Newspaper Strips Research Articles

The Posed and the Transposed

Abstract This article draws on examples ranging from Richard F. Outcault's early twentieth-century newspaper strips to the more complex work of the German artist Wilhelm Schulz in a late nineteenth-century anarchist magazine to show how the format of sequential images can allow a play upon different levels of reality. Their simultaneous presentation, not time-bound like that of cinema, can subvert linear narrative progression and create a disturbing universe in which the boundaries between ontological levels become blurred. Schulz's image of a threatening sea monster encroaching upon the shore is compared to work by Expressionist, Symbolist and Surrealist artists in which the appearance of such creatures in liminal spaces evokes repressed psychic material, as waking life gives way to the irrational and the nightmarish.

‘Black lines on white paper’: how comic artist Barbara Brandon-Croft draws on Where [she’s] Coming from

ABSTRACT Barbara Brandon-Croft is the first African American woman to have a nationally syndicated mainstream newspaper comic strip. Her comic Where I’m Coming From was first published in the Detroit Free Press in 1989. Two years later it was nationally distributed when it was picked up by Universal Press Syndicate. This interview is a compilation of edited excerpts from two recorded interview sessions conducted with Barbara Brandon-Croft during the summer of 2022, and follow-up sessions that occurred in the fall of 2023. The conversation focuses on how Barbara’s experiences during her formative and adult years inspire the world depicted in Where I’m Coming From. We discuss her experiences while growing up in the predominantly Black neighbourhood of New Cassel, Long Island; her father Brumsic Brandon, Jr.’s influences on her career path; her undergraduate years at Syracuse University; and the inspirations behind the content in some of her strips.

Understanding Peanuts and Schulzian Symmetry: Panel Detection, Caption Detection, and Gag Panels in 17,897 Comic Strips Through Distant Viewing.

In this article, we applied distant viewing to a corpus of 17,897 comic strips from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts as a primary case study. Distant viewing uses computational techniques to study large-scale visual media, and draws upon interdisciplinary areas including visual media studies, cultural studies, data science, and semiotics. We focus on comic strips, particularly Peanuts, due to their widespread readership, historical and cultural cache, and complexity as a medium built on the interplay between text, image, and meaning. First, we discuss previous work done at the intersections of comics studies and computer vision. Next, we establish the processes for applying computer vision to comic strips. After that, we provide several examples, including: panel detection (variations in panel length over a cartoonist’s career); caption detection (identification and location of captions in panels); and comics paratext (computer vision analyses/exclusions of copyright text, signatures, dates, etc.). Combined studies of panel detection, caption detection, and comics paratext reveals new insights into the success, longevity, and influence of one of the world’s most famous newspaper comic strips. Ultimately, computer vision reveals a subtle stability and symmetry to Schulz’s artistry that played an understudied but significant role in the comic strip’s popularity.

“Loading memories…”: Deteriorating pasts and distant futures in Stuart Campbell’s These Memories Won’t Last

The field of comics has undergone palpable shifts in print and digital publishing cultures, from newspaper strips and zines to hardbound graphic novels and works still emerging in the era of Web 2.0. Comics that leave behind the aesthetic trappings of print to embrace digital platforms and media are known variously as digital comics, download comics, hypercomics and webcomics. This paper adopts the term “webcomics” to denote a precise, hybrid medium combining the visual-verbal grammar of comics with the capacious potentials of digitality. Through the case study of These Memories Won’t Last, a webcomic by Australian artist and graphic designer Stuart Campbell (known by his pseudonym, Sutu), I aim to explore the ways Campbell engages sound, animation and other interactive elements alongside drawings that render the lived experiences of his grandfather, who suffers from late-stage dementia. This paper considers how webcomics might transform the stasis of word-and-image to explore and communicate subjects that sit on the outer edges of representation, such as memory, identity and trauma. It responds to a new generation of artists who harness digital technologies to expand and revise the comics form and considers the potential effects of this practice on creating, reading and interpretating life stories.

“Modesty Blaise” Cut up in Sweden: The Challenges of Adapting a Newspaper Comic Strip to the Comic Book Format

New Readings provides a fully peer-reviewed platform for original research in the fields of literature, film, cultural history and visual culture. Aiming to stimulate debate between specialists from different disciplines, the journal has a strong, but by no means exclusive, interest in scholarship that cuts across traditional disciplinary and national boundaries, as well as comparative work, and is open to a variety of angles and methodological approaches. Submissions in languages other than English are considered for publication, as long as the choice of language is justified by the subject. The journal’s Open Access policy ensures a wide audience beyond academia. We welcome proposals for guest-edited themed issues.

