Comic Strips 2020: Sumpin Arful

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Chef Bourgeoisie: Oct 9, 2016; by Reene

Bloom County
December 14-15, 1980
Our first Sunday strip!

# ? Jan 11, 2020 04:20

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 27, 2024 18:11

dismas: Jul 31, 2008

riderchop posted:

i need to be mad at the Evanses to live

# ? Jan 11, 2020 04:38

EasyEW: Mar 8, 2006; I've got my father's great big six-shooter with me 'n' if anybody in this woods wants to start somethin' just let 'em--but they DASSN'T.

Sally Forth

Skippy (August 27, 1932)

Peanuts (January 12, 1973)

Les Moore's Overinflated Privilege Theater

Crankshaft

Well, no, I wasn't thinking that until you brought it up.

9 Chickweed Lane

Rip Haywire

Thimble Theater (August 11, 1936)

Out Our Way (December 18-20, 1933)

Kinda fell down on the job with ducks and trolleys, but here's some Rube Goldberg for you. (January 14-16, 1924)

# ? Jan 11, 2020 04:50

Vargo: Dec 27, 2008; 'Cuz it's KILLIN' ME!

BCN

Phoebe

Wallace

Curtis reminds you that we live in a society.

# ? Jan 11, 2020 05:11

Howard Beale: Feb 22, 2001; It's like this, Peanut

Hobnob posted:

The Perishers (1983)

The Perishers may be wordy but it's my kind of wordy. :allears:

# ? Jan 11, 2020 05:24

Professor Wayne: Aug 27, 2008; So, Harvey, what became of the giant penny?

They actually let him keep it.

Last week's dump:

My Dad is Dracula

Pickles

Zits

# ? Jan 11, 2020 05:27

Elysiume: Aug 13, 2009; Alone, she fights.

Vargo posted:

Curtis reminds you that we live in a society.

Why is he acting like Michelle doesn't generally hates Curtis?

Elysiume fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Jan 11, 2020

# ? Jan 11, 2020 05:28

Johnny Aztec: Jan 30, 2005; by Hand Knit

EasyEW posted:

Jesus christ, Wash Tubb is gonna be hosed up. Got a drat bobcat on his head!

# ? Jan 11, 2020 05:45

Julet Esqu: May 6, 2007

gleebster posted:

Then why, by all that is holy, do you post it?

riderchop posted:

i need to be mad at the Evanses to live

# ? Jan 11, 2020 05:53

Haifisch: Nov 13, 2010; Objection! I object! That was... objectionable!; Taco Defender

Professor Wayne posted:

Zits

This was posted just in time for it to go from ridiculous(because our winter has had jack poo poo for snow) to prescient-ish(because we're due to get a winter storm soon). :allears:

Also going by the signs, they're in Indiana somewhere. This is your pointless geography detail of the day.

Elysiume posted:

Why is he acting like Michelle doesn't generally hates Curtis?

Curtis had to get his obliviousness from somewhere.

# ? Jan 11, 2020 06:18

How Wonderful!: Jul 18, 2006; I only have excellent ideas

If you don't know Barnaby you might recognize Crockett Johnson's signature streamlined, gently sparse style from his better-known creation, Harold and the Purple Crayon. Johnson, born in 1906, didn't break into comics until 1934, but his professional career is bracketed by twin impulses towards elegant precision and a child-like proximity to whimsy. Before comics he was the art director for several McGraw-Hill publications, and after moving on from daily strips he produced over one hundred striking "mathematical paintings" which you can take a gander at here.

Johnson's second career as a cartoonist coincided with his political radicalization-- shocked by the Great Depression, he joined the leftist Book and Magazine Writers Union and wound up creating political cartoons for the influential CPUSA organ The New Masses in 1934, at the time an extremely hip and ubiquitous magazine among American intelligentsia which published a who's who of established literary darlings as well as more overtly radical writers such as Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and my homeboy Kenneth Fearing. Johnson's early work here is a little more loose and sketchy than his mature style, and the humor is much more pointed, befitting, I guess, its setting. The goofy one about the antsy Hitler is a striking precursor to Johnson's knack for closely observed body language as the source of a joke.

