[crashryan]

Looking at early newspaper strips both here and on Alan Holtz' invaluable blog (strippersguide.blogspot.com), I get the impression that a huge number of early strips simply repeated the same joke over and over. Miss Scoopem thinks she's found a dramatic scoop and it turns out not to be what she thought. Perhaps that's why so many strips had short runs, sometimes as little as a few weeks. One thing that drives me nuts about Miss S. (and other early strips) is that the balloons frequently read in the wrong order.

Link to the book: Miss Scoopem

[The Australian Panther]

Crash said,

Looking at early newspaper strips both here and on Alan Holtz' invaluable blog (strippersguide.blogspot.com), I get the impression that a huge number of early strips simply repeated the same joke over and over.

That there is a PHD subject if I ever saw one.

An interesting observation. Some strips survive today by widening it to 'Repeat the same two or three jokes but with small variations' Garfield, 'I'm looking at you.' This strip often repeats the same visual panels with different dialogue. 
Many 'comedy' strips start with a strong archetypical character or set-up, repeat the same formula for a while but the best creators add in new characters and widen the approach, so McManus graduated from jokes about Corn beef and Cabbage to deeper social observation.
Blondie was originally a flapper, a millionaires daughter, but she married Dagwood, became a housewife and Dagwood became the focus of the strip, until they had children and a dog and neighbours and a postman and so on. It's always worthwhile adding a dog to your strip.
Max and Moritz morphed into the Katzenjammer Kids and then was cloned and was created 'the Captain and the Kids' but that strip is one where the basic joke never changes and neither do the characters. Never found it funny myself. 
Then on the opposite end of the spectrum lets go from the monotonous and dull to the simple but sublime and remember
Krazy Kat - which survived because William Randolph Hearst loved it.
Three basic characters 90% of the time, very simple premise, repetition but also infinite variation.
Speaking about adapting a basic premise to keep a comic vital, Spiderman.
Like many of us who know - or think we know - a lot about what happened behind the scenes, I can think of quite a lot to be critical of Stan Lee for.
But I don't think he gets enough credit for what he got right.
When Ditko left Spiderman, Lee and Romita made radical changes to the 'book' - graduating Pete from High-school and making him a college student, giving him two super-gorgeous girlfriends, revealing who the Goblin was and making Peter less of a nerd.
I read those books off the stands as they came out and wasn't too happy about the changes, but I have grown to appreciate the thinking that went into that.

Thanks Crash, for triggering these thoughts.

Cheers!