Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "The Comics" by M. Thomas Inge (©1990 by Smithsonian Institution).

Comic art has much in common with all the other forms of literary and visual communication of the twentieth century. Ás in fiction, the elements of narrative, characterization, and setting are important in accomplished comic art; and as in poetry, ideas must be developed within a very short period of reading time, a few seconds for a comic strip and fifteen minutes or less for a comic book story. As in drama, a story or incident must be staged before our eyes within the artificial strictures of a box-like frame and with all the limitations of a play in terms of compressed time, dialogue, and plot development. As in a motion picture, such visual devices as cutting, framing, close-ups, and montage are used by the comic artist, and the point-of-view is free to roam the world over to places known and fantastic.

Although the comics share a good deal with other forms of artistic expression, they differ in distinct ways and provide a method of communication which is ultimately unique. For one thing, comics depend for their effectiveness on a balanced combination of word and picture, the one depending fully on the other for maximum effect. Thus some commentators have suggested that in comic strip art, if either the picture or the text is not essential to understanding, then a proper balance is lacking.

There are other essential features of comic art, which distinguish it from other art forms. For example, comic strips appear on a daily basis in newspapers delivered to homes, while comic books appear on a monthly basis in special serial publications sold at newsstands or comic book shops (and more recently a few bookstores). Both are usually printed on inexpensive paper, and while comic books generally appear in color, comic strips have traditionally been in color only on Sundays.

Another distinguishing feature is that most comic strips and books feature a set of recurring characters with whom the reader becomes familiar over a period of time, with an occasional retelling of their past histories in capsule form. It is the accumulative weight of familiarity over several months or years of reading experience with the characters through which the development of personality occurs, although many characters remain essentially the same throughout their lifetimes. Especially in humor, a set of stock and stereotyped players is essential to the daily comic routines, formulaic repetition being one of those techniques which most often make people laugh (as in Charlie Brown's unsuccessful attempt to kick the football held annually by Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip).

Time is also treated differently in that generally it has no effect on the lives of characters in the comics. They do not grow old chronologically (with the notable exception of Gasoline Alley in which several generations of a family have grown old along with the readers). The dramatic narrative is open-ended and the action, whenever the reading experience begins, is always somewhere in the middle. Thus comics characters inhabit a world that has no beginning and no end, that remains constant and is shored up against the usual influences of change and deterioration. Only in the case of politically satiric strips, such as Doonesbury, Bloom County, or Pogo, are immediately contemporary events and personalities reflected or depicted in the comics.

Since comics characters inhabit a world of silence, due to the restrictions of the printed page which cannot allow for motion and sound, dialogue and noise require a special set of conventions. Words are usually spoken in cloud-like puffs of smoke called balloons. Because of the limited amount of space, dialogue must be kept to an absolute minimum and the joke or story told with the fewest words possible, a continual challenge to the skills of the writer of a comic. As for sounds, the comic artist must resort to the poetic device of onomatopoeia, and while many traditional words such as slam, bang, sock, smash, or bump will serve the situation, new word coinages have proven necessary. Thus the comics have enriched American English by such contributions as wow, plop, zowie, bam, and whap. In order to convey ideas which cannot be expressed with words, the comic artist has also developed a vocabulary of visual symbols, such as bubble balloons for silent thoughts, stars to show pain, drops of water to express labor or worry, or radiating lines to convey pride or enlightenment. It is remarkable how effective these conventions are in creating the impression of a loud and noisy medium.