The first of the strips that I read was Little Nemo. I had some prior exposure to Little Nemo via an Animation History course, friends, and the fantastic McCay exhibit that took place on campus. I found it interesting that the first of the Nemo strips included both dialogue and narration text, but as time went on, the narration began to disappear altogether. I remember thinking that both the narration and dialogue together made for a very broken and turbulent read which left my eyes darting around the page, but it was fun to see how quickly the strip evolved, having most likely gain self-awareness on the issue that pictures can speak for themselves. I also noticed that as time progressed, the strip allowed itself to get past that repetitive first step of having to lead Nemo into Slumberland and began to start off right in the middle of a scenario. While charming, I did find a lot of the Nemo strips to be rather repetitive, of course ending with Nemo awaking and realizing some reason for having had his odd dream. Despite the inevitable ending, the journeys that took place inside Slumberland were very interesting and the characters that became mainstays, such as Flip, added a lot more to the experience.
In Nemo, as with Krazy Kat, the strip is very telling of the era in which they were made, yet they are completely different in style. Everything about Little Nemo seemed sophisticated. The dialogue used in Nemo was very proper and the art that filled the panels could almost stand alone by itself as individual art pieces. So much thought and planning seemed to go into the Nemo strips, while Krazy Kat on the other hand was just a wild and sometimes violent sketch comedy on paper, with the use of slang and broken English, and scratchy drawings that looked like Herriman finished them the night before they were due. While I love both the strips, I feel my personal comic preference is more of the Krazy Kat approach. Thinking back to what McCloud said in Understanding Comics about the abstraction and simplification of character, I feel I was able to put myself in Krazy Kats shoes more often than Nemos and view the comic from that vantage point. With Little Nemo, I always read it as a story about a boy named Nemo, not me as Nemo. Perhaps that is just me. Also, it took me all these years, but I finally made the connection between Itchy and Scratchy from The Simpsons and Ignatz and Krazy Kat. It hit me like a brick.
After reading Little Nemo and Krazy Kat, when I returned to more modern comics such as Charles Shultz's Peanuts and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, it was interesting to see how the medium had grown and was made more concise. I noticed that the contemporary comics tended to remove themselves from larger narratives such as Nemo and Krazy and focused more on more common human experiences. The strips used a lot more 'silent' panels that spoke for themselves than did Nemo or Krazy, which I often found to be the most charming and funniest. I always felt that Calvin and Hobbes was very philosophical in the points that it made, making excellent use of the polarity of their characters and their opposing viewpoints. Peanuts was very similar in this way, but was able to make more of a statement about different kinds of personalities because of the broader character base. I find it very clever and charming that both Schultz and Watterson, used children to discuss ideas that were often very mature, but kept their viewpoints from that of childhood innocence. Had the characters been adults, I'm not sure these comics could have lasted.
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