Adulting, nerdiness and the importance of single-panel comics

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While comics have become a culturally popular and widely studied art form in recent decades, one format remains overlooked: the single-panel comic.

Comics like "The Family Circus," "Ziggy" and "Little Lulu" are often seen as simplistic and not worthy of critical attention, argues Michelle Ann Abate, author of the new book Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States.

"There tends to be a belief there isn't much to analyze there. You don't need a lot of critical thinking skills to see 'Little Lulu' slipping on banana peels and get the joke," said Abate, who is a professor of literature for children and young adults at The Ohio State University's College of Education and Human Ecology.

And while some one-panel comics do rely on slapstick gags, wordplay, and simple puns, Abate said she found while researching Singular Sensations that there's much more to many of the one-panels.

Even comics like "Ziggy" that don't have a lot of cultural cachet have something to offer when read critically.

"'Ziggy' was often about the hassles of 'adulting' before adulting was even a word. 'Ziggy' has a lot of clever humor about the everyday setbacks that most people can relate to," she remarked. "There's a lot that resonates even now, decades later."

As Abate notes, perhaps no other single-panel comic has been more acclaimed and loved than "The Far Side" by Gary Larson.

"It was among the first places in our culture that really celebrated and showcased nerdiness."

While "The Far Side" doesn't have a recurring cast of characters, it did have recurring types of characters: mainly nerds of all kinds, from geeky middle-aged scientists to dorky adolescent schoolchildren.

At the time when Larson started "The Far Side" in 1980, nerdiness was not at the center of popular culture and valued in the way it is now, according to Abate.

Even though Larson's series relied on wordplay and puns, "it was the kind of puns and wordplay that nerds in particular would enjoy and that you don't see in other single-panel comics before it."

But it wasn't just the nerdiness that made "The Far Side" stand out, she said, It was the aesthetics, the way Larson drew the characters, particularly the humans. As one critic said, "his people are grotesque."

The very first "Far Side" comic showed the combination of nerdy subject matter and awkward, gangly, and even sometimes "ugly" humans that made Larson famous. The foreground showed two crabs talking to one another, while two human youngsters build a sandcastle in the background.

The two crabs were drawn to look friendly and adorable, Abate said. But the kids were distorted and didn't look cute like the children depicted in most comics. And the caption was true nerdiness: One crab was telling the other, "Yes … they are quite strange during the larval stage."

The way humans were drawn in "The Far Side" was novel at the time.

"In Larson's series, no child was cute, no man was handsome, and no woman was beautiful by conventional standards," Abate wrote.

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"The odd, unusual and even unsightly appearance of "The Far Side's' human characters did not distract readers from the content of the panel. On the contrary, such depictions echoed and even amplified the theme, topic or message."

Abate said Larson's aesthetic style defied a longstanding trend in American newspaper comics. Much of the emphasis has been on making the case for comics as fine art. And indeed, many cartoonists, especially graphic novelists, are known for the beauty and skill behind their incredible artwork. But Larson's drawing is intentionally unflattering and awkward.

"It just really went against the grain of what was happening in comics," she said.

"It gets readers to think about the aesthetics of ugliness and—paradoxically—what might be called the beauty of ugliness. Moreover, it also invites us to ponder what we deem ugly and why. It may even get us to learn to value what we thought of as ugly, rather than denigrate it."

While many people have rightly focused on Larson's impact on nerd culture, Abate hopes to call more attention to his contribution in the realm of comics aesthetics. The awkward, unflattering, and gangly way that Larson rendered his nerdy characters, Abate argues, is just as important as the nerdiness of their personalities. Many online comics—such as "The Oatmeal" and "Hyperbole and a Half"—render their human figures in ways can be seen as echoing and even extending Larson's style.

Beyond just "The Far Side," Abate said that single-panel comics deserve more recognition as an important type of cartoon art. Many of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed titles over the years—from "The Far Side," "Ziggy," and "The Family Circus" to "Heathcliff," "Marmaduke," and cartoons in The New Yorker—have been single-panel. Comics as we know them and especially as we love them in the United States would not be the same without the single-panel form.

Singular Sensations examines an array of popular one-panel comics from the 1890s through the present day. In addition to her discussion of "The Far Side," she has chapters on political cartoons, comics from The New Yorker, "The Family Circus," "The Yellow Kid," "Little Lulu," the groundbreaking series "Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger" by Jackie Ormes, "Ziggy," and "Bizarro."

"Single-panel comics are not only comics," Abate's book asserts, "they are examples of the medium at its most concentrated, compact and concise."

Gary Larson—and his nerdy characters—would likely agree.

Provided by The Ohio State University