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Understanding Peanuts and Schulzian Symmetry: Panel Detection, Caption Detection, and Gag Panels in 17,897 Comic Strips Through Distant Viewing.

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In this article, we applied distant viewing to a corpus of 17,897 comic strips from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts as a primary case study. Distant viewing uses computational techniques to study large-scale visual media, and draws upon interdisciplinary areas including visual media studies, cultural studies, data science, and semiotics. We focus on comic strips, particularly Peanuts , due to their widespread readership, historical and cultural cache, and complexity as a medium built on the interplay between text, image, and meaning. First, we discuss previous work done at the intersections of comics studies and computer vision. Next, we establish the processes for applying computer vision to comic strips. After that, we provide several examples, including: panel detection (variations in panel length over a cartoonist’s career); caption detection (identification and location of captions in panels); and comics paratext (computer vision analyses/exclusions of copyright text, signatures, dates, etc.). Combined studies of panel detection, caption detection, and comics paratext reveals new insights into the success, longevity, and influence of one of the world’s most famous newspaper comic strips. Ultimately, computer vision reveals a subtle stability and symmetry to Schulz’s artistry that played an understudied but significant role in the comic strip’s popularity.

Introduction

Comics scholars have long analyzed how the medium’s connection between text and image, content and form, lends crucial insights into comics’ historical, cultural, and commercial impact. [1] This is particularly prevalent within newspaper comic strips. Comics studies scholar M. Thomas Inge wrote that “along with jazz, the comic strip as we know it perhaps represents America’s major indigenous contribution to world culture” largely for aesthetic and formal qualities (xi). Their emergence and success in the United States, and beyond, has made them a major area of study in media studies, and, with the publication of studies like Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (1985) and Scott McCloud ‘s Understanding Comics (1993), led to the establishment of comic studies as a field. For instance, comics’ uniquely powerful propensity for visual representation has led researchers to analyze race, gender, queerness, sexuality, disability, and the body within sequential images comprising the medium and its messages.

Comics’ flourishing has led to different publishing formats over the last century, each with unique characteristics that impact their meaning-making. In this article, we focus on comic strips. We delineate them from various other graphic narratives (comic books, graphic novels, manga, etc.) as well as separate from closer counterparts, chiefly editorial cartoons and New Yorker -style cartoons, all with their own rich formal and publishing conventions (Cohen 33–37) . As a subset of the broader comics medium, comic strips are characterized by their regular appearance in newspapers or similar publications; continuing characters and stories; long aesthetic history dating back to nineteenth century humor magazines; routine publication frequency of daily strips; and reliance on word balloons, among other aesthetic traits (Gardner 241; Harvey , “Aesthetics” 640) .

Formally, comic strips have a relatively uniform structure of panels, text and characters due to newspaper design and circulation. Most daily strips are organized into even panel layouts taking up a 1x3 or 1x4 horizontal grid so they can be rearranged according to each individual newspaper’s layout: vertically, horizontally, or even in a 2x2 grid. Key here is that, most often, daily strips are primarily black and white due to printing prices which creates a slightly more streamlined reading experience. Sunday strips, on the other hand, are primarily in color, take up more space, and can feature more complex compositions with more panels than the average four-panel daily strip. [2] The extended length allows cartoonists to create more complicated stories and gags, or simply experiment with what a four-panel gag might look like with additional panels and visual space.

Jared Gardner notes this inherently active medium “invites and even requires the reader to become active agents in meaning making,” due to the readerly intervention necessitated by several key formal elements: panels, which guide readers and contain visual/narrative components; textual captions and word balloons filled with dialogue; and the spaces between panels, known as the “gutter” (Gardner 248) . In comics, sequential images are cordoned off by successive panels, so bridging the narrative between the images involves acts of closure—imagining or filling in the gaps, the literal gutters, that separate panels to perceive the whole (McCloud 63) . In comics studies, analyzing panels reveals how narrative is created and organized through visually ordered sequences of time and space. For comics theorists Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, each comic strip panel offers a wealth of visual, textual, and narrative evidence to dissect because every drawn line, shape, word balloon, and letter matters in a comics panel. Word balloons work in tandem with images, figures, and characters within (or outside) panels. These fundamentals are combined with difficult to parse elements including negative space, implied motion, and time. Studying the combination of panels, images, and word balloons tells us how meaning is made in comics.