Although Johnson fairly quickly rose through the ranks and became the magazine's art director, revamping it to what I'd consider its "iconic" design, in 1940 he segued to Colliers to produce the comic strip "The Little Man With the Eyes," an often gently topical or satirical comic relying on minutely observed variations in its mute protagonist's gaze:

If "The Little Man With the Eyes" was absolutely dependent on micro-level gradations of motion and expression-- kind of an extreme close-up Keaton-- Barnaby, which launched in the leftist (but not nearly as leftist as The New Masses!) magazine PM in 1942, imported Johnson's masterful hand at the meticulously structured gag into a more narratively driven framework and into a more fully realized social universe. As goofy and screwball as Barnaby can be, it engages with plot and character (and continuity) in a way totally alien to Johnson's earlier work. A lot of the fun here, to me, is Johnson's intuitive melding of these two comic pleasures: the almost fussy precision of his lines, the novel adoption of a crisp Futura typeface instead of hand lettering, and his Lubitsch-esque pacing on one hand, and the "film blanc" charm and wonder of taking the fairy-tale logic of childhood seriously as the foundation of sitcom antics on the other.

Although Barnaby was never especially widely syndicated, appearing in 64 papers at its height, it was admired by a number of prominent figures including Dorothy Parker, Rockwell Kent, and Louis Untermeyer. I imagine they liked it for the same reasons I do-- it's understated but immensely technically sophisticated, as well as just being a super breezy, refreshingly bubbly and sleek little comic universe. There's a little McCay, there's a little Bushmiller, but mostly there's Johnson's own totally suis generis talent.

Although his initial run on Barnaby only lasted until 1946, it cast a long shadow, influencing both Charles Schulz and Walt Kelly (as well as, I have a hunch, Chris Onstad). Johnson's own career stretched on for decades, exchanging the clockwork tempo of the comic strip for the langorousness of his Harold books and a number of extremely charming and whimsical kids' books in collaboration with his wife and artistic partner Ruth Krauss.

Here's Barnaby! I really really like it and I hope you do too!

4/20/1942

4/21/1942

4/22/1942

I'll write up a bit on Cathy tomorrow-- to be honest I've never read it all the way through before and am only tangentially aware of it outside of the characters colossal pop culture presence throughout the late 80s and 90s, but I have a feeling it'll be an interesting time capsule and maybe a nice companion piece to FOOB in terms of "what kinds of jokes and narratives were being pushed through the back-half of the 20th century in comics geared towards women." I browsed the first little bit of it earlier today and it settles into its familiar rhythm remarkably quickly although the art starts off pretty unruly.

How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jan 11, 2020

# ? Jan 11, 2020 07:05

Ghostlight: Sep 25, 2009; maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me

Barnaby's lettering makes it look like a terrible webcomic from the 2000s.

# ? Jan 11, 2020 07:36

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

riderchop posted:

i need to be mad at the Evanses to live

Comic Strip Thread 2020: i need to be mad at the Evanses to live

Johnny Walker posted:

Mary Worth

Whatever she's got seems to be contagious, because Zak's looking pretty bad too.

EasyEW posted:

Crankshaft

Well, no, I wasn't thinking that until you brought it up.

What were you thinking then? What else does "going commando" even mean?

# ? Jan 11, 2020 07:50

How Wonderful!: Jul 18, 2006; I only have excellent ideas

Ghostlight posted:

Barnaby's lettering makes it look like a terrible webcomic from the 2000s.

It's an acquired taste perhaps, for sure. Here's a bit from Philip Nel's excellent biography of Johnson and Krauss that goes into it a little:

quote:

Meeting Johnson's exacting standards was a challenge. According to Sparber, 'I could never quite grasp the tightness of his line. I learned a great deal from him, but I didn't draw that way.' Sparber saw Johnson as more than a perfectionist: 'Perfectionist is sort of ordinary. He was way beyond that.' Johnson's background in layout and in typography inspired him to set his dialogue in type. Barnaby was the first strip to always use typeset dialogue, with Johnson using italicized Futura medium. Designed by German typographer Paul Renner in the 1920s, Futura embodies the Crockett Johnson aesthetic: it excises needless detail, rendering its simple geometric forms in precise lines of uniform width. This devotion to precision informs Johnson's diction, too. As Sparber explained, the type 'wasn't just sort of dashed in. Dave would be writing the text as if he was counting characters in his head, because he knew he had to do five lines to fit into a balloon that would be over Mr. O'Malley's head. (73)

# ? Jan 11, 2020 07:56

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

# ? Jan 11, 2020 08:22

Samovar: Jun 4, 2011; I'm 😤 not a 🦸🏻‍♂️hero...🧜🏻

In today's Corto Maltese: El Cairo has a very bad day, or Under pressure! dun-dun-dun-da-da-dun-dun, or Looks like the Leopard-Men have answered quis custodiet ipsos custodes, putting them a step above many modern-day police forces

# ? Jan 11, 2020 08:30

Kennel: May 1, 2008; BAWWW-UNH!

