While the classic toppers started fizzling out in the 1940s, and the last remaining holdouts, like Gasoline Alley's Little Brother Hugo, finally bit the dust in the early 1970s, we have a little problem with cutting them off then. The whole idea of toppers is that they are self-contained features that can be lopped off by your friendly neighhborhood features editor. With that loose definition -- a sub-feature that comes with a Sunday comic that can be lopped off if space is unavailable -- it can be argued persuasively that toppers have continued on.
Take, for example, the Star Wars Sunday strip. Most papers ran it as a third, but if you wanted to run it in a more complete format, you'd get the title panel plus a panel feature called Star Wars Scrapbook. Some would call this a "drop panel", but I prefer to reserve that term for panel(s) of the main strip that can be dropped without affecting the gag or storyline. Even though features like Star Wars Scrapbook existed well after the 'topper era', they certainly seem to be the same thing.
Star Wars Scrapbook did not start concurrently with the Star Wars Sunday strip in 1979, but was added quite a bit later, shortly after the strip was taken over by writer Archie Goodwin and artist Al Williamson. The topper panel first appears on April 26 1981, and continued until shortly before the demise of the strip; the last Sunday bearing the feature was apparently October 23 1983*. Why it was dropped before the end of the Sunday strip itself (on March 11 1984) I have no idea.
There wasn't much to the feature, which merely offered up portraits of various characters and bits of tech from the Star Wars mythos, so you can certainly see why cut-happy features editors rarely let that top tier make it into their Sunday sections.
* All dates from the Star Wars Wookieepedia website.
Hello Allan- An oft used alternate term for "Drop Panel" we often used was "Trash Panel."
ReplyDeleteThe Flash Gordon strips done by Jim Keefe in the late 1990s-early 2000s had a similar "topper, that ran the length of the strip, often actually presented as three panels. They featured a picture of the cast heroes or villians, but there were only the same two or three alternates endlessly repeated. Of course, very few papers used this, I guess you could call it a "Drop out row."
All the Marvel (Spiderman, Hulk, Conan and Howard the Duck) strips did the same thing with having the same topper every six weeks. For the entire Spiderman Sunday run you would see art by the first artist John Romita Sr.
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