A major challenge has been exploring questions such as comic strip’s formal evolution at scale. While comics scholars in particular have studied the work of significant cartoonists and individual entries in their long-running comic strips, there is a dearth of scholarship on most comic strips due to their volume, particularly on the formal traits of comic strips. Newspaper comic strips that reach syndication status often run for decades. Changes to a strip’s formal qualities over time may go unnoticed day-to-day or year-to-year unless the change is visible and significant. [3] Taken together, studying a comic strip that has run for, say, 25 years with over 300 strips published each year becomes a difficult task due to the large quantity of strips, a trait that marks comic strips as prime objects of study for computational analysis.

The average comic strip consists of between three and four panels, meaning our corpus consists of several hundred thousand panels. The scale offers a challenge for a person or even team to look closely at each strip. Should one look at them all, keeping all the elements in mind can be difficult. Thus, studying each individual strip, even the entirety of one cartoon, would take an inordinate amount of time and effort. Distant viewing applies computer vision to study these strips at scale, all at once, and in connection with one another (Arnold and Tilton 2023) .

The scale thus makes these comic strips prime objects of study for distant viewing. Drawing inspiration from distant reading’s large scale studies of texts, distant viewing involves “viewing” visual materials at scale by: extracting representational informational metadata from thousands of photographs, [4] television/film frames, [5] even comic strips as the current case study will show; applying algorithms to see and engage with that metadata; and analyzing the results. Put plainly, it uses computational programs to expedite analyses of large collections of visual material and complement close reading by seeing the corpus at once. Previous studies have focused on: gender-based visual style in two network-era sitcoms; image region segmentation combined with structured data to enrich historic photography; and the creation of a Python package for analyzing visual culture. Distant viewing excels at computational studies of large visual media corpora when used in conjunction with extant theories of visual semiotics and germane media studies.

In this article, we use distant viewing to study the formal and aesthetic qualities of one seminal North American comic strip: Peanuts (1950-2000) by Charles Schulz. [6] Peanuts is inarguably one of the most internationally popular and critically successful newspaper comic strips of all time. A popular mainstay of the American comic strip and international newspapers, Peanuts ran from 1950 to 2000, ending on February 13, 2000—the day after Schulz passed away. Schulz’s comic first appeared in the aftermath of World War II in just seven newspapers in 1950. When the comic ended in 2000, Peanuts regularly appeared in over 2,600 newspapers across 75 countries and in 21 languages, reaching a readership of more than 355 million people. This prolonged nature, historian Blake Scott Ball argues, allowed Schulz to reflect and amplify “a complex range of popular feelings on issues from civil religion, racial integration, and women’s rights to fears of capitalism’s decline, environmental degradation, and the Vietnam War” (Ball 1) . Due to this complex nature, Peanuts has been adapted into films, movies, theater productions, games, and more alongside countless merchandising ventures.

Using Peanuts as an initial computational study of larger questions in comic studies, we ask several key questions: How do cartoon strip formats change over a cartoonist’s career? What do longitudinal changes in comic strip paneling signify? How does the image-text relationship manifest not just in a single comic strip, but in the entirety of a comic strip’s print run? These questions often drive studies of newspaper comic strips on smaller scales, but we take them up using computer vision to address these formalistic inquiries at a distant scale. Comic studies and media scholars have long since demonstrated how cartoonists grow and evolve over time, and how their work is connected to cultural movements or historical moments; we use computer vision to find evidence of this growth on a formal level in key facets of comics: panels, word balloons, and the image-text relationship.

We build on previous non-computational quantitative studies of comic strips, which narrowed their studies in several ways: chronologically, regionally, and by content. Ralph LaRossa et al. studied gender roles in comic strips that appeared on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day from 1945 to 1990 (693). Others like Deborah Chavez focused on gender inequality in comic strips from specific regional or national newspapers over a 30-day span in 1981 and a second 90-day span in 1981 (93). A content analysis study by Sylvia E. White and Tania Fuentez focuses on racially-coded depictions of Black characters in comic strips that appeared in the Akron, OH Beacon Journal from 1915-1995 (72). Our study and its findings break new ground in the field, while also speaking to the challenges of the scale of comic strips—the volume of visual data—published each day in a newspaper. [7]

