The Amazing Comic Strip!

For this week I read Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbs, Little Nemo, and Hark! A Vagrant.  It was really interesting to me because I used to read the comics section of my newspaper at home pretty religiously.

        I'd never read Calvin and Hobbs before.  I always thought it was some male-ego comic thing because all I have seen of it were Calvin making weird faces and those stickers on trucks of Calvin peeing on a logo. So I always assumed it was just it was just a lot of drivel.  But I was proved wrong and I actually loved Calvin and Hobbs.  I loved the way the panels switched between Hobbs being a real tiger and a stuffed animal.  It just made sense, I mean what kid hasn't thought that of their stuffed animals as real people?  I know I did, so it was really easy to put myself in Calvin's shoes.  Calvin and Hobbs reminds me a lot of Peanuts, I mean they are both driven by real life events. But while Peanuts goes for the more dry sarcasm more adults can relate to, Calvin and Hobbs seems more aimed at what things kids do.  Don't get me wrong, I love Peanuts, but that comic could be so depressing and the other half of the time I barely had a reaction at all.  Like I'd read it and I'd be like, ok. Wait, that's the end?  It was a lot less punch-line driven and more, this is the bare bones of life we deal with. Sometimes it just isn't that funny.
         
          Little Nemo was very much akin to Prince Valiant.  I tried to read Prince Valiant when I was younger, but it only came out on Sundays and it was like reading molasses.  I tried to convince myself I had to read it because for some reason I thought grown ups only read the long saga comics like Rex Morgan M.D. and Prince Valiant.  There were so many different characters and I felt like I was getting nowhere, so I gave up. It was very slow moving but very highly rendered.  Not exactly my style.  It was literally like a fully complete illustration per panel!  When I got to the panels with all the snowmen having a snowball fight I was literally blown away by the attention to detail.

And what is this panel. Like I was reading and then there were pirates being attacked by the good guys and this qwoping drawing happened. And I was like... what? How does human body work? HOW DOES PHYSICS? I cried a little on the inside when I saw this one.

I'd have to say Hark! A Vagrant was my favorite.  I mean, they were hilarious.  I was reading them in the library and I had to stop myself from dying laughing on some of them.  And they were so minimal and clean and nice to look at, three panels and boom you are done and there is a payoff.  I mean some were longer, but they were very fast and easy to read.  I liked it how a lot of her comics were history based or based on books.  When I got to the Gatsby ones with the baby jokes I almost died. It was fabulous!  I mean, they weren't as higly detailed as Nemo, but it was really concise.  Although there weren't really any reoccuring characters that I saw in the pages I read, it was still really easy to relate to.

And my favorite comic of hers was a tie between the David Bowie comic and the chicken comic because they were just so obvious that it made the joke 10 times more hilarious.