Superman was a daily newspaper comic strip which began on January 16, 1939, and a separate Sunday strip was added on November 5, 1939. These strips ran continuously until May 1966. In 1941, the McClure Syndicate had placed the strip in hundreds of newspapers. At its peak, the strip, featuring Superman, was in over 300 daily newspapers and 90 Sunday papers, with a readership of over 20 million.
First Superman Sunday strip (November 5, 1939).
A comic strip is a sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with daily horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in newspapers, while Sunday papers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the advent of the internet, online comic strips began to appear as webcomics.
Richard Newton Progress of a Scotsman 1794 (British Museum)
Thomas Rowlandson after G.M.Woodward. Opinions on the Divorce Bill 1800 (Metropolitan Museum, New York)
Thomas Rowlandson My Wife 1815 (Metropolitan Museum New York)
Illustrated Chips (1896). Harmsworth titles enjoyed a monopoly of comics in the UK until the emergence of DC Thomson comics in the 1930s.