Little Lady Lovkins' hat never looks makes for a convincing chapeau, but instead resembles an upside down pair of pants flailing in the wind. Oftentimes you really have to stretch your imagination and squint a bit to pretend that the "woman in a big cloak and turban" is actually a woman in a big cloak and turban and not the upside-down chicken it looks like.
Someone climbing a tree would now be falling, and so on. A little old man would turn into a monster. Clouds of smoke would become a giant bird. Turned on their heels, the drawings would take on new shapes: Muffaroo would magically turn into Lovekins and vice versa. You first read the story normally, left to right, but then had to turn the paper 180 degrees to get to the conclusion. This was a Sunday strip where the basic premise lay in the novelty of its design. The central focus of the book is Verbeek's most well known(at least today) strip, The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffarooo. It's that seemingly endless cycle of repetition and the minute variations that cartoonists attempt to find within that limited scope, that seems to keep (or at least has kept until now) people returning to the funny pages day after day. Blondie may get a catering job, the Family Circus mom may change her hairstyle, but the core concept remains the same. It's not just the simplicity of the base concept that attracts, it's also the fact that said concept will never, ever alter in any broad, significant fashion that charms readers. The Family Circus kids will always make cute malapropisms and stay under the age of 10. Dagwood will always get harassed by his boss and have a sexual fetish for overly large sandwiches.
Beetle Bailey will always be a goldbrick and Sarge will always hector him. The daily comic strip isn't the only art form to rely upon repetition and formula - plenty of TV shows and films, not to mention pop songs, do the same - but certainly a lot of strips, both modern and ancient, trade heavily on familiarity to garner interest and appeal. The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek: The Complete Sunday Comics 1903-1905įorever Nuts present: Frederick Burr Opper's Happy Hooliganĭread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as a Comic Strip
0 kommentar(er)
