Week 3: Comic Strips

For this week, we had to delve into the topic of comic strips. I in particular chose to focus on Calvin and Hobbes. This title has always intrigued me but before this, I never found the time to sit down and really read some of Bill Watterson’s works. Considering the sheer amount of people I know who say Calvin and Hobbes is their favorite comic strip (a friend of mine has had a cat for 13 years named Mr. Hobbes), I was happy to finally join them.

What is interesting about comic strips is unlike  the form we typically equate with comics, comic books and graphic novels, comic strips must be accessible to all  and in small amounts. With exceptions to the rule with comics like Prince Valiant where there is a continuous ongoing story, the majority of comic strips must have a very contained story, limited to usually one line of panels or on occasion, a page. They tell their gag or their often humorous message and that is it for that story.

Calvin and Hobbes I found very interesting. It definitely played into the basic comic strip formula of small stories on a daily basis. The overall idea of the strip is its just following the adventures of Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes, who he sees as a real friend. What I noticed was how many of these strips didn’t rely on that gimmick to be entertaining. While an original idea, to have a small kid talking to his plushie as if it were real, one would think that the stories would get old over time. However, Calvin and Hobbes is about more than that. It’s more of a slice of life story about this little boy’s childhood, and Hobbes just happens to be a part of that. In several strips, Hobbes isn’t even in there.

Calvin and Hobbes also showed me that comic strips didn’t need constant light hearted gags. On several occasions, it was bringing up rather large topics for a comic mostly about a kid playing pretend. One sticks out in my mind where he and Hobbes are racing in his wagon and are wondering about very complicated subject matters like fate.

Being a daily strip, the writer no doubt had to pull from a variety of sources to find inspiration. Strips like the one mentioned above could just be the writer’s commentary on such topics, a random thought that popped into his head turned into a strip. Other strips include subtle political commentary, comparing Calvin saying ‘no girls allowed’ in his tree house to full sex discrimination. Its a rather dark comparison, but it adds to the humor. Some strips I couldn’t even guess where they got the inspiration from, the ideas seeming so random, but I suppose when you need to make a strip a day, there’s no harm in it.

Week 2: "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud

Reading the book “Understanding Comics” brought to light several interesting concepts dealing with the comic media, many I had never actually thought of before. In particular, I found it intriguing how he brought up the idea that even in a single panel, there is passage of time.

Normally when thinking of comics, the time passes between panels. However the image, unlike single images of other media where the image is taken as a snapshot of an event, within comics, time can pass even in that single frame. I think I was always semi aware of this, but I didn’t even register the difference until this book pointed it out. Comics have their own flow, one thats so different from non comic illustrations and even from movies. Its like they are their own moving picture on a page.

How is this possible? Well as McCloud brings up, the inclusion of speech bubbles to an amazing job separating the events. We read it like a book where we see the flow of time through sentences. Reading draws the time out for our brains, and due to regular sentence structure, reading from left to right (or right to left as seen in manga), it allows us to follow the speech bubbles. Because of this odd delay due to the words, we have context for the art and are able to read it just as we are a sentence in any other book.

I do find it interesting that the term for enjoying a comic is to ‘read’ it, just as you would a book. Some would say comics are almost closer to illustrations or even movies but you ‘read’ neither of those. Instead you ‘look’ at a painting and you ‘watch’ a movie. Even wordless comics, such as “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan, we read them even though there are no speech bubbles. 

Week 1: "The Arrival" by Shaun Tan

The Arrival is a beautiful example of why stories can be told purely visually. The art itself, each image contains a narrative and due to the clarity words become unnecessary to get what needs to be said across. This combined with the flow of the panels help paint a larger picture. If the art itself are words, then the panel layout could be akin to punctuation.

The art, despite being very surrealist in places with creatures and buildings that look like they came from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, maintains a surprising level of realism. The people are all drawn in a very realistic style, perhaps letting the reader have a easy time identifying and understanding both their facial expressions and their actions. There is little room for guess work with these. Our protagonist is drawn scratching his head, looking just like a normal guy performing this same action. It is easily understood he is confused.

Another cue for what is going on in the story is far more subtle. The novel, despite containing only sepia tones shows an impressive display of color. It differs from scene to scene, which helps the viewer understand that we have moved on. It goes from being nearly grayscale in some scenes to being a much warmer very yellow tone in others. In the page with the clouds all in different colors and the flowers going through the seasons, it is a great way to show passage of time. 

The panel size is also an important story telling device you really can only get from graphic novels. The smaller the panel, typically the less important. The viewers eyes skim through them fast and collect the details needed in a pretty cursory way. Because of this, the time between smaller panels is represented as less. The huge page spreads often have huge amounts of detail and story contained within a single image so we can take in much more information. For each immigrant, a single large page is given in explanation for what was wrong with their old home. No words are needed but we understand what they are running from, no matter how surreal.

All these things carry emotion and despite not knowing word for word what was going on, we are still able to take in the full picture of this strange story. If anything, its more akin to how we take in information on a daily basis as opposed to reading a book.