The Comic Strip

This week I read comic strips from Little Nemo, Peanuts, and Krazy Kat. It was very interesting to see the amount of invention and experimentation that took place in the early stages of comics. It was a new art form that hadn't been fully developed so artists tested design limits and convention. In Little Nemo, lots of tall, narrow panels were used to create a sense of space and scale. In Krazy Kat the artist didn't seem to ever stick to one kind of page layout in the way other artists did. Strips like the Peanuts were all unified with a similar layout of panels. However, Krazy Kat didn't worry about unifying the different strips with the same format, the drawing and narrative style was what unified the stories instead. Sometimes the Krazy Kat strip wasn't a strip at all but a single panel. Sometimes it was a collage of panels. I noticed the panels were numbered which you don't see today in contemporary comics. I think it was because the artist was so inventive with page layouts plus comic strips were so new, how to read them might not have been common knowledge. I also noticed the Krazy Kat dialogue had a very strange vernacular. It seemed to be a mix of several different dialects. The colorful language, collaged panels, as well as the loony narratives made the strip seem chaotic. The character dynamics reminded me of cartoons like Tom and Jerry and Loony Toons while the art style reminded me of Maus and the overall aesthetic and tone reminded me of early disney animations.  The chaos of Krazy Kat was very different from the Peanuts which was both visually and narratively simpler. Charlie Brown and the Peanuts is a strip I was already familiar with because of the animated movies and the fact that the strip was still being published in the Sunday newspaper when I would read the newspaper strips when I was younger. For that reason, reading the original strips from the 1950s was very interesting. I noticed a change in style and design. For instance, Charlie Brown didn't have his iconic zig-zag on his shirt. I also didn't realize just how young the children actually were. At one point Charlie Brown reveals he is only four years old. I think Charlie Brown being so absurdly young makes the comedy more effective. Some of the humor is quite dark and self-deprecating. None of the other characters seem to like Charlie Brown. I remember one strip in particular where the storyline of the whole strip is just that a girl is skipping along, punches Charlie Brown in the face, and then continues on her way. I actually found myself enjoying the humor of the Peanuts more than that of any of the other strips I read. I think the simplicity of the art style made it possible for viewers to both laugh at Charlie Brown but still identify with him even though he's never particularly heroic is is quite ordinary and almost ludicrously plain. The next strips I read were Calvin and Hobbes which was my favorite artistically. I appreciated how the artist was able to provide subtext without text at all, just by drawing things a certain way or using certain compositions. The character of Hobbes jumps back and fourth from being just a stuffed animal to a real tiger. The artist shows when Hobbes is supposed to be a stuffed animal by drawing him in the same style he draws other inanimate objects like furniture. However, when Hobbes is supposed to be a real, talking tiger he is drawn in the same style as the human characters like Calvin and the father.