When I was a kid harboring dreams of someday creating a nationally syndicated newspaper strip of my own, I was forewarned by the Famous Artists Cartooning Course (a 24-lesson correspondence course I took while in high school) about the liberties individual newspapers would feel entitled to take with my future comic strip, no matter how well I were to write or draw it.

I was instructed to make certain panels — and even whole tiers of panels — expendable in the case of Sunday strips because editors would want the freedom to chop them up, rearrange the panels, and omit whole sections of the strip to save space. Succinct humor would be impossible; there had to be extraneous padding so that the jokes would still make sense after editorial amputations were completed.

I was told to make sure nothing important to a gag or storyline was placed in the bottom quarter-inch of a daily strip, since that section was routinely shaved off by editors who wanted to squeeze more features onto a page even if it cramped the effectiveness of each individual strip.

Then came the demand from editors for wholesale shrinkage of all syndicated comic strips all the time. No more Mr. Nice Editor. Page space was money.

Expertly drawn strips like Apartment 3G and Li’l Abner had to begin skimping on dynamic action and/or physical comedy. Atmospheric vistas of Manhattan and Dogpatch had to give way to endless close-ups of characters hunching awkwardly downward in their frames so that their expressive eyebrows would remain in view underneath word balloons that hogged more and more pictorial real estate (since you can’t shrink text too much or it will become illegible).

The whole mass diminutivization requirement was grossly insulting to a creatively transcendent art form that in its heyday had spawned timeless classics like Krazy Kat and Little Nemo in Slumberland — strips whose beautifully crafted imagery invited rapt contemplation whether they the pictures were spare or elaborate.

And the disrespect was made even more humiliating by the industry’s requirement that cartoonists cooperate in making the children of their imaginations ever more chop-uppable, rearrangeable, and ready to be mashed tightly into whichever jammed corners of their newspapers could be spared for such frivolous fare

Now of course, everything has been made easier by the digital revolution. Charles M. Schulz needn’t be involved at all in the mutilation of his honored offspring. All that’s required is some art department underling who knows how to mash a masterwork flat with Photoshop.

But maybe this kind of thing doesn’t happen in your local newspaper, just mine.