La cuestión Malvinas en la Argentina del siglo XX: Una historia social y cultural

The war between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Malvinas Islands (also known as the Falklands in English) in 1982 has a prominent place in Argentine national politics as well as historiographical debates. In large part, this is because the war, based on Argentina's historic claims of sovereignty over the islands occupied by Great Britain since 1833, captured two seemingly contradictory processes: launched by a declining murderous military regime, the war counted on widespread support by the Argentine society, even by those who opposed the regime. To these debates, this book contributes a fresh perspective, approaching the Malvinas conflict through the intersection of war with cultural and social history based on the theoretical concepts of mobilization and war culture. Mobilization is understood as a process encompassing not only military and economic dimensions but also cultural and political ones, including mobilization by different social actors themselves. War culture refers to representations involving common imaginaries, values, practices, and experiences that allow society to adapt to the war period and that legitimate the conflict.This theoretical framework, presented in the introduction, is developed in eight chapters organized along three thematic axes. First, three chapters explore the trajectory of the Malvinas cause and its social and cultural impact throughout the twentieth century before the war. María Inés Tato shows the power of appealing to the Malvinas in Argentina by analyzing how such appeals were used by domestic and international actors during the First World War. Gonzalo Rubio García details the long-lasting anti-imperial critique against Great Britain built around the islands by several Argentine nationalist intellectuals in the 1930–50 period. Gustavo Carrère Cadirant studies how the popular newspaper Crónica and its owner, Héctor Ricardo García, were involved in highly publicized trips to the islands in the late 1960s and early 1970s that had a noticeable impact on public opinion and prompted official reactions.The second theme, mobilization during the war, is then dealt with in four chapters that privilege the role of the press, periodical publications, and the media. Agustín Desiderato focuses on two periodical publications that targeted school-age children, Billiken and Croniquita, to analyze strategies and messages for gathering social support, justifying the Argentine war effort, and building a negative image of Great Britain. Maximiliano Britos looks at messages and representations in newspapers and sport magazines to illustrate how sport events and athletes became explicitly involved in the conflict. Felipe Mistretta deconstructs the gender stereotypes behind the image of the enemy built by Crónica through offensive and sexist attacks that demonized and dehumanized the United Kingdom's prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Iván Rey provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the war coverage by the main and most watched news program in Argentina during the conflict, 60 minutos, and how it contributed to the Argentine war culture.The book's third theme, on the challenge of how to approach the war given its loaded political and historical contexts and meanings, is spread through the different chapters but is specifically addressed in the last one, by Luis Dalla Fontana. By using Marcelo Dascal's theory of controversies, he reflects on the need to go beyond rigid and emotional approaches by incorporating cultural and social history and the history of emotions as the basis for scholarly inquiries and scientific knowledge on the war.Clearly written and well organized, the book establishes a direct dialogue with the work of scholars such as Federico Lorenz, Rosana Guber, and Vicente Palermo on the Malvinas issue's historical roots and political and social aspects in Argentina. While some chapters are deeper theoretically and empirically than others, the book as a whole effectively makes the case for reconceptualizing the Malvinas within the proposed analytical framework. By establishing clear links with studies on gender, war, media, and popular culture, the authors demonstrate that support for the war and the Malvinas cause was the product of not only coercion and propaganda but also consensus and popular support built over generations. Thus comic strips in children's magazines, popular newspapers, sport publications, and gender stereotypes highlight more profound connections of the islands and the war to language, practices, and meanings in Argentine history and society. In this manner, the book dialogues with studies by scholars such as Daniel James and Eduardo Elena on the connections between Peronism and popular culture, by David Sheinin on social support and sports related to the Argentine dictatorship, and by Natalia Milanesio on the gendered meanings and tensions embedded during and after the military regime in Argentina. In all these ways, this book is a very valuable piece of scholarship that would interest scholars and a more general public alike in Argentina and elsewhere.

