Presentation: Comics

                                             Comics

 

               Thimble Theatre: Popeye

                                               Krazy Kat

 Krazy Kat is an American comic strip created by cartoonist George Herriman, published daily in newspapers between 1913 and 1944. . Set in a dreamlike portrayal of Herriman's vacation home of Coconino County, Arizona, Krazy Kat's mixture of offbeat surrealism, innocent playfulness and poetic, idiosyncratic language has made it a favorite of comics aficionados and art critics for more than 80 years.

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The descriptive passages mix whimsical and often alliterative language with phonetically-spelled dialogue and a strong poetic sensibility ("Agathla, centuries aslumber, shivers in its sleep with splenetic splendor, and spreads abroad a seismic spasm with the supreme suavity of a vagabond volcano."). Herriman was also fond of experimenting with unconventional page layouts in his Sunday strips, including panels of various shapes and sizes, arranged in whatever fashion he thought would best tell the story. Despite the slapstick simplicity of the general premise, it was the detailed characterization, combined with Herriman's visual and verbal creativity that made Krazy Kat one of the first comics to be widely praised by intellectuals and treated as "serious" art. . Though only a modest success during its initial run, in more recent years, many modern cartoonists have cited Krazy Kat as a major influence.

                                                 Tintin

 

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The Adventures of Tintin (Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of comic strips created by the Belgian artist Georges Rémi (1907–1983), who wrote under the pen name of Hergé. The series first appeared in French in Le Petit Vingtième, a children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le XXe Siècle on 10 January 1929. The success of the series saw the serialised strips collected into a series of twenty-four albums, spun into a successful magazine and adapted for film, radio, television and theatre. The series is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, with translations published in more than 80 languages and more than 350 million copies of the books sold to date.Its popularity around the world has been attributed to its "universal appeal" and its ability to transcend "time, language and culture."

 

  

• •Set during a largely realistic 20th century, the hero of the series is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided in his adventures from the beginning by his faithful fox terrier dog Snowy (Milou in French). Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash, cynical and grumpy Captain Haddock, the highly intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (Professeur Tournesol) and other supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (Dupont et Dupond). Hergé himself features in several of the comics as a background character, as do his assistants in some instances.
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The comic strip series has long been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ligne claire style. Its "engaging", well-researched plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories within the Tintin series always feature slapstick humour, accompanied in later albums by satire, and political and cultural commentary.

                                         (Punch Magazine, July 28 1920)

(David Low, 1936)

- Filipe Gomes Nº41527

• •Thimble Theatre, created by Elzie Crisler Segar in 1919, was initially a comic featuring the characters of Olive Oyl and several others acting out diferent stories in theatrical style. The strip gradually changed its focus to an adventure style.
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Popeye is considered by many as a precursor to the superheroes that came to dominate the world of comic books. He is likened to the character of Superman, in that they symbolise how the U.S. Sees itself as a nation: possessing uncompromising moral standards and resorting to force when threatened, or when he "can't stands no more" bad behavior from an antagonist. In 1929 the character of Popeye was introduced and became so popular with the readers that he eventually became a main character. In the 70s the strip was renamed after him.

                                In the 1920s and 1930s

• • Comics (from the Greek κωμικός, kōmikos "of or pertaining to comedy" from κῶμος - kōmos "revel, komos",via the Latin cōmicus) is a graphic medium in which images convey a sequential narrative. The term derives from the mostly humorous early work in the medium, and came to apply to that form of the medium including those far from comic.
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• • Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these were published in newspapers, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in American newspapers alone each day for most of the 20th century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes.
• The 1920s and 1930s saw great booms within the industry. While the market for comic anthologies in Britain had turned to targeting children through juvenile humor, with The Dandy and The Beano launched., in Belgium Hergé created the Tintin newspaper strip for a comic supplement; this was successfully collected in a bound album and created a market for further such works. The same period in the United States had seen newspaper strips expand their subject matter beyond humour, with action, adventure and mystery strips launched. The collection of such material also began, with The Funnies, a reprint collection of newspaper strips, published in tabloid size in 1929. 
•  A market for such comic books soon followed, and by 1938 publishers were printing original material in the format. It was at this point that Action Comics#1 launched, with Superman as the cover feature. The popularity of the character swiftly enshrined the superhero as the defining genre of American comics.
 Critical discussions of the form appeared as early as the 1920s,but serious studies were rare until the late 20th century.   In some circles, comics are still seen as low art. However, such an elitist "low art/high art" distinction doesn't exist in the French-speaking world (and, to some extent, continental Europe), where the bandes dessinées medium as a whole is commonly accepted as "the Ninth Art", is usually dedicated a non-negligible space in bookshops and libraries.

 

                              Little Orphan Annie

 

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The fact that the strip had a girl as the main character was indicative of the shift in the spotlight from boys to girls in the 20s. Girls as main characters were becoming more common. The strip was considered very controversial. Gray was the first comic artist to inject politics into a comic strip. He was a very conservative republican, and didn’t seem very worried about offending people with his opinions.

 

                           Portugal: Quim & Manecas

 

• •Considered the first portuguese comic, written and drawn by Stuart Carvalhais. It was first published in 1915 in the “O Século” newspaper and lasted until 1953, ending eight years before its creators death in 1961.
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Originaly following a standart formula in comics of the time, about two boys and their inocent pranks and misadventures, it evolved to encopass political analysis and bizarre situations, even dealing with the war.

• Stuart was one of the first european comic artists to use text baloons.

 Little Orphan Annie was a daily American comic strip created by Harold Gray (1894–1968) The plot follows the wide-ranging adventures of Annie, her dog Sandy, and her benefactor Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks. Secondary characters include Punjab, the Asp and Mr. Am. The strip attracted adult readers with political commentary that targeted (among other things) organized labor, the New Deal and communism.