Most Overrated/Most Underrated Comic Strip

So since we’re in the middle of a Bloom County Roundtable, I thought I’d officially state that I think it’s the most underrated comic strip out there. It gets little critical appreciation and isn’t much talked about, even though it’s fantastic, and one of the all time greats as far as I’m concerned. (It was mired towards the bottom of our best comics list. I sort of regret I didn’t put it on my own top ten.)

Overrated; well, Calvin and Hobbes is the first that springs to mind, for some of the reasons I discussed earlier in the week. I think Doonesbury’s pretty mediocre as well; visually blah and often smug and flat, though occasionally funny. The enthusiasm for Nancy among comics folks also baffles me; it’s visually slick, but completely devoid of any other interest, as far as I can tell.

I actually generally agree with the enthusiasm for the most praised comic strips — Peanuts, Krazy Kat, and Little Nemo. I think they’re rated about right.

So what do you think are the most overrated and underrated comic strips? Let us know in comments.
 

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Creating Children

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Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes is a strip about the wonders of imagination. And, as this famous Sunday shows, the wonder there, and the imagination as well, is insistently self-referential. The opening white space of the page is a nod to the white space of the page, so that the page represents the moment before creation just as the moment before creation turns around and represents the page. The calligraphy foregrounds the artist’s hand, even in the usually ignored realm of lettering, while the close-up of the eye-of-Calvin winks at Watterson’s own eye, gazing down upon the page. Calvin’s virtuoso acts of creation, the planets he sets spinning, are, at the same time, Watterson’s virtuoso acts of creation. That hand, from which a galaxy forms, points to Watterson’s actual hand, from which the galaxy forms. “He’s creating whole worlds over there!” Calvin’s dad enthuses, by which he means Calvin, but which could also, and does also apply to Waterson himself. The mom’s response, “I’ll bet he grows up to be an architect,” is ironic because Calvin’s imagined creation/destruction of the universe is figured as gleefully asocial rather than as a career path. But it’s also ironic simply because she’s got the wrong profession. Calvin is training to be an artist/cartoonist, not an architect; his future is, literally and figuratively, Watterson’s present. The comic can be read not as a winking laugh at the distance between child/adult perceptions, but as a kind of smug moment of gloating; Watterson/Calvin is cooler than his parents and cooler than architects. He’s a gloating god who gets paid not just for the creation, but for the gloating.

The strip’s celebration of imagination is predicated on the link between Calvin and Watterson. But that link is itself created through careful separations; to make Calvin and the cartoonist parallel, certain lines can’t meet. Thus, here, as throughout Calvin & Hobbes, the barrier between imagination and reality is carefully maintained. Calvin’s imagination is rendered in a more detailed, more expressionist style, again, even the text is written in calligraphy; reality, on the other hand, is drawn in Watterson’s standard cartoony format. The child’s-eye world and the parent’s eye world are visually and conceptually distinct. The wonder of Calvin’s imagination, and of Watterson’s, is figured specifically as a wonder by making clear that it is set off from the normal and everyday. Hobbes the tiger is a marvelous creation because the purity of the creation is underlined by Hobbes the stuffed animal. In order to celebrate childhood and (Calvin or Watterson’s) creativity, you need a nothing, a blank, to stick it in and compare it to.
 

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Bloom County’s treatment of imagination and of childhood works quite differently. This strip, for example, does not start with blank space, to be filled with creativity. Rather, it starts with Binkley being woken up by a Giant Purple Snorklewacker — you come out of dream to be in a dream. The one panel with no fantastic elements is not at the end — as ironic reassertion of the real — but in the middle, as a kind of pause or beat between absurdities. Nor is there a stylistic indication of what’s real and what isn’t. The Snorklewacker’s shock of unruly hair looks much like Binkley’s shock of unruly hair; Mrs. McGreevy looks like any other pleasantly dumpy Breathed old person except for that ax.

The imaginative content here is also less virtuoso riff than fuddy-duddy pratfall. In fact, the narrative seems designed to conflate the joy of childhood with the banal worries/fantasies of adults, so that “Green Eggs and Ham” becomes an occasion not for gleeful rhyming, but for worrying about due dates.

Nor is it just childhood fantasies that are punctured; in his notes to this cartoon in the Bloom County library reissue, Breathed notes that the strip was inspired by discovering his own out-of-date library book — a Frazetta art book. Mrs. McGreevy in Viking helmet can be seen, then, as a parody of Frazetta’s barbarians, and also as a kind of back-handed (back-axed?) comment on Breathed’s own imagination, or lack thereof. Give me a noble warrior, Breathed says, and I will turn it into a librarian and a neurosis. Breathed may be the Snorklewacker, gleefully leaping up and down in anticipation of tormenting his character, but he’s also that character, Binkley, who worries the way adults worry. The line between adult/child gets is smudged over, just like the line between fantasy and reality.

You could argue that these smudgings — the fact that the Snorklewacker occasionally escapes into the real world while Hobbes never does, or the fact that Calvin is always a six-year-old with a six-year-olds interests, while Binkley has anxious daydreams about economists — means that Calvin and Hobbes is the more true-to-life strip. I tend to agree with Bert Stabler, though, when he argues that Bloom County is in the mode of realism — especially when we use Ambrose Bierce’s definition of realism as “the art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads.” Calvin and Hobbes revels in creativity; Bloom County deflates it. Watterson creates a world from nothing; Berkeley Breathed insists that your flights of fancy will be fined.

