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The Washington Post Finally Gives In – Updated with Monday’s WaPo Color Comics

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Thursday The Washington Post revealed a major renovation to their daily comics page.

Comics DC reveals to the rest of the nation that starting Monday, September 23, 2024 the daily Washington Post comics will be in color. Decades after most major newspapers made the switch and 76 years after The St. Louis Post-Dispatch proclaimed itself the first to do so.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch from July 11, 1948:

On July 12, 1948 The Post-Dispatch began running their daily comics in color on their rotogravure press.

Above is the November 4, 1948 Post-Dispatch color comics page, four months after the paper began the procedure. Thanks to: Glenn Fleishmann’s forthcoming How Comics Were Made (excuse my bad cut).

Now in 2024 The Washington Post catches up.

Now the dailies will look as pretty as the Sundays, though you will still need a magnifying glass to read them.

UPDATE

Thanks to Comics DC we have the September 23, 2024 color comics pages from the Washington Post.

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Comments 14

  1. This is a bummer to me. This was one of the few places where we could reliably find b&w versions of dozens of comics. I really wish the major syndicates would include b&w versions on their websites alongside the daily color versions.

    1. The Seattle Times prints two pages of comics in B&W. They are online in the print replica (scroll to the end of the menu)

    2. While I agree that daily B&W strips are sacred, and should never have been “colorized,” I DO, however find them “pretty and bright!”… especially online.
      At LEAST they are colored by the creators themselves – or, possibly colorists employed by each strip’s syndicate, respectively. Back in the day, they were colored at the level of each paper’s staff (and were pretty “dull” in their hues)!
      Having said all this, I wish the Dallas Morning News would go full color on all their strips. They feature color on the front and back page of their four page Comics and Puzzles section, with the two inside pages in B&W…except on Friday, to celebrate their weekend edition. Rather frustrating, if you collect a drama strip, like Judge Parker, and each week’s six installments feature only the fifth strip in full color. (AAAUUGH!)

      1. I have seen many a 1970s-era Archie daily strip where “Carrot Top” has blond hair, even white in one instance.

        In the late 1950s, the Chicago Tribune had the Saturday comic page in color for a time, but for a long time adding color to the daily strips was seemingly limited to publishers wanting to show off new equipment.

        It wouldn’t be until the mid-late 90s when publishers, facing diminishing interest for both newspapers and comic strips, began offering the daily funnies in color regularly. If I remember correctly, Universal Press was the first syndicate to offer its daily comics in color back in 1999.

  2. I wonder when the Post-Dispatch added a blue plate to their pallet. When I first encountered their colored dailies in the ’70s, I certainly don’t recall them looking like a weird variation on two-strip Technicolor where it’s impossible to make green.

    1. Looking at old newspaper comics posted on Facebook, green was added sometime during the mid-late 60s, while they finally became able to use blue by the early-mid 70s.

    2. I have an answer! They added blue January 1, 1966. When they launched color on daily pages in 1948, they claimed they were using red, yellow, and “blue-black.”

  3. I wish the Post would use the money that they are wasting on color comics to preserve the jobs of all the people that they have fired in recent months.

  4. The Chicago Tribune circa 1976 to the mid 1980’s ran Peanuts dailies occassionally in color.

  5. Saw the pages, they rearranged everything so the comics occupy both pages whereas, save for “Doonesbury” and “Pickles”, the strips were quite smaller, with bridge and horoscope columns running at the outer edges. Unfortunately, the panel features (“Speed Bump”, “Dennis the Menace”, “Family Circus” and “Reply All”) look quite odd in the little space they’ve been allocated at the bottom right corner of the second comic page.

    A little tidbit: For the very first time in its 14-year run, Kelley and Parker’s “Dustin” ran an old strip (from 2010). Seems the crew finally ran too late on delivering the strips to the syndicate.

  6. I am a Washington Post reader. I object to the new color of the daily comics. Will it make them funnier? Will it increase the pay of the people who make them or just distract them from doing what’s important? Once again, people are using technology–here affordable color prnting of newspapers–just because it’s available, not because it improves anything.

    1. Exactly. And in order to cram all the comic strips onto the color pages, they have put all the games on one page, which looks horrific. Where is the ‘style’ in the style section?

  7. The artwork has changed on the comic strip Dustin as shown in the Wash. Post–the change started on Sept. 23rd when the weekly comics went to color–any comments ? Thanks for your response.

    1. The change, most pronounced in the father’s nose, is due to the strip being in reruns from the comic’s first year – 12 years ago. As is the case universally the art has evolved over that time.

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