Newspaper comic strips have always had a peculiar relationship with time. They arrive every day, we spend a few moments with them, and then we move on. “Comics are impermanent, transient,” Patrick wrote years ago. “They come into being in the daily newspaper and then disappear into recycling bins.”

The Sunday comics are larger, more colorful, and are given more room to make an impression, but they are just as fleeting. A page appears on Sunday morning and, a week later, another takes its place. That is why comic strip book collections are so important and fun. This fall, AbramsComicArts books will begin publishing the complete MUTTS Sunday Funnies — the complete Sunday page library. The first two volumes contain, in chronological order, every MUTTS Sunday from 1994-1998.

So, lately we’ve been spending time with the earliest MUTTS Sundays again. Looking at them now is different from remembering them.

In these first strips, Earl and Mooch are unmistakably themselves, but they haven’t quite grown and settled in to their current selves. Mooch was a bit lankier and his tail was longer. Earl’s nose and ears changed in shape and size. Their looks seemed to morph during those years. Many of the characters who would eventually be important in their world haven’t yet arrived. The artwork is more sketch-like, the color is still being worked out, and there is a real sense of experimentation on the page.

Patrick sees that too. “I love my early strips, their looseness and experimental spirit,” he writes in looking back at these years. “Not completely knowing what you’re doing, having faith and letting go is at the heart of creativity.”

By late 1995, he felt that he had found his footing; by 1996, he says he was “in the zone.” MUTTS was becoming MUTTS. But knowing where it eventually went makes the quality of those first pages more interesting. We can see choices being made before they became habits, characters taking form before they became familiar, and ideas appearing before anyone knew they would last.

There is something else in those early pages that hasn’t changed very much at all. From the very beginning, the strip looked at life from the animals’ point of view. Their friendship, their delight in ordinary things, their closeness to nature and the seasons, their uncomplicated desire to love and be loved. More than thirty years later, that world still feels recognizably the same.

Perhaps that's one of the pleasures of going back to the beginning. You notice what changed, but you also notice what was there all along.

Over the next several weeks, we’re going to spend a little more time with these Sunday pages, exploring how they were drawn, how they were composed, where their colors and influences came from, and what else ecomes visible when we slow down and look again.

We're excited to begin this journey with you and to start where MUTTS began.

The most obvious difference between a daily comic strip and a Sunday page is size. There is more room on the page for the art. But the extra space changes something less noticeable unless you look for it.

Timing.

A daily strip is an exercise in compression. Patrick has compared the best comics to haiku: brief, pared down to their essence, with nothing unnecessary getting in the way. As newspaper strips became smaller over the years, the familiar four-panel gag often became three panels with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Set up the situation, let something happen, bring it home.

Sundays loosen that rhythm and allow the strip to breathe. “The daily strips are the heart and soul of any comic,” Patrick writes in looking back at the first years of MUTTS, “but the Sundays are where you get to sing and dance with all that glorious space and vibrant color.”

You can see that freedom in the pages. A Sunday can linger on a look between Earl and Mooch instead of moving directly to the next line. It can spend a panel on a reaction that isn’t strictly necessary to understand the joke but deepens it. The characters have time to walk through a landscape, sit beneath the moon, or simply be quiet for a moment or two.

Patrick has always been particularly interested in those pauses. In talking about the difference between dailies and Sundays, he described resisting the urge to get too quickly to the punch line: “I show a little more of the thought process of what the characters are doing and thinking.”

That extra beat can change a strip considerably. We can see Mooch pausing before he speaks. We have time to register Earl’s expression. A joke can remain a joke while acquiring a little tenderness along the way.

The larger page also opened up more possibilities for the storytelling itself. Some MUTTS Sundays are pantomimes, told entirely without words. Others use scenery, shifts in scale, or the arrangement of the page to carry part of the story. By 1997 and 1998, Patrick was becoming noticeably more adventurous with both storytelling and layout, continually experimenting to see what the page could do.

And of course, there is color.