In recent years, computational approaches to comics studies have emerged with increasing frequency. Such approaches include linguistics and cognitive psychology; [8] comics collections as data; [9] scanlation; [10] eye-tracking; [11] digital image processing; [12] and more. [13] These studies demonstrate the potential for computational work applied to a textual-visual medium that has historically privileged literary close readings, historiographies, cultural studies, and adaptation analyses. We build on this work and turn to computer vision as a method and form of evidence to add to our analytical repertoire in comic studies. Recent advancements in computational approaches to visual media, particularly computer vision, are now positioned to aid analyses of large corpora of visual media like comic strips that have, in some cases, been published continually for several decades.

We begin addressing the questions at the heart of this study and build upon existing research in computational studies of comics by digitally studying the complete 50 years of Peanuts . Due to the complex nature of comic strips and their visual-textual elements, we created several custom algorithms for our study. We begin by applying a custom-built algorithm to detect and number the individual panels in each daily Peanuts cartoon. Then, we use a computer vision algorithm to detect the location of text within the comic. Next, we combine these two annotations to determine the position of the caption in panels. Finally, we compare the appearance and placement of captions within panels alongside comics studies scholarship on the relationship between comic strip panels, word balloons, and narrative conventions. Along with addressing our core questions below, we aim to demonstrate how distant viewing offers a computational humanities method for comic studies.

Peanuts: Critical Context

Peanuts first appeared on October 2 nd , 1950, nationally syndicated in just seven newspapers, rising to just over 100 newspapers by the end of its second year (“Timeline: Charles M. Schulz & Peanuts”) . In a 1977 interview with reporter Stan Isaacs , Schulz stated that Peanuts was, by that point in time, appearing in 1,655 newspapers (1,480 U.S. and 175 international newspapers), demonstrating the comics’ growth over 27 years (92). In 1984, Peanuts set a milestone, becoming the first-ever strip to reach circulation in over two thousand newspapers (Charles M. Schulz Museum). Speaking to its universal appeal, Schulz noted in a 1971 interview that “we get a strong group of letters each day from little kids, but we also go right on up through teenagers to grandparents. We get letters from quite a broad spectrum of professions, too—doctors, priests, lawyers, nuns, rabbis, athletes, pilots, servicemen, musicians” (Phelan 65–66) . The unprecedented popularity and enduring legacy of Peanuts alone mark the comic strip as a prime first case study with distant viewing.

Part of why Peanuts has earned such high stature owes to Schulz’s mastery and standardization of the form. R.C. Harvey tell us that “Schulz’s strip…revolutionized comic strip art: his deceptively simple graphic style set a new fashion for newspaper cartoonists” (Harvey , Art 202) . Schulz’s cartooning aesthetic is economic and clear: clean lines, iconic [14] characters and figures, and clever, effective jokes. This sparse and simplistic-seeming style allowed Schulz to deliver sophisticated gags, satire, political commentary, and visual parody, to be sure. But, scholars have noted the strip’s enduring popularity is also due in no small part to Peanuts’ emotional core ( Inge , Gardner and Gordon, Harvey). Schulz gave space in his strip for his cast of kids to discuss grief, sadness, disappointment, and other emotions rarely present in newspaper strips featuring children in the 1950s.

It is thus difficult to overstate the historical and cultural significance of Peanuts , even beyond Schulz’s countless cartooning awards. [15] Comics scholar M. Thomas Inge states that “arguably without Peanuts there might not have been a Far Side by Gary Larson, a Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, a Bloom County by Berke Breathed, or a Mutts by Patrick McDonnell,” to name just a few longstanding and historically significant comic strips that Peanuts influenced, directly or otherwise (Inge , Conversations xi) . This can be attributed to Schulz’s characteristically clear cartooning, but just as much credit lies with Schulz’s cast of characters, long career, storytelling, and merchandising efforts. The comic strips’ popularity has generated an ongoing transmedial franchise, earning Schulz over $1 billion in lifetime income. [16]

With 17,897 cartoons in Peanuts , we turn to computer vision to parse this high volume of comics. Any single one of these cartoons holds enough comics elements to bear scrutiny for the length of an entire book, as Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden demonstrate with a strip of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy in How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels . We focus on three key features within the Peanuts strip: panel detection; caption detection; and panel-image-text relationship. With almost 18,000 cartoons, each daily cartoon typically consisting of three or four panels and each Sunday strip holding a variable amount of panels, computer vision provides critical avenues of not only counting these panels across nearly fifty years of comics, but providing visualizations of trends in these cartoons. Likewise, the volume and variety of captions within these cartoons can be equally overwhelming, as most panels contain at least one textual caption. Computer vision can detect these captions within each panel, and compare caption sequences from day-to-day, week-to-week, across decades of comics—streamlining what would be a time-consuming process.

