Here's Rudolph Dirks' "Katzenjammer Kids" from 1902! Click to enlarge. This is better than anything in the funnies now and it's more than a hundred years old! Good Grief! Where did we go astray!?
I love the spacious layouts. Having room to breathe makes the action funnier somehow.
How about an Alphonse & Gaston page (above) from 1904? The writing isn't exactly Hamlet but it doesn't impede the graphics like most TV writing these days. .
Here's (above) a George McManus page from 1906. Once again, the story isn't much but it enables funny, beautiful layouts and that's no small thing.
16 comments:
Hey Eddie
those are all great but you oughta scan them at higher resolution so we can make out some details!
Otherwise your argument may not come across as strong as it could.
yeh! I support John. I really want to read those comics.
>I love the spacious layouts. Having room to breathe makes the action funnier somehow.
Hmmm.. I was gonna say, and John sort of beat me to it, I bet the reason more space works is you can actually SEE the details, or you actually have the option available. I miss the days when Sunday comics were full pages, even thought I wasn`t born then.
The closest thing the modern comics had to that spacious pantomime style of the first comic were the later Calvin & Hobbes Sunday pages which had very experimental lay outs and half of the time, no words at all. Ok, well maybe 1/4 of the time. But they were great!
Eddie, any good book collections of old comics? What do you recommend?
Jorge: Buy any anthology by Bill Blackbeard!
John: I just checked the pictures and you're right, they're small and out of focus. I've scanned large pictures at that resolution before and they turned out fine. I wonder if my scanner is on the Fritz. Anyway thanks for telling me!
I will wait with bated breath for an eddie edit so we can see what he's talking about :3
Happy Hooligan, Alphonse & Gaston, the Captain, etc. are all great cartoon characters. What's so great about these is that the artist's "style" doesn't get in the way of telling the jokes.
Interesting that these are all staged in "full shots" - like you'd see them on a vaudville stage. Here's a theory: DW Griffith hadn't "invented" the close-up yet (He started directing at Biograph in 1908) so these comics are staged as you'd see the action on a stage or in a movie of the era.
Physical comedy really does stage better in the full shot. This is also true in animation.
But I've never seen multiple actions at the same time in a shot done well in animation. For example, Panel 7 of the Katzenjammers, in a movie you'd probably want to see individual shots of the cook clean up the spilt food, the sailor trip over the oil barrel, Mama's reaction, etc. In motion this moment would only last a second, but in the comic panel we can savor it.
In animation (same as movies) you could show each of these actions in a shot, edit between them so the audience gets the full picture, and then maybe pull back to the wide shot and show the big impact that happens between panel 7 and 8. Or - (Hanna Barbera style) - Show the cook clean up mess - then show the sailor on the barrel (he's running backwards on the barrel as the barrel rolls toward cook) - pan with sailor - he exit frame - camera shake for his off screen impact - then cut to sailor & cook piled up as in panel 8. Intercut reactions from Mama & Captain as needed.
Either of these ways (and probably a bunch of other editing approaches) would get a laugh in a cartoon - but you really wouldn't want to animate all 5 characters in the scene altogether. There'd be too much happening at the same time and the audience would miss the joke.
The colors are so beautiful... different inks? Different grades of paper for sure. You'll never see many of those colors in the crap strips they run today.
These old comic strips are my favorite! Thank God for them being reprinted in books! I can stare at them for hours...genius cartooning!
Aside from the old comics being funny, many were also brilliantly written for comedy/adventure stories. I'm currently reading Segar's Popeye strips..Not only are they really funny, but the stories and ADVENTURES are completely gripping! I just can't put 'em down!
It's sad to say, but I feel that the comic strip business is in much worse condition than the animation business today. Your examples posted here are proof that comic strips have potential to be one of the world's greatest art forms. Too bad the papers, the syndicates, and the "artists" today won't let the medium be what it is capable of. I would love to see our country's love for comic strips make a huge comeback oneday. But that's just me dreaming again. What a shame.
Today, I posted an analysis of various newspaper comics by Gene Byrnes. Check it out.
See ya
Steve
Hey Eddie,
I reposted the "Li'l Abner" comic, I won on E-bay. The pictures were not scanned on a high resolution. You can see the brush strokes on the comic now by clicking on them.
Link:
http://banjobeaver.blogspot.com/
Injoy Y'all.
Steve: That's my favorite how-to-draw book. It teaches by inspiring the reader with exciting examples.
AB: I'm envious!
I have a collection of Buster Brown and one of Katzenjammers that I pickd up back in the 70's.
They are really funny. If I'm not mistaken every cartoonist must bend over and kiss Outcault's ass.
I wish I had more. I don't how much of the era has ever been reprinted and bound. as a kid I used to go the the Library in downtown Chicago and look at old newspaper comics on microfilm.
Didn't Daffy have kids named Alphonse and Gaston in a WB short??
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