By Ayo
I’ve been thinking a lot about the North American comic strip as a medium of expression and as a cultural institution. Comic strips are the most widely seen form of the comics medium, but almost the last thing that comes to mind when people hear the term “comics.” Part of this might be that we take our strips for granted, but another part has a lot to do with how the rest of the comics medium seems to have cut off contact with the comic strip segment.
I differ from many of my comic book peers because I like comic strips a lot. I even read the newspaper.
I sometimes fear that I have read my last graphic novel. I know that this is not literally true, but it feels that way. I cannot seem to invest in the hour (more or less) of time that it takes to read a graphic novel, although I read comic strips just about every day.
There are a few things that appeal to me about comic strips:
1) Specificity: what comic strips do is unique to comics. While comic books share parallels with episodic television or literary short stories and graphic novels parallel prose novels and feature-length motion pictures, comic strips are an oddity because they are specifically COMICS. In comic strips there is no sense of competition with, or aspiration for other mediums. And I like that.
2) Time: comic strips don’t demand much of the reader’s time, on a daily basis. This is important because I’m a harried and desperately disorganized person.
3) Cultural: people who are not geeks read them. That may not be important to most of you, but it has significance to me. Since I was a teen, I’ve agonized and tortured myself over comics and the medium’s general lack of a popular cultural foothold. All of those years, I pretty much neglected that mainstream people have loved comics all along.
Interesting about comic strips is how design comes into play in a much different fashion than in comic books. In comic books, a great deal of energy is expended toward creating different page designs throughout a story. This keeps the form free-moving and somewhat wild. Comic strips have variety of designs, but many strips such as Peanuts (prior to 1989) and Doonesbury have a rigid design that seldom changes. Comic book enthusiasts sometimes see this as boring. I tend to see it as liberating in a different way.
By taking the focus off of the panel count and layout of the page as a unit, fixed-ratio comic strips make their panel borders become invisible—imperceptible. Just as how we don’t notice the edges of the television set or the movie screen, the perimeters of Doonesbury’s reality fade from our consciousness and the reader is compelled deeper into the panels.
The design of these strips wins for me precisely because it does not draw attention to itself. The panels are equal size and equal in number each day.
Since the comics medium suffers from a long-term inferiority complex, humor is often looked down upon. Which is obviously ironic because the name of the medium is “comics.” The thing that’s silly is that there seems to be a general retreat in most quarters from humor as an end to itself.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of the humorless cartoonists of the modern age, but I think that in the culture’s quest for the Great Books of comics that might stand on a shelf with prose’s Great Works, our comics culture has lost sight of humor as a perfectly sufficient motivation to make work and to read work.
I’m a humorless comics person as well. I personally come out of the same tradition of comics enthusiasts searching for Great Works and legitimacy for this artform. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been learning to stop worrying and love the bomb. Not everything needs to have a grand philosophical and sociological meaning to it. It isn’t even healthy to spend so much time searching for such things.
The first comic that I ever read was Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. My mom read one of the Sunday pages to me and I’ve loved it ever since. Not too much later, my dad told me about the secret of Peanuts. But I was too young to care about “adult issues” and “psychological problems.” Aaron McGrudder’s The Boondocks brought me back to newspapers in the late 1990s.
During all of that time, Doonesbury has been a constant fixture of the daily comics. A “grown up” comic, sure, but now I am a grown up. These days, Doonesbury is my favorite. Simple in its graphic scope but agile enough to keep abreast of America’s 24-hour culture. It’s known more for being an overtly political commentary work, but there are characters and those characters do have their charm.
In the end, character is what I care about the most in comics. And in movies and novels and television programs. I can lose myself for hours in a good character. For that, I don’t need to spend hours reading about that character—just a compelling minute of time per day is enough to give me a boost and scratch my comics itch.
That’s where I’m coming from these days.
(Doonesbury January 16, 2012 - January 21, 2012. (C) Garry Trudeau)
(Source: littlegardencomics.com)
