>>95092924>>95093217It's also so papers could rearrange the panels vertically if that's how they wanted to lay out a strip on a page. The first panel wouldn't necessarily need to be cut, since it's the same size as the others, but the throw away gag allows more leeway.
Bill Waterson notoriously hated those jokes because they were low-effort and wasting space, plus it meant papers might print the comic differently than intended. When Calvin and Hobbes got big, he started requiring any paper running his strips to use it exactly as is and that it would be a full page's width. Many of the later Sunday strips would be huge single panels or some sort of layout where they couldn't alter it even if they wanted to.
But Garfield has never been about creativity, so I imagine they keep the rigid format so it's able to be printed in as many papers as possible.
