DC Conspiracy[dots pattern]

10.30.2005

Sunday Comics

As an outgrowth of their work to preserve historical newspapers, Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano have collected some of the finest — and largest — examples of newspaper art from the turn of the (last) century into The World on Sunday. The "Book Photo Gallery" section has a few more images.

Slate spends some time thinking about the difference such a visual approach meant to newspaper readers: "Today's newspapers compress comics into cellblocks sometimes measuring as small as 1 inch by 4 inches. The World's comic "strips" routinely ran a full page, as this installment of the Plunk Family shows, and the pages were much larger than those found in the modern broadsheet. This gave comic artists the real estate to tell a story, to set up a punch line, to convey a sense of motion and the passage of time. The World was crafted to be unpacked, savored, and saved. It encouraged readers to "waste" time reading and rejected the notion that the newspaper experience should be a quickie that catapults you into a busy day."



A little while back, The Comics Curmudgeon had his own observations on the historical treatment of the comics section.

Bram at 8:22 AM  |  link to this     

2 Comments

Great piece, Bram. I see this tying in with your Watterson article. So two stories on "newspaper" comicing, each talking about the parameters of modern-day comics. Hmm, are you and Monica up to something?

Dembicki at 10/31/2005 7:59 PM   

Not up to anything new in particular . . . I've just become more interested in the state of newspaper comics today and the thoughts and debates that are surrounding them. Fear of change and innovation, the rise (but still not widespread popularity) of online strips, &c. And now that it's in my head, I keep running across articles (online and in print).

The Santa Fe daily paper (which I don't get regularly) has a pretty amazing section that, in percentage of quality strips, probably beats the Post. Their prepackaged Sunday section, until recently, pretty much represented the worst of newspaper comics.

How am I keeping up with my daily strips? The Houston Chronicle has this cool feature.

Bram at 11/02/2005 12:09 AM   

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