«ҚАЗАҚ» (1913-1918) ГАЗЕТІНДЕГІ ЭКОНОМИКАЛЫҚ ЖӘНЕ ҚОҒАМДЫҚ-САЯСИ СӨЗДЕРДІҢ ҚОЛДАНЫСЫ

The article shows that the origins of most doublets of the economic and socio-political vocabulary of the language can be found in the works of the intelligentsia of the early twentieth century, as well as in the texts of the newspaper Kazakh. However, in the newspaper Kazakh of the early twentieth century there are no terms related to macroeconomics, microeconomics, economic theory, such as economic choice, opportunity costs, motivation of economic choice, marginal costs, variable costs, normative economics, positive economics, etc. It is difficult to say that the terms of economic theories are found even in the articles of A. Bokeikhanov, written for acquaintance with famous people from different countries. However, some words, as well as borrowed words with economic meaning and related to economic activity, are found in texts, in newspaper strips, messages devoted to the social and political life of the people of that period. Therefore, socio-political words sometimes had economic meanings. And the Arabic-Persian words used in the newspaper Kazakh mean that they are one of the prerequisites for the appearance of lexical, phonetic doublets, variable uses in the modern language, including in the ranks of economic terms. The written models of borrowed economic and other words of the early twentieth century differed from the written models of the modern language. Therefore, in order to clearly see the differences in writing, the spelling models of that time were partially preserved in the examples given. Thus, it is possible to compare the linguistic facts of that period, i.e. the beginning of the twentieth century and the present in economic and socio-political terms.

Structural Failure: The Steve Canyon Television Series (1958–59)

Steve Canyon, developed in the late 1950s from the popular newspaper comic strip of the same name created by Milton Caniff, was the first attempt at generating a filmed dramatic series for American...

Lehekoomiks 1990. aastate Eestis [Newspaper comic strips in Estonia during the 1990s

Artikkel iseloomustab ülevaatlikult 1990ndate Eestis siirde­ aegse ajakirjandusbuumi ning laiema kultuurilise teisenemise osana tek­ kinud lehekoomiksiribade lainet. Moodsa ja läänelikuna tajutud formaat tõrjus leheveergudelt varem menuka karikatuuri ning mõned arvukatest uutest lehekoomiksisarjadest nagu Madis Otsa „Pesakond“ saavutasid suure populaarsuse. Tsensuurijärgsele kõikelubatavuse atmosfäärile ise­ loomulikult pakkusid koomiksid sageli taotluslikult toorest ja amatöör­ likku kunstilist teostust ning vägivaldset ja vulgaarset sisu. 1990. aastate teises pooles, kui trükimeediamaastik stabiliseerus ning hoiakud mõõ­ dukamaks muutusid, hakkas lehekoomiksilaine erinevatel põhjustel vai­ buma. Kohalik materjal asendati enamjaolt tõlkekoomiksiga ja osa loo­ mingulisi impulsse suubus uuel sajandil sõltumatusse koomiksisse. 1990. aastate koomiksipärandist avaldatakse siiani trükis üksikuid reliktsarju ja kuigi seda valdkonda on seni vähe uuritud, võiks lehekoomiksipärand leida tulevikus enam akadeemilist tähelepanu.

新聞4コマ漫画が描くアメリカ大統領 日本のマス・メディアに見るドナルド・トランプ像に関する一分析

新聞4コマ漫画が描くアメリカ大統領 日本のマス・メディアに見るドナルド・トランプ像に関する一分析

Steve Rude interview

ABSTRACT A conversation with award-winning comic book and fine artist Steve ‘The Dude’ Rude about his career, art, and influences. Also discussed are Nexus, Jack Kirby, Alex Toth and Space Ghost, Doug Wildey and Jonny Quest, Star Trek, Russ Manning, Hal Foster, illustration and design, Superman, why superheroes continue to resonate with modern audiences, and the Nexus newspaper strips.

Joy Katzmarzik, Comic Art and Avant-Garde: Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes” and the Art of American Newspaper Comic Strips

Joy Katzmarzik, Comic Art and Avant-Garde: Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes” and the Art of American Newspaper Comic Strips

La Guerra civil española como tema en la novela gráfica actual

The Spanish civil war and its postwar period remain two of the most important historical references of present-day Spain. Along with themes of strictly political nature addressing that period of time and with the negative aspects of the transition to democracy, themes of memory and postmemory (Hirsch 1992 / Liikanen 2015) appear. Both are closely related to – although not only to – the silencing of the victims of the mentioned historical periods. By this, I am referring to the ones defeated and to the next of kin of the disappeared.
 
