Kurtis Findlay, who is the administrator over at the Facebook page of the Library of American Comics Newspaper Strip Appreciation Group, shows us how small the Sunday Prince Valiant strips were going from the 1960s (left), decade by decade to the 1990s (right). Horrible.
"I was sorting through hundreds of Prince Valiant pages today and it always shocks me how big the 1960 comic pages were and how the page shrunk over the decades. The photo has one Sunday from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Getting smaller and smaller! I don’t have any from post-2000 as the collector had stopped collecting by that point."
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Of course the entire newspaper was shrinking as broadsheet pages grew smaller and smaller. In 1984 the shrinkage was standardized with the SAU format. Also, comic sections had fewer and fewer pages, so strips were packed three or more to a page to at least deliver quantity -- goodbye to full pages, half pages, and toppers, along with much detail and dialogue.
As a kid in the 60s I remember noticing that Prince Valiant was the only strip to command two thirds of a page in the SF Chronicle comics, and as you demonstrate even Val had to bow to this different form of economies of scale. Also noticed that advertising in comic sections vanished altogether -- another factor in fewer pages and strips?
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