When Lynn Johnston of "For Better or For Worse" was interviewed for this segment, we asked her what she saw as a benefit of cartoons appearing online. She described the advantages of people being able to view her work as she means for it to be viewed--full size drawings, with all the details visible. When asked the same question, Doug Pratt, sysop of the Comic Forum, suggested that online comic books will grow to include the ultimate interactivity--viewers telling artists and writers what they'd like a character's fate to be.
Freedom from print restrictions. The ability to have immediate online reaction and feedback. How did cartooning become so demanding? It's probably the medium's upbringing-- comic strips and comic books reflect the prevailing technology --and there is reason to believe that online transmission will have its influence, too.
Don't Ask Whether It's Art, Just Enjoy It
Comic strips and comic books are defined as sequential panels of art, with recurring characters, and dialog underlying the art or communicated in balloons. Comic strips that appeared in newspapers and comic books grew from a common heritage in mass communication and sales. Colored, Sunday strips first appeared in newspapers in the United States in the late 1800s as a device to sell papers. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World Sunday newspaper carried a comic from former newspaper illustrator Richard Outcault, who produced a recurring child character and his gang from "Hogan's Alley." The boy's nightshirt was imprinted with yellow newspaper tint. "The Yellow Kid," as he became known, started a fierce rivalry between competing newspapermen Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Hearst bought all the artists away from Pulitzer and started his own serial comics in the New York Journal.
The art of cartooning evolved under the constraints of printing technology. Presses were engraved and line illustration was used to convey information that would eventually come from photography. Illustration and drawings could provide clearly defined descriptions of events, places and people. Artists could also use their mass-produced drawings to subtly or not-so-subtly lampoon, ridicule and satirize those in power.
Many of the early cartoonists had been engravers for the newspapers and were responsible for providing factual representations of news. Critics have suggested that freedom from realism allowed the cartoonists to experiment with surreal and abstract art. Early strips were boisterous and dealt with obvious humorous situations. The art was variously crude and free spirited, or elegant and involved. Unlike today, artists often had a half a page for a story panel. This meant the art was a focal point of a continuing story.
Some of the first strips to appear and gain an audience included "Katzenjammer Kids," "Buster Brown" and "Happy Hooligan." A more contemporary strip, "Krazy Kat," drawn by George Herriman, was astoundingly well-rendered and tells the story often with no dialog whatsoever. Artists of the Abstract-Expressionist period, such as William de Kooning, Franz Klein and Philip Guston all looked to art from these comics for inspiration.
Other artists of this time period included Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger and George McManus. These artists all brought a more scholarly approach to the comic strips; the art was composed of a more technically refined approach that linked the pictures inextricably to the story. The turn-of-the-century through the 1930s saw a steady increase in the number of comic strips. Daily black and white strips followed. As black and white strips were cheaper to produce than color ones, they became a staple of the daily newspaper. Comic strips dealt with social issues such as families, women entering the work-force and the Depression. Elsewhere in the world strips were popular, but the approach to plot and art was slightly less integrated. For example, European comics of this time separated story from illustration with captions, and did not use speech balloons.
Movies and the Saturday matinee contributed to the rise in the late 1930s of the action adventure strip. "Terry and the Pirates," "Dick Tracy" and science fiction such as "Buck Rodgers" and "Flash Gordon" all attracted huge followings. The art in these strips tended to be more involved, as the storylines became serial installments which drew the reader back time and time again. Greater detail allowed the artist to create moods and allowed a more sophisticated and involved approach to story telling. The Belgian artist George Remy met with international success in his creation known as Tintin. An action adventure hero, Tintin was drawn with great detail and attention to the specifics of locale and props.
Comic Books and Shrinking Comics
Around this time, newspapers were beginning to decrease the amount of space available for comic strips in order to accommodate more advertising space. Stories had to become simpler because complex art work was undecipherable when reduced. Story lines often became trite. Paralleled with the gradually diminished role of the newspaper strips was the rise in popularity of comic books.
Comic books, it has been argued, were not exclusively an American creation. Although compilations of Sunday strips and graphic novels appeared in the teens and twenties, the Japanese mass produced comic books in the twenties. Often in color and highly popular, these books launched the careers of many cartoonists. A split from the illustrative style of comic strips to the more highly trained artistic style was evident with many of these comics.
Back in the U.S., comics as we know them were created by National Periodicals (now known as DC) and Timely (now known as Marvel), both of whom introduced super-heros in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The art and plot that accompanied "Superman" (1938) was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster and was originally produced for Action comics. The art was simple and subtle. Peculiar angles and dramatic page construction were the hallmarks of another legendary artist, Will Eisner, for the super-hero the Spirit. Other heroes included the Torch, the Sub-Mariner, and Captain America, all from Timely. Timely's artistic style has been described as "an explosion of color and forms in motion."
Although comic books provided cheap and easily accessible entertainment, they lost some of their luster after the Second World War. Comic books began to compete with television and films for the time and attention of comic book subscribers. Additionally, an emerging class of youth meant that new areas of revenue awaited publishers. This led to development of new genres of comic books, such as the teen comics, horror, science fiction, and characters from movies and television. The quality and style of the art varied dramatically. Art associated with the horror comics was often complex, dark, and forbidding--perfect for conveying the story.
The Last Thirty Years--Cynics and Shrinking Space
A growing sense of cynicism and an increase in the number of college students fueled the changes in cartooning after the war. Comic strips like "Peanuts," "Pogo" and "Feiffer" supported intelligent humorous observations with art that was either clean lines or highly detailed. Comic book artists Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko took artistic risks, using photographic backgrounds. For example, Jim Kirby introduced the notion of a single panel occupying an entire page and later occupying two contiguous pages. Kirby also introduced photographic backgrounds. Steranko used an irregular numbers of panels, used only three colors instead of four, created photo-collages or used art that exceeded panel boundaries. In the 1960s, underground comic books sidestepped the "Comics Code" drawn up in the 1950s to prevent distasteful or obscene material in comics.
Newspapers continued to decrease the space for strips. The change was coincident with the rise of superb new cartoonists. Sophisticated humor came from Garry Trudeau, while absurd, surreal comics came from Gary Larson. For this type of humor, only cartooning could allow the viewer to absorb the unspoken action that provides the surprise. Among contemporary artists, only Garry Trudeau's wildly popular "Doonesbury" is given full space in many papers. Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes," about a small boy and his stuffed tiger, also demanded that newspapers increase the space his Sunday strip received. Watterson has stated that great strips of the past, for example "Pogo," could never have been enjoyed at the current space constraints.
On Line Drawing
The outlook for comics online is exciting. As Doug Pratt said, "The potential for comics and interactivity is just beginning to be explored. Whatever combination of multimedia and online services can create living comic books, where the viewer actively determines the fate of his/her super-hero, waits to be unleashed." The old-time excitement about comics and appreciation of the work of the cartoonist awaits online. On the Comics and Animation Forum, cartoonists and creators like Bill Amend of "Foxtrot," Dik Browne of "Hagar the Horrible," "Moonshoots" Alfredo Alcalla, Pete Castiglia of "Sophistikats" and newer artists such as Dan Brereton can exchange ideas teach others, and innovate online.
