Comics

February 28th, 2006General4 comments

I want to talk some more about the UCLA Hammer Museum’s current Masters of American Comics exhibit.

Seeing these early comics before they were watered down by marketing and decades of recycling is pretty amazing. The early Peanuts were, like Dave says, very “Calvin and Hobbes”-like — with a lot of personality and wit.

“Little Nemo”, one of the earliest comic strips (from the first decade of the 20th century) was incredibly surreal, approaching Salvador Dali levels of weirdness. In his dreams, Little Nemo’s bed legs grow into jelly-like stilts, carrying him all over the city:

Little Nemo.

In his original comics, Popeye was a really dumb brute. There’s one newspaper strip in the exhibit where Olive Oyl disguises herself as a competing male suitor (to test Popeye’s love for her); and Popeye punches her out. Then he beats her up. It’s pretty crazy.

By the way, cartoon violence has been going on forever — ever since cartoons were first invented. Dick Tracy blows holes in villains with a machine gun; his hair gets singed off in a firey explosion. Popeye beats Wimpy to a bloody pulp. He’s literally lying in a pool of blood and surrounded by hamburger pieces.

There’s this “Garfield effect” caused by time and marketing that dulls an originally sharp and witty comic strip down to a boring, humorless piece of coal. “Garfield” itself was hilarious when it first appeared (I used to love the wide-layout book collections as a kid), but now it’s the comic strip equivalent of a mayonnaise and wonderbread sandwich.

Gary Larson and Bill Watterson were so very, very right to let their comic strips cease at their high points. Comic strips shouldn’t be immortal just like people shouldn’t be immortal.