For my first exercise for part one I have been asked to research into 5 different important historical comic creators. I will be focusing on researching the way they create the comic imagery rather than the actual stories etc. From quickly reading through the list of who I’m going to research I found out I only know three out of the five artists and their work. The ones I know are ‘Peanuts’, ‘The Adventures of TinTin’, ‘The Fantastic Four’ & ‘Thor’ and the ones I don’t know are ‘Persepolis’, ‘Embroideries’ and ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’. I think it would be smart to look at the ones I don’t know first just to get a better idea of them before moving onto the ones I already know. There are some question prompts in the course book that I decided to copy below as they seemed like a good starting point.

Windor McCay – Newspaper Comic Strip – ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’ – 1905-1926

• Drawing Style: Very detailed work created with what seems like a fine pen. It’s colours are mostly pastel shades, I assume to give a ‘dream-like’ feel to the comic.
• Page Layout: Panels change shape and size depending on what topic is shown in the story (e.g. in the image shown above, Nemo’s bed has long elastic legs so the panels are long and thin to match the legs).
• Contents: A series of whimsical dreams that the boy ‘Nemo’ has before waking up in bed again.
• Are they drawn realistically or like children’s drawings or cartoons?: There is a mixture of realistically drawn backgrounds and details but the parts of the story that are exaggerated (as Nemo is in a dream) are cartoon-like.
• Do they use black space or shading or are the drawings clean lines?: The drawing are made up of clean lines and a wash of pastel colouring.
• Is the story told in dialogue or in captions that describe the actions and motivations of the characters?: The story is told in dialogue.
• Are they political, satirical or fantastical?: Fantastical
• What kind of world do they take place in? Is it our world or an imaginary world or somewhere in between?: A dream world, where Nemo dreams of strange things that happen in a seemingly normal world/surroundings.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Nemo_in_Slumberland_%281908-07-26%29_panels_11_to_15.jpg

Charles M Shulz – Comic Strip – ‘Peanuts’ – from 1950-2000

• Drawing Style: Simple but classic work, memorable art style. Possibly created using black ink pen.
• Page Layout: Equally sized panels. In the old newspaper comics strips, a story normally consisted of four panels like the one above.
• Contents: Quick stories. Normally involving Charlie Brown and his friends.
• Are they drawn realistically or like children’s drawings or cartoons?: A mixture between children’s drawings and cartoons. The lack of details and the way the feet are drawn would make me think (if I didn’t know what ‘Peanuts’ was) that it was a children’s drawing but on the other hand there is this consistency with the way the characters are drawn and composition of the images makes the strip interesting.
• Do they use black space or shading or are the drawings clean lines?: There is a bit of shading, normally just to show if someone has a different colour skin or to give texture.
• Is the story told in dialogue or in captions that describe the actions and motivations of the characters?: The story is told in dialogue.
• Are they political, satirical or fantastical?: I’d say none of these.
• What kind of world do they take place in? Is it our world or an imaginary world or somewhere in between?: Our world (e.g. in the image above Charlie Brown and his friend are located on a beach making sand castles).

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20181112-good-grief-the-beguiling-philosophy-of-peanuts

Hergé – Series of 22 books – ‘The Adventures of TinTin’ – from 1946 – 1976

• Drawing Style: Detailed and has a use of bold colours.
• Page Layout: Neat but irregular panels.
• Contents: The main character ‘Tintin’s’ Adventures with his dog ‘Snowy’.
• Are they drawn realistically or like children’s drawings or cartoons?: Definitely cartoon style. Everything is very bold and colourful.
• Do they use black space or shading or are the drawings clean lines?: No, the only shading I could see is used when there are clothes or grass etc that need texture.
• Is the story told in dialogue or in captions that describe the actions and motivations of the characters?: Dialogue but other sounds (for instance the plane breaking down in the image above) use words within the drawing to describe the sound.
• Are they political, satirical or fantastical?: I’d say in between political and fantastical.
• What kind of world do they take place in? Is it our world or an imaginary world or somewhere in between?: Our world (for instance in the image above there are trees, fields, planes, humans, a gun and animals).

https://scriptoriumdaily.com/tintin-top-ten/

Stan Lee & Jack Kirby – Superhero Comics – ‘The Fantastic Four’ & ‘Thor’ – 1960’s

• Drawing Style: Detailed and extremely bold (what would probably come to mind if someone said ‘comic book’.
• Page Layout: Many panels of all shapes and sizes depending on the context of the story/images.
• Contents: Superhero’s being hero’s, saving the day, backstories (e.g. how they became superhero’s) or how they are going to defeat the baddies/nemesis.
• Are they drawn realistically or like children’s drawings or cartoons?: They are drawn realistically with a mixture of cartoon (for instance, the human figures are realistic but the character ‘Ben Grimm’ also known as ‘The Thing’ is shown to be a mutant with a rock-like appearance.
• Do they use black space or shading or are the drawings clean lines?: There is both a use of black space and shading throughout many of these comics.
• Is the story told in dialogue or in captions that describe the actions and motivations of the characters?: Both. Even though the image above doesn’t show it, sometimes there are captions above or below the images in squares almost like someone is narrating it.
• Are they political, satirical or fantastical?: I’d say all of the above for this one.
• What kind of world do they take place in? Is it our world or an imaginary world or somewhere in between?: I think a mixture of our world but also a different place also known as the ‘Marvel Universe’.

https://www.comicsgrid.com/article/id/3533/

https://50yearoldcomics.com/2018/09/09/thor-158-november-1968/

Marjane Satrapi – Graphic Novels – ‘Persepolis’ & ‘Embroideries’ – 2000 & 2008

• Drawing Style: Simple, with just the use of black and white. There is a lot of empty space too around the illustrations.
• Page Layout: No panels are used at all, the pages are comprised of a few illustrations with no backgrounds and a little text.
• Contents: Illustrated Autobiography that depicts the author’s memories.
• Are they drawn realistically or like children’s drawings or cartoons?: Like children’s drawings.
• Do they use black space or shading or are the drawings clean lines?: No.
• Is the story told in dialogue or in captions that describe the actions and motivations of the characters?: The stories are told in dialogue.
• Are they political, satirical or fantastical?: Political and satirical.
• What kind of world do they take place in? Is it our world or an imaginary world or somewhere in between?: Our world as it’s the human author’s memories of growing up from when she was young to when she was an adult in Iran and Austria during the Islamic Revolution.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9526.Embroideries

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Embroideries-2005-Marjane-Satrapi_fig6_280640981

Looking at these different comics all together I can see a real variety. It was interesting to analyse each one separately as when I was going through each one I noticed how many differences their actually are and how things can be so different from the style to the context. I was particularly interested in Marjane Satrapi’s Graphic Novels ‘Persepolis’ & ‘Embroideries’ and I think I might purchase these as I really liked the art style and think it may be useful to have as a research material to use in other parts on this unit.