 Despite the famous affair of the so-called “gentleman’s agreement”, the “amnesia”, the “forgetfulness” or the “silence” of the democratic transition, a variety of narrative works have emerged in recent history; literary works that in various manners have the Civil War and Franco’s posterior dictatorship as topics or common threads in their narrations[1]. 
 The consolidation of a new literary subgenre of hybrid characteristics combining the mode of narration found in novels and the specificities of the comic strip is a novelty in the context of Spanish literature. Although already canonized in the 1970’s in the United States (Eisner, 1978), the subgenre emerged in Spain during the end of the 1990’s. With the turn of the century, a new vision of the Spanish cartoon arrived: it was no longer fundamentally limited to the sphere of children, of satire, or of short comic strips in newspapers. With an expanded format, it began addressing the adult public.
 In the selection of graphic novels that I am presenting, there are various narrative strategies and aesthetics elaborated from accounts from the Civil War, and its prolongation in the Second World War, by authors who were not protagonists in the real-life events themselves and whom I include within the wide concept of postmemory. The prevailing ideas in all the texts are as follows: the necessary recuperation of the memory of the Civil War, the presentation of the present as a result of the past and the importance of knowing the points of view of the defeated in order to update the cultural identities of the territorial sphere of the Spanish state
 
 
 [1] I have already presented one such work during the «Romanist XV» « Escribir de Oídas: Final literature of the memory of the Spanish Civil War and its postwar period” (2012).
 

Buck Rogers in the 25th century: Transmedia extensions of a pulp hero

AbstractTheBuck Rogers in the 25th century A.D.comic strip first appeared in the newspapers on 7 January 1929, an important moment in the history of comics. It was the first science fiction comic strip, and, along withTarzan– which curiously debuted in comics the same day – the first adventure comic. However, many people are unawere that the origins of Buck Rogers are not rooted in comic strips, but in popular literature. In fact, Anthony Rogers (not yet “Buck”) was the main character of two novellas published in the late 1920 s inAmazing stories, the first pulp magazine:Armageddon 2419 A.D.(August 1928) and its sequel,The airlords of Han(March 1929). At first, the stories in the daily comic strips closely followed those of the novels, but soon the Buck Rogers universe expanded to include the entire solar system and beyond. This expansion of the narrative world is particularly evident in the weekly charts published since 1930. Soon, Nowlan’s creature became a real transmedia character: in the following years Buck appeared in a radio drama series (aired from 1932 until 1947), in a 12-episode 1939 movie serial, as well as in a 1950/51 TV series. Toys, Big Little Books, pop-up books, and commercial gifts related to the character were produced, before the newspaper comic strip ended its run in 1967. In recent years, the character has been reeboted a couple of times, linked to the TV series of the late 1980 s and to a new comic book series starting in 2009. Buck Rogers thus found himself at the centre of a truly character-oriented franchise, showing how transmedia characters can be traced back almost to the origins of the modern cultural industry. The following article focuses on the features that distinguish Buck Rogers as a character and on the changes of his identity across media, presenting a revised version of an analytical model to investigate transmedia characters that has been developed in previous publications.