Comics scholar Scott McCloud notes that “words, pictures, and other icons are the vocabulary of the language called comics;” in other words, to study comics for the content involves parsing their vocabulary, the visual formal elements of panels and captions first (47). This is because comics and comic strips are fragmentary, visualizing moments of a given narrative and sequence in a process that Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith term encapsulation : “selecting certain moments of prime action from the imagined story and encapsulating, or enclosing, renderings of those moments in a discrete space (a unit of comic book communication that is called a panel , irrespective of whether or not there are actual panel borders” (131). In comics more broadly, but comic strips especially due to their uniform publishing formats, panels dictate understandings of space, time, and narrative sequencing. Thus, for comic strips, studying panels provides necessary insights into the kinds of text and images deemed significant enough to be encapsulated.

Finally, computer vision allows for a combination of visual detection algorithms, enabling what comics studies scholar Nick Sousanis terms “allatonce”: seeing the entirety of a comic strip at once, including layout, panels, captions, movement, color value, and more (62). Put another way, computer vision allows us to first isolate panels, then captions, and combine those algorithms to examine the panel-image-text relationship at the heart of comics as a visual medium—and to do so by examining all 17,897 Peanuts cartoons ‘allatonce.’ This process of moving from the outside in also mirrors Schulz’s own creative process for Peanuts . In an interview with journalist Barnaby Conrad in 1967, Schulz reveals that he begins by drawing in panels for each daily and Sunday strip, then inks in the dialogue. According to Conrad , “When he has all six days’ strips ‘dialogued in,’ he begins to draw the figures and the action, preferring to draw directly with the pen with a minimum of penciled guidelines” – so too do we begin our own investigation by zeroing on the panels, moving on to Schulz’s inked dialogue, and finally focus on the strips as a whole once they have been ‘dialogued in’ by computer vision (19).

Peanuts : Panel Detection

Cartoonist Bill Watterson, in his public eulogy for Peanuts , wrote that the comic strip “is so thoroughly a part of the popular culture that one loses sight of how different the strip was from anything else 40 and 50 years ago” (“Drawn”). Indeed, its popularity and circulation helped standardize the format of the newspaper strip into a four-panel format. Harvey notes, initially, United Feature Syndicate editors stipulated that:

[ Peanuts ] should always be drawn in four equal-sized panels, an arrangement that would give editors great flexibility in running the strip. They could run the strip in one column with the four panels stacked vertically, or they could divide the strip in half, the first two panels stacked on top of the other two panels, and run it as a two-column box. (212)

This format became ubiquitous for the newspaper strip, such that other syndicates have continued to use the format for over seventy years. Peanuts ’ sparse, cartoonish, and abstract drawn aesthetic contrasted starkly with bombastic and visually-complex narrative strips from previous decades. This four-panel format is primarily relegated to the dailies, whereas the Sunday strips are often printed in a larger format and with far less formal restrictions than the traditional daily strip. These Sunday strips can take up to half of a newspaper page, though rarely in contemporary times.

Gardner notes that newspaper strips are “inherently elliptical and fragmented”: newspaper cartoonists have to tell daily stories in three-to-four panels of focused narrative combined with implied action and narrative occurring in the gutter, the spaces between panels (Gardner 213) . As noted above, panels also dictate how comics messages and narratives are received and decoded. Given Schulz’s cultural cache, studying his approach to panels on a distant scale provides an opportunity to see where Schulz played with the format, particularly over time. Our investigation is interested in seeing how Schulz plays with, defies, or challenges these initial constraints, especially focused on his panel use given the publisher’s early mandates and their crucial formal contribution.

