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October 17, 2005
Blondie
COMIC ANALYSIS
In the Sunday October 2, 2005 Blondie, there are six panels. Dean Young and Denis Lebrun are the creators. The two main characters in Blondie are Dagwood and his wife, Blondie. They live in a house with their two children and dog, but there is always some light-hearted joke about what is going wrong in the lives of this family.
In this particular strip, Dagwood awakes to the sound of a particularly loud lawnmower at an ungodly hour in the morning. He and his neighbors march around the neighborhood to confront the source of the noise. However, the source turns out to be a model who says, “I hope I’m not disturbing you gentlemen, but I have a modeling job this morning.” This, of course, causes Dagwood and the other men to calmly go back to their beds with earmuffs because they are so surprised and excited by the beautiful woman.
The panel transitions certainly fit most comfortably into the moment to moment transitions because it takes place during ten minutes or less of the characters’ morning. It could also be argued that it is action to action because in every panel, there is a new action by Dagwood. In the first he awakes, in the second he is leaving the house, in the third, he is shown in the lawn talking to his neighbors, and so on. Also, each panel is the same size, and all of the pictures or words are contained inside the lines.
As for the level of representation, there is not a clear category. It is definitely not realism because the characters are cartoons, but the characters are not completely abstract or symbols. Somewhere between realism and symbolism may be the best definition. Although they are not simply smiley-faces, the people are not realistic. They do have human-like features so that we can deduce that they are, in fact, people.
Blondie does not seem like a particularly deep or meaningful comic, but one more just for laughs. The female model and the end, does seem to be used as metonymy, representing the population of exceptionally beautiful people, and how the rest of us tend to give these people special treatment and privileges.
This comic is interdependent. It would be possible to understand the comic without the speaking bubbles but it wouldn’t be as clear and would be missing a necessary visual component. On the other hand, without the pictures, the humor would be lacking. The pictures illustrate the emotions and events that are happening so that the reader can fully comprehend the story. Both the words and pictures contribute equally to the content.
In a comic strip, the visual aspect is very important when communicating what the characters are doing and feeling. The eyebrows and mouths that are drawn in Blondie effectively represent the anger and surprise on Dagwood’s face. His clenched fist, and sense of urgency showed in his forward posture are indications that he is angry. There is sweat on one of his neighbors’ faces, showing that he is also agitated. Most of the characters’ bodies are drawn, rather than having close-ups of the faces, so that we can see what they are thinking from their body language, and their physical actions, like running in panel 4, and the hands on the neighbor’s hips in panel 3.
Planning out a comic strip must be more difficult than we might have thought, now that we are analyzing the meaning behind the panels, line, shapes, angles, and many other aspects. As in this comic, there are various aspects to consider that all work together to create a funnAy, visually pleasing, and meaningful display.
Posted by lcishagan at October 17, 2005 10:12 PM
Comments
I was really close to using this comic!! I thought it was really funny as well as meaningful, especially in respect to the treatment that the men of the neighborhood give to the model.
Brenna DeCotis
Posted by: Brenna at October 18, 2005 10:15 AM