Comical comics
Comical comics |
|
Page 15 of 34  Covers, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (Dell, 1944 and 1946), featuring an exhortation by Bugs Bunny to 'Buy More War Bonds'. Art: Leon Schlesinger. Another change was that the quality of writing and art was driven down. The frantic need to meet deadlines, and the often unrealistic pressure on creators to imitate the work of people like Reid and Baxendale, meant that the vast majority of strips were derivative and dull. The jokes were often spread too thinly, and the artwork was typically second rate (unsurprising bearing in mind that creators were paid for quantity rather than quality). Today, it's enormously tempting for adults of a certain age to look back on these humour comics with nostalgia. Readers, however, should be warned against investigating them too closely, as we were all much less critical as children. In the United States, comedy comics were equally as successful over a similar period. As we have seen, their origin was in newspaper strips: in Chapter I we explored how the popular press became the home for strip supplements aimed at a mixed-age readership, which were then filleted by enterprising publishers to make collected book editions of individual stories. This process continued through the Depression era, with ever-greater popularity, as country-wide syndication became more organized. However, new strips rarely deviated from previously patented formulas: unarguably, the main genre remained domestic comedy. |