What, exactly, is the measure of greatness when it comes to comic strips? The daily newspaper comic is a very limiting art form, with only a few panels — sometimes just one panel — to make a joke. Because of its brevity, it's easy to trivialize the medium as simply the “funny papers,” a daily, disposable art form designed to pick you up after reading the actual news.
Yet, we’ve seen comic strips do so much more than that. Characters like Snoopy and Garfield have become part of the fabric of our culture. Comic strips are capable of greatness.
And since greatness is possible, what, then, makes a comic strip great? The first instinct is to go for something “deep.” Comic strips like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes occasionally ventured outside of comedy to examine the world and say something thoughtful about it. But that’s not the case for other comic strips that don’t go deep.
For Garfield, I’d argue greatness would come down to a really clever, relatable gag. For something like Prince Valiant, which specialized in highly detailed, picturesque images, I imagine greatness would relate to visual appeal. So what would the measure of greatness be for Gary Larson’s The Far Side?
The Far Side didn’t do deep and life-affirming stuff. Nor was Larson's comic beautiful in any conventional sense, as his characters were often grotesque to enhance the comedy. It's tempting to associate greatness with the comic strips that made the biggest impact, like the Stegosaurus strip that resulted in a new name for a dinosaur bone, but Larson’s work never set out to end up in science books.
I’d argue that what Gary Larson was doing with The Far Side was trying to make the funniest joke each day. That's why he didn't use recurring characters — it wasn't about characters so much as the joke. Thus I’d argue, for The Far Side, greatness should be measured by the effectiveness and cleverness of the joke.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
