the.com/comic strip
A joke with a beginning, middle, and punchline, drawn in boxes so you can't skip ahead.
means A short sequence of drawings, usually with dialogue, arranged in panels to tell a joke or brief story.
from From 'comic' (meant to amuse) plus 'strip,' describing the narrow horizontal band of panels as it ran in newspapers — the format that gave the genre its name dates to the daily and Sunday papers of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when cartoonists began stringing single gags into panel sequences printed in a strip across the page.
- optimal length
- usually exactly three or four panels
- oldest trick
- timing lives in the gutter between panels
- economic model
- newspapers paid by the inch, jokes shrank accordingly
- peanuts secret
- charlie brown never aged in fifty years