Picasso, Comics, and Cultural Divides: Why Krazy Kat Is a Kubist Kat

Picasso, Comics, and Cultural Divides: Why Krazy Kat Is a Kubist Kat Kevin Cooley (bio) Pablo Picasso had a weakness for comic strips. In Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein records a humorous incident in which Picasso and his lover Fernande quarreled over the latest Katzenjammer Kids strip, a comic featuring the rambunctious troublemakers Hans and Fritz who made constant mischief to the chagrin of a series of bumbling authority figures. When Fernande bumped into the painter on the street and asked him to share the supplement that The Kaztenjammer Kids appeared in, Picasso was having none of it. Fernande said that he “brutally refused” her the comic supplement and, according to Stein, Fernande “roused like a lioness defending her cubs” while relating these circumstances. Fernande called the affair “a piece of cruelty” she would “never forgive.”1 Poor Stein, the couple’s frequent hookup for American comics, hoped the pair would be reconciled “before the next comic supplements of the Katzenjammer kids” came out, reasoning: “if I do not give them to Pablo he will be all upset and if I do Fernande will make an awful fuss” (The Autobiography, 24). This anecdote might amuse popular, academic, and high cultural audiences alike. For many members of all of these groups, the very name “Picasso” is and has been metonymical for high art itself. Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes “he’s no Picasso,” to characterize a personified version of the Spanish city Segovia as somewhat artless.2 Leonard Cohen’s poem “Kanye West Is Not Picasso” rebukes West’s frequent self-comparisons to the painter by calling its speaker Picasso, and it claims that speaker is “the Kanye West that Kanye West thinks he is / When he shoves your ass off the stage.”3 Even the hidden camera show Impractical [End Page 595] Jokers feeds into the narrative around the name, featuring the cast pulling pranks in a sketch called “Picass-holes” on the “future Picassos” shopping at Blick Art Materials.4 Picasso himself treated his own name as a metonym for artistic mastery, claiming “my mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ . . . Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.”5 In all of these disparate texts from different cultural niches, to be a “Picasso” is to be a high artist. To hear of Picasso behaving like a child over a newspaper comic strip called The Katzenjammer Kids, then, will surely register with some readers as nothing more than an extraneous factoid (albeit an amusing one) about Picasso’s reading tastes. I will suggest another reading: that this anecdote is one nugget to be found of a mineful of contextual, thematic, and formal evidence that indicates Picasso was inspired by American comic strips. His most prominent influence was George Herriman, the cartoonist behind the bizarre anthropomorphic animal comic Krazy Kat and a contemporary of Katzenjammer Kids creators Rudolph and Gus Dirks. As comics and cubism stumbled through their early days at the beginning of the twentieth century, they played together in a sandbox of paradoxical visual temporalities. Michael Tisserand, Herriman’s biographer, claims that Marcel Duchamp’s landmark cubist piece Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was “in many ways . . . just catching up” to the innovative techniques for simulating motion and interrogating the fixity of images that newspaper cartoonists like Herriman experimented with.6 The two art forms shared a collective sense of new possibilities for the visual still image to do what the photograph could not: offer a multiplicity of perspectives on the same physical plane of the flat surface. I argue here, then, that the most responsible reading of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat is as a narrative not only indebted to the work of Pablo Picasso and the members of his social circle, but inspirational to that company. That Krazy Kat ultimately casts the comics form itself into the central logic of cubism and of Picasso’s work (predominantly through its consistent presentation of the dissonance between signifiers and signified) will be crucial to my historical re-reading. This weaving together of the comics form and cubist...

Looking for Black Religions in 20th Century Comics, 1931–1993

Relationships between religion and comics are generally unexplored in the academic literature. This article provides a brief history of Black religions in comic books, cartoons, animation, and newspaper strips, looking at African American Christianity, Islam, Africana (African diaspora) religions, and folk traditions such as Hoodoo and Conjure in the 20th century. Even though the treatment of Black religions in the comics was informed by stereotypical depictions of race and religion in United States (US) popular culture, African American comics creators contested these by offering alternatives in their treatment of Black religion themes.

Soaring out of the Private Sphere

Throughout World War II, newspaper comic strips and propaganda posters not only presented Americans with depictions of major shifts in societal norms, but also helped them accept the dramatic social changes spurred by total war. One historian has argued that pop cultural art that featured women in non-traditional jobs did important work during the war years by creating platforms that helped ease societal fears about the dramatic changes afoot in the workplace. This research argues that Flyin' Jenny and its brave aviatrix, Jenny Dare, was not only among these hard-working graphic stories and pop cultural icons, but that she was a pioneer on the comics pages by predating Wonder Woman and Brenda Starr. Each week, readers found their heroine competing against the most accomplished men in aviation. But this narrative was intentionally softened through paper dolls, reader-submitted content, and pin-up-like poses.

