Eventually, they'll be so small you won't be able to read them

A full-page Gasoline Alley strip

It may be a sign of the times, and entirely beyond my control, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

My wife Liz was the first to notice the problem when she grabbed the newspaper last weekend. The Boston Globe has shrunk the Sunday comics, squeezing them into four pages instead of six and, presumably, cutting printing costs as a result. How far the mighty have fallen.

"When Sunday strips first appeared in newspapers, near the beginning of the 20th century, they were usually in the full-page size," according to a Wikipedia entry on comics formats. You read that right. Individual comic strips took up a full page in those days.

During World War Two, paper rationing and increased advertising in comics sections “led to fewer strips having a full page of their own” on Sundays. Many strips dropped to half of a page, or a third of a page. Nowadays, as cash-strapped newspapers plagued by circulation and advertising losses scramble to save money, “the funnies” are shrinking almost to the point of absurdity. Some panels are, literally, about the size of a large postage stamp.

With the advent and growing popularity of big-screen computers, maybe the day will come when the Internet will be the salvation of the comic strip. Still, it’s dispiriting to see this once-great American art form treated like so much filler, as the death watch for print-based newspapers drags on.

A full-page Krazy Kat strip