One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages” Exhibit
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John Read is the creator and curator of the “One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages” exhibit. A freelance cartoonist, John also teaches cartooning to children and is the publisher and editor of Stay Tooned! Magazine, considered the trade journal of the craft. The Comic Mode The comic strip provides a colorful and humorous respite from the serious and often tragic news that precedes it. There are many reasons for reading the “funny pages”; from the basic need to be entertained, to the desire to escape for a moment into what seems a playful combination of a joke and a sequence of images that illustrate the nonsense and play that generates it. Yet, what really constitutes the “comic” in a comic strip? Are they simply funny, as in Blondie, Garfield or Hagar the Horrible? Or do we sense underlying tones of irony, satire, political and social commentary as evidenced in Doonesbury, Non Sequitur, and Between Friends? How are we to understand the double entendre, the sting of wit or the twist of the absurd that infuses so many contemporary comic strips? It would seem that as in dreams, there are many levels to the comic mode. On the first take, the superficial or manifest appeal generates a smile or laughter. But as with many dreams and good jokes, there is the second take, a latent need to establish or defy meaning as embedded within the structure of the images themselves. The paradox or playfulness of the comic strip partially lies in discovering the truth in the nonsensical aspects of day-to-day living. Comic artists are keenly attuned to this aspect of life and seem to absorb the dialogues, actions and entanglements of personal relationships that surround them. The condensation of these observations in a few frames of comic imagery, along with pithy comments seems to be indicative of the comic mode. Sigmund Freud noted in “Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious” that “the factor of bewilderment and illumination; too, leads us deeply into the problem of the relation of the joke to the comic.” Part of this combination of bewilderment and illumination can be seen in the persona of the wise old sage as seen from of the child’s point of view in Dennis the Menace or The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee. In both cases the tension between the joke and the comic is clearly at the expense of the adults who preside in those worlds. Alongside the playful and more illuminating appeal of the comics in the funny pages, many readers and viewers sense the edgy world of surrealism and the confrontational approach of expressionism as experienced in Bizarro, Zippy the Pinhead and Speed bump. Here we see absurdist word play working in an expressionistic or post-modern style of imagery. The Art of the Comic Strip Despite modern technology, many contemporary Sunday newspaper comics are still produced in black and white, using exactly the same tools as the daily comics with simple art materials: india ink, bristol board, pen (with nibs, yet) brush, pencil. Color is added digitally, either by an assistant or by a syndicate production company. In this exhibit, which consists of the original pencil and ink renderings before printing, there are examples of the many stylistic and technical approaches to creating a comic strip. Some artists make very tight pencil renderings and the inking stays just as tight, while others work very loosely with almost no underpinnings. Often artists use lightboxes and trace their characters over and over while others work completely freehand. In most work it is challenging to distinguish the difference just by looking at the finished work. The newest trend of artists now work straight to digital and there is no physical original art to speak of. 3 Surprisingly, there is no standard size template. Artists can work very large or very, very small depending on their personal aesthetic. Short cuts and corrective measures can be used which may include the use of blue pencil, cut and paste and use white out. Many strips are produced by a team of writer and artist but there are other combinations as well. Zits is written by Jerry Scott and drawn by Jim Borgman but Jerry does pencil sketches that Jim fleshes out. You can see this on the original Zits comic in the show - Jerry does the pencil sketch in the drop panel - the rest is what it looks like after Jim finishes with it. Doonesbury is another strip with a separate inker - Garry Trudeau does tight pencils and another artist inks it, imitating Trudeau’s line perfectly. The One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages show is one of the only places left where one can see the “drop panels”; these are the title panels that newspapers decide whether or not to run, leaving more space for more comics. The Kenosha News, for example, does not run drop panels. All of