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.

Then there is color.

The Sunday pages open up a visual vocabulary that simply isn’t available in the black-and-white newspaper dailies. A winter sky can establish the mood before anything happens. A patch of green can make the outdoors feel expansive. Color can be playful or atmospheric and, occasionally, become the point of the page itself.

For Patrick, Sunday color also carried a history. He had grown up looking at the extraordinary early newspaper comics of Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, and George Herriman. Those pages had colors that were rich, unusual, and painterly. Looking back at those old Sunday funnies, Patrick remembers being “in awe of the chromatic beauty.”

When MUTTS began in the 1990s, newspaper comics were smaller and their colors tended to be flatter and more primary. Patrick initially assumed that was simply all that modern newspaper reproduction allowed. The early MUTTS Sundays show him discovering otherwise.

Look through the pages in sequence and the change is visible. The first experiments were more tentative: 

Gradually his palette becomes more subtle and assured. Grays soften other colors. One tone fades into another. Skies become atmospheric rather than simply blue. Color begins to establish season, weather and mood as naturally as the drawing itself.

The changing Sunday title panels helped push that experimentation further. Trying to evoke the feeling of a Japanese woodblock print, a Hopper painting, or a Vermeer within the limits of newspaper color required Patrick to look closely at what made each image work. What colors really mattered? What could be simplified while preserving the feeling of the original? Those weekly experiments inevitably found their way back into the rest of MUTTS.

Patrick is affectionate about the learning curve. “You can see some awkward attempts on a few of these very early pages,” he writes. With time and experimentation, “I soon found my color voice.”

Seen together now, the Sundays allow us to watch that voice emerge.

Of course, there is another question hidden behind all this color: how did a watercolor painted at Patrick’s drawing table actually become the colors readers saw in their Sunday newspapers?

That involved watercolor copies, printer’s guides, handwritten numbers and a fair amount of unpredictability.

We’ll come back to that.

At the far left of a traditional Sunday comic is a small space with an oddly dismissive name: the “throwaway panel.” It usually contains the name of the strip, and newspapers are free to leave it out when they need the space. For that reason, most cartoonists have historically used the same title panel week after week. There are, after all, another 51 Sunday pages to make before the year is over.

Patrick did almost the opposite.

Inspired by George Herriman, who continually reinvented the Krazy Kat logo, he began making a different MUTTS title panel for each Sunday. At first the designs were his own and related in some way to the story that followed. Then, on October 1, 1995, he drew the title in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of his favorite painters. Something opened up. The little panel at the edge of the page became a place where MUTTS could meet the rest of the visual world.

A painting might become a MUTTS title. So might a Japanese woodblock print, a comic book, an album cover, an advertisement, a movie poster, or a children’s book. Sometimes the connection to the Sunday was straightforward; sometimes the borrowed image gave the story an unexpected twist.

The story nearly always came first. Patrick has said that “ninety-nine percent of the time” he would write the Sunday joke and then go through his “memory bank” looking for an image that somehow belonged with it.

That distinction is important. The title panels weren’t simply opportunities to reproduce favorite works of art. They were another part of the cartooning: a visual idea responding to the idea in the strip. And because they were made for newspaper reproduction, translation was necessary. How do you suggest the quiet luminosity of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid with four-color newsprint? What happens to a Hiroshige print when Earl and Mooch enter its world? Can something that began as a comic, became Pop Art, and then returns to the comics page still carry traces of all three?

Patrick particularly enjoyed that last bit of circularity. Of his tributes to Andy Warhol’s paintings of Dick Tracy and Popeye, he wrote, “I love the full circle of the newspaper cartoon becoming fine art and then the fine art becoming a newspaper cartoon.”

The range kept widening. There were nods to Renaissance paintings, modern art, Picasso, Mattie’s, Cubism, children’s books illustration, Italian advertisements, George Herriman, Chester Gould, Will Eisner, and Robert Crumb; to Hiroshige and other Japanese printmakers; to album art by Cal Schenkel; and eventually to paintings whose color and texture were remarkably ambitious things to attempt on a newspaper press. Some weeks, the homage escaped the title panel and took over the entire Sunday.

All of this took time, and there is something appealingly impractical about that. Patrick later acknowledged that the title-panel tributes could be challenging and time-consuming. And, of course, some newspapers didn’t even print them. But that may be part of what makes them so interesting to look at now. A part of the Sunday page designed to be disposable became, instead, a place for curiosity, affection, experimentation, and play.

The throwaway panel turned out to be worth keeping.

A comic strip is a strange kind of work because it is always due again.

Before MUTTS, Patrick had spent years as a magazine illustrator. An illustration had a deadline, certainly, but it was still a discrete piece of work: finish it, send it off, begin something else. A daily comic had an entirely different rhythm.

"Nothing really prepares you for doing a daily comic strip,” he wrote in MUTTS: The Comic Art of Patrick McDonnell. “The daily deadline is a funny way to make art. There is little time for reflection. You don’t live with a piece, you live with the process. There’s always the next one.”

When MUTTS began, “the next one” meant 312 daily strips and 52 Sundays every year.

“That’s a lot of scribbling!” Patrick writes in looking back on those first years. He had dreamed of drawing a newspaper comic since childhood, but the dream came with the practical requirement of filling another blank piece of paper tomorrow, and another one the day after that. He remembers entering those first years with “equal parts faith and fear, learning the craft in public, one strip at a time.”

Where do enough ideas come from?

Not always from sitting down with one fully formed. Patrick’s sketchbooks are full of fragments: drawings, scraps of dialogue, observations, images that may or may not lead anywhere. Sometimes the drawing itself produces the idea. He has described sketching a random scene or situation, putting Mooch into it, and waiting to see what happens. Because Mooch can be unpredictable even to the person drawing him, the character becomes a collaborator of sorts. One mark leads to another; an expression suggests a thought; eventually a strip begins to take shape.

At other times, the world outside the drawing board supplies something. Birds have flown in and out of MUTTS for years, and Patrick once noted the practical reason: “A cartoonist sitting at the drawing board in front of a huge window searching for an idea can find a lot of birds.”

Patrick has written about the anxiety familiar to anyone who has had to create on command: “You’re always wondering when the well will run dry.” Some ideas arrive like puzzles, with one piece appearing first and the cartoonist trying to find the piece that completes it. Others seem to arrive only after getting quiet enough to notice them.

And then the strip has to be drawn.

For all the talk of ideas and inspiration, Patrick has increasingly described cartooning as a craft. There is something resolutely physical about it: a hand, a pen, a bottle of ink, marks made on paper. The work is repeated so often that instinct develops alongside technique. Characters become easier to inhabit. A line gets surer. You begin to know what can be left out.

But the repetition does not lead toward a predetermined destination.

“You’re building a structure one brick at a time with no floor plans,” Patrick wrote. Unlike a novel, the daily strip has no final chapter toward which everything is moving. Earl and Mooch simply keep going out into the world and encountering whatever the next day brings.

That may help explain something we can see when the early MUTTS strips are placed back in sequence. What looks in retrospect like the development of a style or a body of work was not experienced that way while it was happening. There was no finished version of MUTTS waiting at the end of the process. The characters, the drawing, the humor, the Sunday pages, even the larger concerns of the strip emerged through the accumulated act of making it.

One strip. Then another.

Years later, the structure is visible.

But it was built a day at a time.