A comic strip is a short strip or sequence of drawings, telling a story.

Drawn by a cartoonist, they are

published on a recurring basis (usually daily or weekly) in newspapers or on the Internet. They
usually communicate to the reader via speech balloons.

As the name implies, they can be humorous (as in "gag-a-day" strips like Beetle Bailey , Hi & Lois, or
Hagar the Horrible) but not by necessity. Serious soap-opera continuity strips (like Judge Parker or
Little Orphan Annie) have serious story lines in serial form. They are, however, nonetheless known as
"comics" – though the term "sequential art", coined by cartoonist Will Eisner, is becoming
increasingly popular.

The great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war between Joseph Pulitzer and William
Randolph Hearst. The Little Bears (the first American comic with recurring characters), The Yellow
Kid (the first color comic, part of the first Sunday comic section in 1897, and the root of the term
"yellow journalism"), and Mutt and Jeff was the first daily comic strip, first appearing in 1907.

The comic strip, in a manner of speaking, began in 1865 in Germany with Max and Moritz, a strip
about two trouble-making boys. It was more a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of
German children's stories like "Struuvelpeter" ("Shockheaded Peter"): in one, the boys, after
perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill, and consumed by a
flock of geese.

Max and Moritz did provide an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, leading to the
debut of The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897, probably the first comic strip in the modern sense of the
term. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, speech and thought balloons, and
sawing logs for snoring originated in Dirks' strip.

Hugely popular, Katzenjammer Kids was responsible for one of the first comic-strip copyright
ownership suits in the history of the medium. When Dirks left Hearst for the promise of a better
salary under Pulitzer (unusual, since cartoonists regularly deserted Pulitzer for Hearst) Hearst in a
highly unusual court decision retained the rights to the name "Katzenjammer Kids", while creator
Dirks retained the rights to the characters. Hearst promptly hired a cartoonist named Harold Knerr
to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks renamed his version Hans and Fritz (later, The Captain and
The Kids). Thus, two versions distributed by rival syndicates graced the comics pages for decades.
Dirks' version, eventually distributed by United Feature Syndicate, ran until 1979.

Hundreds of comic strips followed, with many running for decades.

Most comic strip characters stay the same age throughout the strip's life, but in strips like Lynn
Johnston's award-winning For Better or For Worse characters age. The first strip to feature aging
characters was Gasoline Alley.

The advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s led to an explosion of amateur web comics, comic
strips created solely for Web sites. Web comics differ from published comic strips, in that anyone
can start his own comic strip and publish it on the Web; there is no longer any need to for a creator
to meet the approval of a publisher or syndicate. Currently there are hundreds of web comics, most
of which are low-quality and sporadically updated. However, a number of web comics have endured,
and the best web comics rival their newspaper and magazine counterparts in terms of quality and
quantity. Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, PvP, Sluggy Freelance, and User Friendly are considered to be
among the best of the web comics.

The history of comic strips also includes series that are not humorous, but tell an ongoing dramatic
story. Examples include Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Mary Worth, Modesty Blaise and Tarzan.
Sometimes these are spin-offs from comic books, for example Superman, Batman, and The Amazing
Spider-Man.

All the comic strips mentioned so far in this article are centered on human beings, but a number of
strips have either also included sentient animals as characters, either without being able to verbally
communicate with humans, as in Garfield or Peanuts, or being able to verbally communicate with
humans, as in Get Fuzzy. Other strips have centered entirely on animals, as in Pogo or Donald Duck.

The comics have long held a distorted mirror to contemporary society, and almost from the
beginning have been used for political or social commentary. This ranged from the staunch
conservative values of Little Orphan Annie to the unabashed liberalism of Doonesbury. The
aforementioned Pogo used animals to particularly devastating effect, caricaturing many prominent
politicians of the day as animal denizens of Pogo's Okeefenokee Swamp. In a fearless move, Pogo's
creator Walt Kelly took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, caricaturing him as a bobcat named Simple
J. Malarkey, a megalomaniac bent on taking over the characters' birdwatching club and rooting out
all undesirables.

Kelly also defended the medium against possible government regulation in the McCarthy era. At a
time when comic books were coming under fire for supposed sexual, violent, and subversive
content, Kelly feared the same would happen to comic strips. Going before the congressional
subcommittee, he proceeded to charm the members with his drawings and the force of his
personality. The comic strip was safe for satire.
The world's longest comic strip is 88.9 metres long and on display at Trafalgar Square as part of the
London Comedy Festival. The record was previously 81 metres and held in Florida. The London
Cartoon Strip was created by fifteen of Britain's best known cartoonists and depicts the history of
London.

Today's comic-strip artists, with the help of the National Cartoonists' Society (NCS) enthusiastically
promote the medium, which is considered to be in decline due to fewer markets and ever-shrinking
newspaper space. One particularly humorous example of such promotional efforts is the Great
Comic Strip Switcheroonie, held on April Fool's Day, 1997. For that day, dozens of prominent comic-
strip artists took over each other's strips. Garfield’s Jim Davis, for example, switched with Blondie’s
Stan Drake, while Scott Adams (Dilbert) traded strips with Bil Keane (The Family Circus).

Even the United States Postal Service got into the act, issuing a series of commemorative stamps
marking the comic-strip centennial in 1996.

The advent of the Internet, and especially the World Wide Web, in the 1990s led to an explosion of
amateur web comics, comic strips created solely for World Wide Web sites. These web comics
differed from published comic strips, in that anyone could start his or her own comic strip and
publish it on the Web; there was no longer any need to for a person to meet the approval of a
publisher or syndicate. This led to the appearance of literally hundreds of web comics, most of which
were (and still are) crudely drawn and sporadically updated. However, a number of web comics have
endured, and the best web comics rival their newspaper and magazine counterparts in terms of
quality and quantity.

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