Inevitably, Watterson’s self-vaunting optimism in the power of childhood and comics is the popular and critical darling, while Breathed’s dumpy skepticism is either ignored or forgotten. But for me, at least, I much prefer Breathed’s sly, exuberant pfft to Watterson’s rote magic. Certainly, I’d happily trade all of Watterson’s cosmic shenanigan’s for that single motion line Breathed uses to show the curlicue path of the ax, so you have to imagine the head flipping around before embedding itself in the wall. Or, for that matter, for that first picture of the happy Snorklewacker leaping up and down on the bed, a scrunched purple bundle filling the room almost up to the ceiling with jittery motion lines, imagination not as expansive power, but claustrophobic vibration.

Bloom County is realistic, I’d argue, not because it eschews fantasy, but because it doesn’t. In Breathed’s world, the real and the ridiculous crowd in on one another, elbowing each other for space in the same low-ceilinged room. Children are not proto-artists to be glorified, but just schlubs like the rest of us, beset in equal measure by the snorklewackers in their own brains and by the due dates in everyone else’s. The artist isn’t a god, but a horny toad, who provides, not wonder, but nagging, and an occasional ax.
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The entire Bloom County roundtable is here.

#3: Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson

Those two-seconds-late realizations when Calvin’s mom realized what his last absurdist claim meant. The jarring reminders when Hobbes was drawn as a stuffed tiger. That quaint moment when you first figured out that Suzie would always be his one true love. Trying to figure out which of the Calvins was the one who actually went to school after he created all those cardboard clones. Getting jealous of his tree forts and the friendships contained within them. The lettering that Bill Watterson used for Moe’s threats, and the way Moe’s physical prowess was never bested. Knowing that, since she was a Mrs. Wormwood, that meant there was a Mr. Wormwood hiding somewhere else who only knew about our hellion secondhand. The first time you tried to make snowmen the way Calvin did. When Calvin’s dad broke down and taught you that your dad could be as confused and scared as you always were. The majestic, experimental Sunday strips where you saw all the other styles that Watterson had at his beck and call, and the moment when he brought you home with the one you knew best. Learning what the word sabbatical meant. Learning that artists could stand up for themselves, and that they should stand up for themselves, and always holding up the moment when this one did as the bar that all other artists had to clear. A hippopotamus with wings. Calvin’s face. Calvin’s ambition. Calvin’s imagination. Calvin’s hair. How hard he tried, how often he failed.

The way he loved Hobbes. The way we loved them.

Tucker Stone is an actor who most recently appeared in the film Quiet City and a whole mess of plays in New York City. He writes about comics for comiXology and The Comics Journal, and he blogs about all kinds of trash culture at The Factual Opinion.

NOTES

Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson, received 45 votes.

The poll participants who included it in their top tens are: Michael Arthur, Robert Beerbohm, Piet Beerends, Eric Berlatsky, Corey Blake, Scott O. Brown, Bruce Canwell, Scott Chantler, Brian Codagnone, Roberto Corona, Jamie Cosley, Dave Coverly, Martin de la Iglesia, Randy Duncan, Jason Green, Steve Greenberg, Greg Hatcher, Alex Hoffman, Abhay Khosla, Kinukitty, T. J. Kirsch, Sean Kleefeld, Nicolas Labarre, Sonny Liew, Alec Longstreth, John MacLeod, Vom Marlowe, Gary Spencer Millidge, Pat Moriarity, Eugenio Nittolo, Rick Norwood, José-Luis Olivares, Jim Ottaviani, Michael Pemberton, Andrea Queirolo, Martin Rebas, Giorgio Salati, Val Semeiks, Joe Sharpnack, Kenneth Smith, Tom Stiglich, Tucker Stone, Kelly Thompson, Sean Witzke, and Yidi Yu.

Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes was a newspaper strip published between November 18, 1985 and December 31, 1995.

There have been 18 book collections of Calvin and Hobbes published. The most comprehensive is The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a three-volume hardcover set that reprints every strip along with all supplementary and promotional art produced for the feature.

Those looking for a single, introductory collection are probably best served by Calvin and Hobbes: The Tenth Anniversary Book, which features a selection of strips chosen by Bill Watterson. The book can be found at most bookstores and online retailers, as well as in many public libraries.

–Robert Stanley Martin

Best Comics Poll Index

Blog vs. Professor: Seduced by Form

The comics blogosphere and comics academia can seem both unaware and mistrustful of each other. This is the case despite the fact that there are many people who work in both worlds. Probably it has something to do with the fact that traditional publishers are understandably wary of making their texts accessible online; probably it has something to do with a fan culture’s understandable skepticism of the ivory tower.

In any case, I thought it would be nice to buck the trend at least a little by devoting a roundtable to an academic work. After some discussion, we decided to read Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, one of the most respected academic publications on comics of the last decade. The choice seemed especially pertinent since Charles is a blogger as well as an academic; he writes with Craig Fischer at the wonderful Thought Balloonists. (And Charles has graciously agreed to weigh in himself at the end of the roundtable.)
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Alternative Comics turns out to be an excellent book to bridge the comics/blog gap in that its concerns, interests, and enthusiasms are ones which map closely onto the online world (or at least the art comix parts of it). Specifically, the book focuses on history, on formal elements, and on authenticity, especially as the last relates to autobiographical comics. Alternative Comics also, and somewhat to my surprise, engages in a good bit of advocacy — Charles definitely sees himself as validating comics as art and (more specifically) as literature for an academic audience.

The part of Charles’ discussion I found most compelling was the formal. Charles sees comics as “An Art of Tensions,” defined by how it negotiates between competing ways of making meaning: image vs. text, single image vs. image in series, seriality vs. synchronism, sequence vs. surface, and text as experience vs. text as object (loosely narrative vs. style.) Most of these contrasts will be familiar to comics readers, but Charles’ exposition of them is unusually clear, and his application to particular cases is very nicely handled. For instance, here’s a discussion of seriality vs. synchornism (events happening one after the other vs. events happening at the same time) in a page from Mary Fleener’s “Rock Bottom”:

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