The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, We Told You So: Comics as Art and Spurgeon with Michael Dean

The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, We Told You So: Comics as Art and Spurgeon with Michael Dean

Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists by Martha H. Kennedy

Reviewed by: Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists by Martha H. Kennedy Rachel R. Miller (bio) Martha H. Kennedy. Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists. University of Mississippi Press, ix + 238 pp, $50. In her Women Artists Zine, "Blind Illustratrix," minicomics creator, and zinester M. Sabine Rear introduces her list of twenty-four women artists by reflecting on how to effectively negotiate women's erasure from the canon of visual culture. Rear writes that "[adding] the erased subject (here, women) to the canon … does not directly question the canon itself, it merely protests its exclusionary nature."1 Illuminating the illustration and comics work of eighty American women, Martha H. Kennedy's Drawn to Purpose remaps an expansive, multigenre lineage of women's illustration and cartooning from Golden Age illustrators to [End Page 221] graphic novelists to courtroom documentarians. Kennedy's consistent, careful attention to how women created community and navigated the gendered conditions of doing their work sets her survey apart from those that might merely install women's work into preexisting canons and histories. Drawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists accompanies an exhibition of the same name that Kennedy curated for the Library of Congress, which was on display through fall 2018. Drawn to Purpose lives on well after the close of the exhibition as an invaluable resource for researchers and those teaching comics history, offering readers a deep catalog of creators in accessible chapters furnished by high-quality reproductions of each artist's groundbreaking work. Drawn to Purpose begins its survey with Golden Age Illustrators and then shifts to comics history with two chapters—one covering early newspaper cartoonists and another that charts its course from contemporary strip-makers to underground collectives, graphic novelists, and even minicomics creators. An "interlude" attending to technical illustrators "overlooked in art surveys, despite the role they have played in shaping the cultural environment" (77), leads into the second half of the book, in which Kennedy covers "Commentators and Reporters," magazine covers, and cartoons, concluding with editorial cartoonists. The project also includes an index of "biographical sketches" about each woman featured in the text. Kennedy's attention to illustration and cartooning as sister media allows her to seamlessly draw together forms like the single panel gag cartoons of the New Yorker by the likes of Barbara Shermund,2 Roberta MacDonald, and Roz Chast and the illustrations that have found a home on the covers of early twentieth-century American periodicals like Puck, Vanity Fair, and Masses. Though Kennedy does not always draw artists into conversation with one another across chapters, her tour, which includes high-quality reproductions of each artist's work alongside the text, sustains a nuanced account of how gender, sexuality, and race all inflect and inform the canon of women's work in the applied arts of illustration and cartooning. As she writes in her preface, "Women who become illustrators and cartoonists represent a special breed of artist and form a self-selected sisterhood. Taking pencil, pen, or brush to paper, burin or needle to plate, litho pen to stone, or digital pen to pad, they ply their tools toward multiple ends—to tell stories, to entertain, to persuade, to assert opinion, to earn a living" (xii). By considering the "sisterhood" of illustrators and cartoonists holistically, Kennedy not only attends to forms of each medium that are often left at the margins of academic consideration such as the single panel cartoon, book binding and title plate designs, and technical illustrations, including architectural and fashion designs, but she also tracks trajectories of subject matter, style, and the manipulation of text and image that unify seemingly disparate creators. The cute kids and clever dogs who populate the newspaper strips of Grace Drayton, Rose O'Neill, Marge Henderson Buell, and Edwina Dumm set the foundation for the graphic novel's preoccupation with the girlhoods of some of its most lauded practitioners such as Lynda Barry. Girls, too, primed the market for YA graphic novels such as Raina Telgemeier's runaway success, Smile, and Jillian Tamaki's effervescent coming-of-age story, This One Summer. But this child-centric [End Page 222] canon of comics work also rewards...

Analyzing Humor in Newspaper Comic Strips Using Verbal-Visual Analysis

The researchers aimed at analyzing the meaning of humor in newspaper comic strips within a variety of incongruous combinations of multimodal rhetoric. The current research focused on how humor was produced via verbal medium only, via both verbal and visual media, as well as via visual only. The source of data was 74 political comic strips featured in Kompas newspaper. The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) was adapted as a framework of analysis. The analysis of the data confirms the following categorization: 49 humors appear only in text, 22 humor result from the interaction of text and image, and three humor come from images. In addition, humor which appears in text only and cases of the interaction between the two semiotic modes (either complementary or contradictory) is based on puns, exaggerations, contradictions, analogies, parallelisms, or verbal metaphors. Special attention is given to humor produced by the interaction of both text and image and by the images only which cause the hyperdetermination of humor, which can produce two or more humorous utterances. Meanwhile, the humor appeared in visual comic strips is produced exclusively by the visual language of knowledge resources.