At the beginning of the publication of comic books many were simply made up of a collection of a months worth of Sunday Funnies, or even daily strips from the newspaper collected into magazine format and sold for a dime.
Which is why National Periodical Publication’s (DC) Detective Comics with all new content was so important to the development of the form.
However even after Detective there were still many comics, such as Famous Funnies, The Funnies, Crackajack Comics, Super Comics, and others that would be made up of newspaper strips recut as a comic.
Eventually this practice would end, even Famous Funnies started to print original material for the comics.
The last comic to do this in America was probably DC’s Mutt and Jeff by Bud Fisher which printed nothing but newspaper strips of the pair until 1958.
As such there are a lot of characters such as Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Mutt & Jeff, Tarzan in the 40’s, Blondie and others that while published by one comic book company or another, sometimes even by two or three simultaneously, they were really never a part of that comic company, but always characters of the newspaper’s funny pages.
As such this listing is not so much for comics which always had a publisher such as Dell, or DC or Eastern Color, but for characters who appeared in comics from one or more of those publishers while really always being a thing of the papers.
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