Production in USA (King Features)

General information

About the formats of Sunday pages:

Mickey Sundays started as full-pagers with Silly Symphonies (beginning with Bucky Bug) taking up 1/3 of the page and Mickey taking 2/3 of the page (4 tiers). However, some papers ran the Mickey Sunday as a half-page, which would in some cases mean a changed layout (3 tiers each with 4 panels), in some cases removal of some of the panels.
Later on, when the Silly Symphony page was upgraded to a comic strip in its own right, it got its own half-page, and Mickey was degraded from 2/3 to 1/2 page.
For tabloid newspapers two different versions were used, one was the full page en miniature, the other was a rearranged full size version of the half page of Mickey, usually with one or more panels removed. Silly Symphonies were also printed as full size tabloid pages.
From the mid-forties the Mickey Sunday page had a standard format in which the central panel could be removed, so the remaining panels could be rearranged in a tabloid format.
The 1/3 page (2 tiers) format was probably developed due to the wartime paper shortage. At least I know it only from 1943 on. At first the 1/3 pages were made by removing a couple of panels and rearranging the rest, but later on the standard was to remove the top tier of a halfpage. Notice how the top tier of almost all Sunday comic pages can often be considered a gag in its own right, and that it is not vital to the remaining part of the gag. At least one paper (Philadelphia Inquirer) printed 1/3-pagers in a different format with more panels missing.
The writers must have had quite a bit of work figuring out how a gag should be workable in all three possible formats!

Oddly, though, the Donald Sundays were designed differently, so a tabloid page of Donald will more likely be a complete page. The 1/3-pagers were done in a manner much like the Mickeys.

Scamp Sundays were arranged much like Mickeys, but later on they were designed as 1/3-pagers where the first panel og each tier could be removed, thus making a version which could be published as a half tabloid page with the art having a reasonable size.

I could go on and on, but I hope these few explanations clarify matters a bit. For each Sunday page title there is an individual history with periods of different formats. If any format should be defined for a given Sunday page, it ought to be the most complete version.

BTW, also Dailies were done in different formats. I have seen examples of (stats of) original art with two copyright notices, where obviously one version was intended to be printed with taller panels than the other. Again, the most complete version should be used as the standard.

Reprints of a Sunday page in comic books are often the tabloid page version, but in quite a few cases the comic book version has been re-layouted differently, most often with more panels missing.

Story codes

When reprinted in comic books, the newspaper comic strips are usually indicated by their publishing date, sometimes preceded by `WDP', `WDE', `KF' or `KFS'. The publishing date may be either in USA format (MM-DD-YY) or in European format (DD-MM-YY).

Note that a date does not identify a story or gag uniquely, since there were several newspaper series at the same time, like Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Silly Symphonies, Scamp.

Story codes in the INDUCKS

The codes are as follows:

letter1 + letter2 + space + date

letter1 = 'Y' for dailies, 'Z' for sundays
letter2 = 'D' for Donald, 'M' for Mickey, etc.

If a sequence of strips form one story, the date of the first strip is used.

There are three exceptions:

The Mickey Mouse daily sequences are coded "YM " + a 3-digit number.
The Mickey Mouse Sunday sequences are coded "ZM " + a 3-digit number.
The Sunday "Classic Tales" strips are coded "ZT " + a 3-digit number.

contributions: Martin Olsen (About the formats of Sunday pages)