“An editor told me a long time ago,” Walker writes, “that if you could cover up the drawing and still get the gag by reading the caption, then you were a writer and not a cartoonist. With that advice, I’ve always tried to get as many funny pictures into my work as possible.”
Writing in his 1975 book, Backstage at the Strips (still probably the best book around about the life of a cartoonist), Walker discusses his attitude toward humor. He disagrees with Jules Feiffer, who says “you have to hate to be funny. Humor, Feiffer says, comes from dissatisfaction with things; you attack, ridicule, and destroy what you don’t like with humor.' Some humorists do. But Walker says he’s more comfortable with Leo Rosten’s notion that “humor is an affectionate insight into the affairs of man. Affectionate is the word that won me,” says Walker. “I like people. I like their absurdities, their aberrations, their pretensions. If you catch a guy exaggerating, you don’t ridicule him: you understand him.”
“…Lighting is very revealing. Lighting, for an artist, generally depends on how he sees something, his sense of perspective. Those artists - if you look at comic books, you’ll see them - those artists who come from the far west, or outside of major cities, think in terms of horizons. Their lighting generally is flat–maybe not flat so much as solid. They see lots of sky. I grew up in the city. Most of the light I saw came from a lamplight, vertically, or light coming through tall buildings. I either saw things sharply up or sharply down, coming down the stairwell in my apartment house, or walking up a stairwell in my apartment house, I saw light, I still do, even to this day, sharply and directly, and people coming from the West or from farms and places like that see light as diffused. This is an example of what I mean by cultural input.”
“I think that there are a hell of a lot of fans that are very ignorant about comics, where the comics of today came from, and they’re very ignorant about them and about the newspaper strips. I can’t imagine someone considering themselves a fan or a buff in an area and not taking the time to go back and look at the history, and look at the contributions of these people.”
“…I think satire is a form of rage, an expression perhaps of anger. There is kindly humor and there is bitter humor. There’s kindly tragedy and there’s bitter tragedy. There is a relationship between the two in my mind -I can’t keep them separate. Every time I do a very tragic scene, I can see humorous scene within the same frame and it can be converted. A man walking down the street and falling into manhole can be very tragic thing – or it could be very funny. So much depends on what else is involved. I see humor as an incongruity. There are lots of definitions of what humor is- some think it’s man’s inhumanity to man, some think people laugh because they’re glad it isn’t happening to them, some people laugh because of happiness, or kindness, or even fear – but I see humor as a kind of incongruity.”
“…we all seem to go that route. Michelangelo too - in his later years he began to have a looser approach to his carving. The unfinished statues that you find in Plorence are an example of that. And Milton Caniff - look at the change in his work over the years. As one gets older, as one matures, the tight line, the finely constructed line, loses its value. Perhaps one gets more interested in the theme than in the technique.
People don’t remain the same, they change over the years. The only features that never altered their structural line are features like Mickey Mouse. Even Al Capp changed - although he never loosened up to the point of sketchiness. When you have a strip that’s very very personal to the artist, a strip which isn’t drawn by formula, you’ll find that the art will change. Usually it will tend to get looser. There’s a lack of patience with having to retain that heavy line. In The Spirit that heavy, very controlled line was an effort to retain color, color which had to be applied after all by someone else. We had to give them what we used to call “trap arcas.” Now that’s not necessary- the technology has advanced, color can be applied in other ways. Besides, I like that loose line I think it looks nicer… more expressive.”
“I must say that I am still the same Will Eisner of 1942-43, trying to expand the horizons of my medium, my medium being a sequence of pictures on paper. I believe that sequential art is the oldest communicating art form, I think it has the validity of any other art form – and while it may not have the breadth and dimension of motion pictures and it may not have the ability to cover abstracts the way lines of words do, and it may not be able to do a lot of things – it has served humanity since early man because it has the ability to transmit a story. So I am at work now, hopefully not singlehandedly – I’d like to be joined by other artists – in an effort to produce literature in sequential art form, or what you would call “comic art.” I’ve been struggling with the word “comic book” for 30 years now… but every time I try to change it, I find that people force me back into it. I had finally settled on the term “graphic novel,” thinking that would be an adequate euphemism, but the class I teach is called “sequential art” – and of course that’s what it is – a sequence of pictures arranged to tell a story.”
Every time I hear somebody say “according to Google AI” all I hear is “according to my drunk belligerent uncle who insists he has a great memory but doesn’t”
Controversial opinion that I had no idea was controversial until I shared it in a forum where I assumed a majority of people agreed with me of the week: Works of art should be able to stand on their own. You should not need to read a book length explanation of a work of art in order to appreciate it.
There should at least be a hint of what the point of the work of art is, or what it’s about, within the work itself. The art should at some level justify its own existence. Otherwise, what is it for?
I don’t know why people are arguing with me about this.
I have said in the past, very publicly, on the internet, that art and artist should be separated, but I don’t believe that anymore. The artist does not separate themselves from their art when they make it, so it’s not possible to separate them from it after it’s made.
That said, I don’t think that when an artist does something deplorable that it means their art has somehow changed. It’s still good, if we thought it was good before, and the artist is still in it. However, it’s the better part of them that’s in it, not the ugly part.
I have no issue with someone separating themselves from the work of an artist if the actions of the artist makes their work uncomfortable to engage with. However, it does not change the quality of the work. It only changes your reaction to it.
It’s one thing you learn as you delve more into the history of any creative medium. There are a lot of really awful people who have made a lot of really beautiful things. We reconcile that by recognizing that people have both ugliness and beauty inside them, and they come out in different ways.
People praising certain webcomics by saying they’re “just like old newspaper comics” is wonderful, but sad. It’s great that web cartoonists are still doing 3 and 4 panel gag comics like that, and that people appreciate it, but saying it that way implies that newspaper comics are no longer a thing.
But they are! Newspapers still exist and still run comics daily! Webcomics are great, but there are still print comic strips too!
It just bothers me a little that people don’t seem to know this.
Better to excitedly talk about how great newspaper comics are and how they’ve influenced American culture and society than to sit around bemoaning the fact that no one seems to care about them anymore.
Because when you do, you find more people actually do care than you ever thought
With how the newspaper comic landscape is now, it’s really hard to explain to rising generations how much more important comic strips were to people in previous decades.
One of the things you realize when you study the history of a thing is how much longer it has existed than people think. Sequential art has been with us for centuries. It has incredible staying power. How it’s published and consumed may change, but the medium will not die.
“…It may end being socially significant, or accepted, or whatever, but at the time, almost without exceptions, it was a way to make living. It starts that way, anyway.”
It’s interesting that cartoonists who started their careers in the 1930s, like Milt Caniff and Hal Foster, didn’t view their work as having any significance or artistic merit and was only meant to make them a living. It would take another generation before some cartoonists would see it differently.