Comic Strips

After reading early comic strips, I see they haven’t really changed much compared to today’s comic strips. What the comic strip started as worked, and it set the wheels turning for what became today’s comic strips and what eventually evolved into comic books and graphic novels. Two comics I read the most to compare are George Harriman’s Krazy Kat and Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo. Krazy Kat surprised me a little because I never really expected so much from early comics. There’s some mild swearing and the characters have unique accents. I know putting in accents isn’t new in literature. For instance Huckleberry Finn makes use of it, but I guess I imagined early comics to be very plain. There was also mild swearing and the humor carries on to today. The style is very simple and cartoony as well, and, looking back on Scott McCloud’s lesson on relatability with cartoons, this comic checks out. Krazy Kat doesn’t resemble a cat very much in the first place. He has a pretty human nose. Again, the style is very toony, unlike Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo. Little Nemo is more realistic and though some characters like Flint are more stylized, they’re less abstract than Krazy Kat. The entire comic’s style gets detailed too, in contrast to a comic like Harriman’s. Little Nemo had the plain, fancier dialogue that I imagined all comics to have. Personally, I enjoyed Krazy Kat more for it’s silly style and more fun dialogue and punchlines. Little Nemo ending with him waking up every time gets tired after a while.