spuds MacKenzie on the wall.

for those who don’t remember comics pages wanted to shrink the size of the comics they were displaying, artists complained that they would lose the quality of art. There was eventually a compromise on sunday comics being smaller if the paper wanted. that’s why if you look at most sunday comics here, the first two panels are throw aways,so if the particular paper wants to make it smaller they don’t lose the main story.

Press CTRL, roll mouse wheel – presto!

I’ve got some old newspapers from 50’s and 60’s- they were much larger than current papers.

In the earliest decades of comic strips standard newspaper size was 16" X 18". You could really plunge into a Prince Valiant strip.

Just a few years away from on-line comics, were they? Guess they’ve since found out what that brought out in publishers and what not…

Cartoonists complained about the shrinking of their strips for years. Bill Watterson may have even quit Calvin & Hobbes partially because of this. But essentially they lost that battle as the cost of newsprint kept going up and ad revenue kept going down. Sad irony is that now digital newspapers have no size restraints but there is no money to pay the artists most of whom have left the business.

The artists work at a larger size, whether on paper or a computer. The results are reduced in size losing detail. Berk shrinking the lettering on the sign is a perfect example. All the lettering is there, but after the papers reduced it it is illegible.