For much of the history of American editorial cartooning, the standard format has held strong: a bold, single image carrying the entire metaphoric weight of the opinion being expressed.
Major mainstream contests have reflected that primacy, including the Pulitzer Prizes for nearly a century, and more recently the RFK Award and the Herblock Prize, named for the longtime Washington Post cartoonist. Sure, occasionally the Pulitzer would go to the creator of a multi-panel comic strip (Garry Trudeau, Berkeley Breathed and Jules Feiffer) or a political animator (Mark Fiore), but the traditional editorial cartoon dominated, friendly as it sat within the print newspaper’s opinion pages.