Surgeon's Tales

Nancy

Dustin

Mandrake

1997 Viivi & Wagner

# ? Jan 11, 2020 12:24

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Kennel posted:

Mandrake

Mandrake waves his hands.
:drac:

Now you're stuck in a cage. Hang tight while I go rescue Narda.

# ? Jan 11, 2020 13:17

SubNat: Nov 27, 2008

Moomin and the brigands

# ? Jan 11, 2020 14:12

dracky: Nov 8, 2010

Thanks for posting vintage comics. I remember reading the Calvin & Hobbes collection with commentary by Watterson, he kept talking about how comics used to have huge pages of beautifully drawn, watercolor illustrations of dream imagery and flights of fancy, and I never got what he meant until I saw Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Mama's Angel Child in particular is really gorgeous, just lushly drawn, flowing fashions and expressive characters. It's a shame that newspaper comics have devalued art so much that poo poo like Dilbert gets published, although talented artists haven't gone away, they've just moved to the indie scene.

riderchop posted:

i need to be mad at the Evanses to live

It annoys me that Luann the comic has spent however many years insisting on Gunther. "Oh you think he's a loser, well he's actually super nice, and creative, and attractive, and popular". We get it, he's gonna wear Luann down and Urkel his way into her heart, just marry them off already and get it over with

# ? Jan 11, 2020 14:16

Strontium: Aug 28, 2009; Dexter didn't much care for the party.

Daddy Daze

Take It From the Tinkersons

Dark Side of the Horse

Fort Knox

# ? Jan 11, 2020 15:21

CommonShore: Jun 6, 2014; A true renaissance man

# ? Jan 11, 2020 15:23

The Bloop: Jul 5, 2004; by Fluffdaddy

EasyEW posted:

Skippy (August 27, 1932)

Is it something obvious that I'm missing?

It feels like it's "chicken breast" or something but that feels wrong for a Skippy joke

# ? Jan 11, 2020 15:24

Endless Mike: Aug 13, 2003

Star Wars is getting some rebound action

# ? Jan 11, 2020 15:43

gleebster: Dec 16, 2006; Only a howler; Pillbug

riderchop posted:

i need to be mad at the Evanses to live

So basically this, eh?

Kennel posted:

Well, I'm plenty angry at this Holbrook chap, and I never read his stuff. But to each his own.

Anyway, more Juliet Jones, in which I assume Pop Jones has recognized that the young hood is a woman and will be trying to make her later.

# ? Jan 11, 2020 15:47

Vargo: Dec 27, 2008; 'Cuz it's KILLIN' ME!

Team Evans has always been lazy writers but this hack job assassination on Bets out of absolutely nowhere is really something else.

Tiggum posted:

What were you thinking then? What else does "going commando" even mean?

It means "not wearing underwear." No, I don't know why.

BCN

Phoebe

Walter the Concave

Curtis

Oh, I'm sorry, do you not remember this event from loving OCTOBER?

Horrifying.

EDIT: I got curious and read up to the newest Luann. Holy poo poo, this thread is going to lose it.

# ? Jan 11, 2020 15:48

Darthemed: Oct 28, 2007; "A data unit?
For me?"; College Slice

Docks

Zip

Rip

Dick

Duck

# ? Jan 11, 2020 15:51

Bell_: Sep 3, 2006; Tiny Baltimore
A billion light years away
A goon's posting the same thing
But he's already turned to dust
And the shitpost we read
Is a billion light-years old
A ghost just like the rest of us

sweetguts posted:

today at my job a woman responded to me asking this by telling me all about how her car was stolen that morning, including an inventory of everything that was in the car, and finished her story by saying "Y'know I'm not worried about it but I'm a minister and I'm worried about their SOULS".

I wish people would just say "fine".

There are plenty of other ways to greet people if you actually don't care about how they're doing.

# ? Jan 11, 2020 15:54