the color comics in this show were specially printed to provide examples of what the final comic looked like when run in the Sunday, April 11, 2010 newspapers. The History of “One Fine Sunday in the Funny Pages” Exhibition curator John Read’s decision to try to organize an exhibit of cartoon art didn’t just come out of the blue. Originally, he had been dreaming about opening a cartoon art museum. There are only a few American museums that specialize in exhibiting original cartoon art, and none of them are situated in the South, where John lives. Recognizing that he had no experience running a museum, he sought out people with the requisite experience and whose opinions he valued. They all recommended that he try to curate an exhibit or three, before attempting to found a museum. So Mr. Read came up with an original concept that he figured would appeal to the public and the artists whose work he would spotlight. He thought an exhibit of newspaper comic strip art would be something that might appeal to a broad audience, regardless of the venue in which the art was displayed. In December 2009 he began contacting the creators of comic strips and panels requesting they loan the art for their April 11, 2010 cartoon for what would be an unprecedented exhibition of their craft. He imagined a show featuring the original art of 50 to 60 different comics, all published in news- papers across North America on the same Sunday, would be something exceptional to present. The resulting exhibit, which is made up of virtually every comic strip and panel currently being published in North American newspapers – or, at least, that was published on April 11, 2010, is the product of John’s desire to mount a showcase for the incredible variety of graphic storytelling and humorous illustration presented every Sunday by cartoonists displaying a vast spectrum of drawing styles, the aesthetic range of which offers readers of “the funnies” a diverse choice of eye-candy entertainment. An interesting thing John has discovered during the run of the show, was that this comics “time-capsule” offers its viewers a trip down memory lane as much as an overview of the state of newspaper comics today. Seeing so many different features in one place rekindles that affection, revives people’s memories of favorite characters, and reintroduces them to comics they thought were no longer produced. Ultimately, the approach or intentions that can be gleamed from the art of the comic strips in this exhibit are completely subjective. If deeper meaning is to be found in these images, that is between the viewer and the work. Any relation between the joke and the comic may be debatable as well, but most viewers will be able to discern the humor of human foibles in whatever form it takes. As for the one-liner or the punch line of a good joke, that may depend on whether one is looking at the outside or the inside of a dog. — Diane Levesque and John Read 4 ANNIE Ted Slampyak & Jay Maeder THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Alex Saviuk & Stan Lee 5 THE ARGYLE SWEATER Scott Hilburn B.C. John Hart Studio 6 BETWEEN FRIENDS Sandra Bell-Lundy BIOGRAPHIC Steve McGarry 7 BRILLIANT MIND OF EDISON LEE, THE John Hambrock CRANKSHAFT Chuck Ayers & Tom Batiuk 8 DICK TRACY Dick Locher DOONESBURY Garry Trudeau 9 GARFIELD Jim Davis POOCH CAFÉ Paul Gilligan 10 LOLA Todd Clark MONTY Jim Meddick 11 FUNKY WINKERBEAN Tom Batiuk NON SEQUITUR Wiley Miller 12 PRICKLY CITY Scott Stantis RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT John Graziano 13 ZIGGY Tom Wilson ZITS Jim Borgman & Jerry Scott 14 Read these cartoons every week. Here’s where to find more information on your favorites. P ADAM@HOME Rob Harrell & Brian Bassett P DUPLEX Glenn McCoy C ON A CLAIRE DAY Carla Ventresca & Henry Beckett C AGNES Tony Cochran K DUSTIN Jeffry Parker & Steve Kelley K ON THE FASTRACK Bill Holbrook M ALLEY OOP Jack & Carole Bender K EDGE CITY Terry & Patty LaBan C ONE BIG HAPPY Rick Detorie C ANDY CAPP Roger Mahoney & Roger Kettle K THE FAMILY CIRCUS Jeff Keane C THE OTHER COAST Adrian Raeside K THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Alex Saviuk & Stan Lee K FLASH GORDON Jim Keefe M OVER THE HEDGE T Lewis & Michael Fry T ANIMAL CRACKERS Fred Wagner C FLO AND FRIENDS Jenny Campbell K PAJAMA DIARIES Terri Libenson T ANNIE Ted Slampyak & Jay Maeder P FLYING McCOYS Gary McCoy W PC & PIXEL Tak Bui K APARTMENT 3-G Frank Bolle & Sandra Moy P FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE Lynn Johnston M PEARLS BEFORE SWINE Stephan Pastis C ARCHIE Fernando Ruiz & Craig Boldman W FORT KNOX Paul Jon K THE PHANTOM Paul Ryan & Tony DePaul K ARCTIC CIRCLE Alex Hallett P FOXTROT Bill Amend W PICKLES Brian Crane P THE ARGYLE SWEATER Scott Hilburn M FRANK & ERNEST Thaves Studio K THE PIRANHA CLUB Bud Grace P ARLO & JANIS Jimmy Johnson M FRAZZ Jef Mallett T PLUGGERS Gary Brookins C ASK SHAGG Peter Guren C FREE RANGE Bill Whitehead P POOCH CAFÉ Paul Gilligan C B.C.