Joe Ankenbauer ASKS me…
Here's a question for you. I read numerous comic strips each day. Some comic strips continue their story line through the comics that appear on Sunday, while others put a Sunday strip that has nothing to do with the current story line. What is the reasoning behind that?
It's one of those decisions that, like so many in the popular arts, meets at the juncture of Creative and Business. Usually when a new strip starts up and the syndicate's salesfolks try to get newspapers to carry it, they can't get every paper to carry both the dailies and the Sunday page. Each paper had a certain number of open slots on their page of dailies and a certain number of slots in their Sunday section and those numbers rarely coincide, especially if they're carrying one or more of the strips that are daily only or Sunday only.
So the question becomes do we link the daily and Sunday continuities of our strip and hope that causes the papers that only want one to feel they need the other? Or do we make them separate so they read better for readers who get one but not the other? Obviously, the nature of the material itself has a lot to do with this decision as does the preference of the cartoonist. But at some point, they have to consider what the sales force thinks may be best.
Also, this isn't so relevant these days but back when a newspaper strip was more work (i.e., they were larger), it was not unheard-of for a cartoonist to choose to just do the six daily strips each week and turn the Sunday page over to someone else. Hank Ketcham did his Dennis the Menace strip Monday through Saturday and had ghosts produce Sunday's strip. I don't know that he ever wanted to have a day-to-day continuity in the feature but it would have been difficult with that split.
Roy Crane's strip Buz Sawyer dealt with the problem by making its Sunday page a completely different, slightly-connected feature. Monday through Saturday, it was an adventure strip featuring Buz drawn by Crane and later his assistants. Sunday, it was comical, self-contained exploits of Buz's pal, Rosco Sweeney who was rarely seen in the daily continuity. Rosco's pages were written and drawn by Clark Haas (and later, Al Wenzel) but signed by Crane. The decision to separate the storylines that way enabled Crane's uncredited writer, Edwin Granberry, to write Buz Sawyer adventures as a six-day-a-week continuity strip without worrying about readers who didn't get the Sunday page.
The current Popeye strip consists of reprints on Monday through Saturday — old strips by Bud Sagendorf. The other day each week, Hy Eisman produces a new Sunday page. I would imagine a lot of the papers that carry it only carry one or the other…but there are not enough total to warrant making it all-new. That was one of those Business-type decisions.
