Week Three: The Comic Strip

For this week, I read the collection of Little Nemo comics, Krazy Kat and The Rarebit Fiend. The specific story I thought was interesting the The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend comic strips. These newspaper comic strips began on September 10, 1904 and ran until 1925. They were released under the publisher, New York Herald and were immensely popular for their time. They were drawn and written by American Cartoonist, Winsor McCay.

All of these comics follow a different set of characters, all having the same dilemma. They all embark on a strange and often unfortunate dream, with extreme cases of luckiness or misfortune. They involve shrinking to unhuman sizes, taking medicine to grow taller for the women of your dreams, licking too many postage stamps and repeatedly sitting, laying, leaning and stepping in multiple slabs of sticky bug paper.  The idea is meant to be fantastical, as none of this could really happy, minus the sticky paper.

There meant to represent dreams and how far fetched they can be, and how they can leave a lasting impression on you after you wake up. The comics themselves follow a very common layout. Starting at the top left, and ending at the bottom right. They do not ever break this layout and part of that is obviously because of there limitations.

These comics were printed on the tiny corners of newspapers back when they could only print in black ink and with very think edges. meaning a lot of the clean crisp lines or comics would be lost. The art here is shaded with dots and etching, and line work is very minimalist and readable from far away, usually relying on silhouettes and readable caricatures. Comics like this would be the inspiration for many American comic artists of the early 1900's and the beginning of the comic book franchise.