CSotD: Simple gag simply kills
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Non Sequitur got a genuine laugh, rather than a "that's pretty good," out of me this morning. Now, of course, having enjoyed it, I feel compelled to analyze why I enjoyed it.
Sort of the way a puppy gets a nice squeaky toy and then tears it apart to find, and destroy, the squeaker. It's how I express the joy of discovery.
No wonder I'm single.
Anyway, I think the first element in this is that (sorry, industry) I read it on-line, where Wiley's vertical Sunday format forces you to view the panels sequentially. But I think that format works in print as well. In the olden days, I enjoyed the "Calvin and Hobbes" Sunday strips in which he'd be Spaceman Spiff among the dinosaurs or a hardboiled detective in complex, detailed panels, and then the punchline would be the final panel, reverting back to the strip's signature artwork, in which we'd see him in school or with his parents or Suzie.
But most times, my eye would take in that last contrasting panel before I read the strip. I didn't read the punchline, but I'd already know where things were headed and its effect was dulled, if not defeated.
By contrast, Wiley has done two things here — (1) I think the vertical format keeps you from taking it all in at once, and (2) that last panel does not draw your eye with a lot of contrasting artwork. So, even when he doesn't have the on-line advantage of forcing you to scroll down, this works. (And he gets paid more than one-thousandth of a farthing for the print version, which, for him, is a nice advantage over the on-line version.)
Here's something else: Wordless comics have the benefit of stopping cartoonists from over-explaining what they are up to. It is commonly accepted in editorial cartoons that the quality of a panel is inversely proportional to its number of labels, but gag cartoons also tend to suffer from Too Much Explanation. The best gags do not require the cartoonist to bring on the Stage Manager from "Our Town" to set them up.
In this case, it's a desert island cartoon. Pile of sand. Palm tree. That's your set up, now let's have the gag.
Pantomime also helps to keep cartoonists from treading on their own punchlines, though there are ways to screw up a punchline in pantomime, mostly in the form of having other characters react to what has happened by doing a faint-and-flop or becoming enraged or simply being mystified.
In this case, the deadpan non-response is the right response, particularly in contrast with the nice "I've got it!" panel towards the top. Just let the reader see what happened — don't add a panel in which the furious fellow chops up what is left of the boat or throws himself to the sharks in despair. Just leave it.
This is not a brilliant gag, but it's brilliantly done, which is much the same thing. And, in a medium that requires 365 gags a year, it's a pretty damn good thing.
(And Wiley's coloring in his Sunday strips always lifts them a bit higher. Today is a good example of that, as well.)
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