Sunday Newsday!

Martinex1: Today I would like to share a short tribute to the Sunday newspaper - a mainstay in the Bronze Age but perhaps now a disappearing anachronism.   Growing up, I was part of a family delivery team that handled the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, dropping off each neatly wrapped paper on many neighborhood doorsteps.   We would get bundles of "stuffing" delivered from the News Agency on Saturday night; the stuffing included all the advertisements, comic strips, TV guide, and arts pages.   The "news" would arrive early Sunday morning and we would marry the two and then set out to deliver.   If it was raining we would bag the papers otherwise we would rubber band them - two rubber bands for the unwieldy and thick Tribune.  That Sunday route taught me a lot about hard work, earning a living, and service to customers. 

Newspapers have played a significant role in comic books as well, with The Daily Planet and The Daily Bugle fitting into Superman and Spider-Man's fictional private lives. Reporters and photographers seemed like exciting careers that would keep the lead characters close to the action.

In real life, I was at my prime comic collecting age when I was delivering papers.  Sometimes the two aspects would cross paths - like when Spider-Man first appeared in the Tribune's comic pages battling a villain named the Rattler who didn't exist in the comic books but seemed suitably fit for Spidey's rogues gallery.  Or when a special Spider-Man and Hulk comic insert was included in the stuffing for a Sunday paper.    Those special newspaper comics are collectibles now   Here are a few samples including the one I recall from my youth in Chicago.

And of course I was always drawn to comic covers that had headlines or newspapers as part of the art.   I thought it was an interesting layout if characters were bursting through the headlines or reading a paper.

Who amongst us didn't enjoy the comic strips in full color in the Sunday paper?   Sunday was when the story always seemed to leap forward.  The daily three-panel strips were repetitive and merely set up the conflict; the Sunday action took it to the next level.   Spider-Man, DC's World's Greatest Heroes, and the Hulk all had strips when I was growing up.   But recently I have become more aware that many of our favorite heroes and characters had strips during the earlier decades.  Some books have collected those strips.

 Today we can take a look at a few Sunday strips of The Amazing Spider-Man, written by Stan Lee of course with art by the likes of John Romita and Alex Saviuk. 

 So what are your Sunday paper recollections?  Was your dog trained to fetch the delivery?  Did your father read the news while sipping a mug of black coffee?  Did the kids pull the comics and spread out on the floor reading each panel?   Did you skip over some and read others?   Did you catch your grandfather chuckling at the "funnies"?  Who had the better news organization - DC or Marvel with the Planet and the Bugle?   There were many good memories around the Sunday edition; share yours today (and tomorrow the BitBA gang will lead you on a whole new set of topics).   Cheers!