The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics' Effect

The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, edited by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams, offers easy access to several decades of American newspaper comic strips. From Little Nemo in Slumberland, by Winsor McCay, to B.C., by Johnny Hart, this collection showcases the shift that takes place over the period of time that is shown elapsing between the two covers of this work. While The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics was meant to serve, affectionately, as a history and compilation of the included comics, in the act of grouping these strips together into a single volume (in such close proximity to one another), Blackbeard and Williams created their own comic strip. As mentioned in the book, these strips were constructed with their medium in mind, one where a 24-hour period of suspense was meant to elapse between the viewers’ consumption of the daily comics. Here, however, the next comic is but a short distance down the very same page. As a result, the ebb and flow of the stories, and consequently the overall effect thereof, changes a good deal. For those very few individuals who are able to look back on this full collection with nostalgia, the experience, perhaps, changed very little; for those people of younger generations reading many of these strips for the first time, the effect is of an invariably different nature: one of a broader understanding of the role these comic strips played in our culture rather than experiencing each one individually. Through The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, comic aficionados are able to come to a better understanding of the foundation on which the medium beloved by millions of Americans was built.

Hogarth's Harlot

William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress is a series of masterfully crafted engravings which contain an unbelievable amount of detail. As one of the founders of comics, Hogarth saw the opportunity that visual narratives presented. Even more so, he understood the power of the panel, and the needlessness of a description; although he did provide a short, one-sentence summary of each engraving, the illustrations could and certainly do stand on their own two feet, so to speak. I have seen this series several times over the last few years, but I am still discovering new details and subtle symbols that Hogarth was able to sneak into the compositions in order to enrich the visuals, support the story, and even hint towards offshoots of the main storyline that would elaborate on secondary and even tertiary characters. As all comics should be in some measure, A Harlot’s Progress is visually pleasing enough to draw readers into the space of the characters, and, once there, audience members are hardly able to extract themselves from it as they discover layer upon layer of story, character, culture, and environment. In this series, it can be said that there is a “gutter” of sorts, not between panels (as with conventional comics) but between pages, or the time that passes between the viewing of the different illustrations. There, just as in modern comics, people are invited to fill in the gaps of the Harlot’s narrative. Through A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth made many concepts of modern comics and graphic novels mainstream.

Ernst's Seven Deadly Elements

A Week of Kindness or the Seven Deadly Elements, by Max Ernst, is a surreal graphic novel that relies heavily on cultural context. Through the strange imagery of this novel, Ernst suppresses what would traditionally be viewed as comprehensible and allows the subconscious minds of the readers to take over the experience. This work takes advantage of what the graphic novel is capable of on a very surreal level, one that leaves the story’s plot up to the individual interpretation, unlike other art forms that are absolutely tethered to a mundane plot that is completely dictated, word for word, by an author (or other similar creator). Thursday, in particular, focuses on a wildly impossible story featuring chicken-like monsters, human experiments, and murder. Ernst is able to pull this off artistically because of the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief. When something as fantastic and utterly impossible as this is laid out before a person, he or she is less likely to scrutinize every single aesthetic aspect of the story and is able to delve deeper into the theme, passing right by the physical, surface elements of the illustrations. As a result, and given the wordless fashion of this graphic narrative, A Week of Kindness: Thursday, inevitably shifts in meaning with every new person that joins the reading of this story. It can be argued that this is something that happens in some small measure with every work of art, but the surreal quality of Thursday allows this to take place to an exponentially higher degree, following – yet reinforcing – the fashion of wordless comics.