One would assume that the cartoonists’ moans are real, that their available space is shrinking, comics being shrunken in size.
Yet many of the Sunday comics I see on line have that big title panel that has almost nothing on it but the name and perhaps a lineup of the regulars just smiling.
I don’t get any papers so I don’t know - Do they print them any more?
Yes, some papers choose not to and some do. One paper may also choose to do so for some comics but not others. I read the SF Chronicle and Oakland Tribune together occasionally and was very noticeable between redundant comics.
Some comics like Doonesbury (and I think Dilbert?) also have the first two or so panels optional. They will be setup for the main comic, but ultimately be unnecessary.
According to the Comics Curmudgeon, every strip that has a bigger Sunday comic has the first row be throwaway, for precisely this reason.
The Memphis Commercial Appeal still does, most of the time. Sometimes they shrink them down so they can stick an ad on the back of the comics section. The paper’s mostly ads nowdays, anyway.
Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) explained that this was exactly the reason for the jokes and gags in the title panel that didn’t fit in with the rest of the story of the main strip.
Yes. Sunday comics are displayed in different formats in different newspapers. The title/splash page is used to fill out certain formats
The practice goes back to at least the 1930s; if you see strips of any era printed in full, you’ll see a separate joke or gag at the heading. I’m looking at some old Pogo Sunday strips from the 1950s and they’re all the same: four panels at the start that can be tossed away, then eight panels of strip. A newspaper using the 12-panel format used the entire strip, while others that used the 8-panel format could ignore the first four panels.
Looking at online comics, I don’t see any that use more that two rows of panels for their Sunday strip. Maybe Peanuts, which is highly popular and predates the worst of the shrinking.
I don’t think my local newspaper prints the longer versions… then again, I live in sleepy little Green Bay, WI.