Blondie (comic strip) over all he surveys, with one notable exception—his formidable and domineering wife, Cora. Blondie and Dagwood's best friends are their next-door neighbors Herb and Tootsie Woodley, although Dagwood and Herb's friendship is frequently volatile. Lou is the burly, tattooed owner of Lou's Diner, the less-than-five-star establishment where Dagwood often eats during his lunch hour. Other regular supporting characters include the long-suffering mailman, Mr. Beasley; Elmo Tuttle, a pesky neighborhood kid who often asks Dagwood to play; and a never-ending parade of overbearing door-to-door salesmen. There are several running gags in "Blondie", reflecting the trend after Chic Young's death for the
Comic strip formats readers did not realize there were only seeing part of what the artist drew, and the artists were forced into increasingly restrictive formats to make dropping panels possible. Today, only the "Reading Eagle" and a few other newspapers run any of their Sunday strips in the complete half-page format. The Sunday "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip was so popular that the artist insisted that it fill half of a page, although many editors ran a shrunken version of the same strip. That strip has since ended, and today the only strip that requires the half-page format, though not necessarily the