It is this deceivingly simplistic form and steady format that places so much importance on each component in Peanuts , prompting our initial study looking at the panel variation over time. Part of this initial study is an attempt to understand whether or how Schulz plays with the initial constraints of the four-panel strip in the daily comics, as well as if there are moments in his career when this format changes. If so, this could indicate subtle shifts in Schulz’s cartooning style that may themselves signal that Schulz has earned enough social and economic clout to break away from the United Feature Syndicate formatting stipulations—or, that Schulz stayed true to the format throughout his career.

We build on previous studies of panel detection and comics by reinvigorating critical conversations concerning the formal qualities of comic strips, aesthetic traits that have recently been overshadowed by studies of the graphic novel, graphic memoir, and superhero comics. We do this particularly by combining data science and comics studies to study these strips at scale using Python, RStudio, and custom computer vision algorithms. This compliments work by Nguyen, Riguad, and Burie [17] who studied previously existing datasets like the eBDtheque, Fahad18, and their own DCM772 dataset that are much smaller in scope than our Distant Viewing: Peanuts dataset, which consists of almost 18,000 images. This study also further compliments Xu et al., [18] who developed a comics genre identification method using panel-page comparisons; our own approach is focused closely on learning how computer vision can reveal new insights into the formal qualities of comics images of the newspaper cartoon variety.

In order to algorithmically identify individual panels in Peanuts we developed a custom rules-based algorithm. On manual inspection of several comics, we noticed that every panel we found was enclosed in a black, rectangular, apparently hand-drawn box. These boxes are arranged in a non-overlapping fashion on a white background. Based on this structure, our algorithm for detecting panels proceeds as follows. First, determine all of the pixels in the image that can be reached by starting at a white pixel on an edge of the comic and creating a path of adjacent pixels that are also all white. This set of reachable pixels can be associated with the background of the comic. Next, select any non-background pixel. Then, determine the set of all non-background pixels in the image that can be reached by following a path of other adjacent non-background pixels. This set is one of the detected panels of the comic. The process continues by starting with another non-background pixel that is also not in the first detect panel, and continuing until all of the pixels have been accounted for. Finally, we remove very small panels, which are usually extraneous writing on the background, expand the detected panels to be full rectangles, and number the panels according to the standard left-to-right and top-to-bottom reading order. Manual inspection of the results from 135 randomly selected comics showed only a single error in the detection of the panels. In order to detect the “reachable” pixels needed in the different steps of the algorithm, we wrote custom C code that adapts a breadth-first implementation of the well-known tint fill algorithm (Smith 1976) . The full code implementing this algorithm is included in the article’s supplementary materials.

Peanuts ’ standardized four-panel format thus offers a prime site of investigation for quantitative analysis. For every Peanuts strip in our corpus, we ran the algorithm described above to identify the location of each panel. The average panel lengths for the daily and weekly comic strips align with expected outcomes: on average, Schulz used 3.74 panels for comic strips published Monday through Saturday, and a higher average panel length of 9.49 for Sunday strips. While there is slight variation between the panel length in the dailies (3.71 on Mondays, 3.78 for Wednesdays), the overall format is consistent across Schulz’s cartoon. This consistency is significant when considering Schulz’s cartoon ran for almost fifty years, suggesting the initial formulaic nature of Peanuts not only stayed during its early period, but later on as well.

Taking a semi-random year as a sample – 1975, the midpoint of Peanuts – we can begin seeing the effects of this panel detection play out during the week. Immediately, the formulaic nature of the weekly four-panel strip is apparent, with slight variation in 1975 of five additional days where Schulz deploys a five-panel strip or six-panel strip. A closer examination of these five additional days (4-30; 5-14; 7-08; 7-10; 12-18) reveals that the panel detection algorithm detected panels where they didn’t exist; these strips are all comprised of four panels, as expected. With the larger space of the Sunday strips, Schulz used no less than seven panels and as many as thirteen panels in 1975. This makes sense given the literal larger format of Sunday strips, which aligns with existing comics studies historians and scholars who note that the Sunday strip’s larger size necessarily expands the narrative and visual possibilities of a comic strip.

The consistency of daily strips takes on a deeper significance because fluctuations in the Peanuts formula stand out. 1988 is the first year in which Schulz shifts away from the four-panel format for the dailies for extended periods of time, using an average of three panels or less beginning on February 29th, 1988.

On its own, this data might seem an outlier for a variety of reasons: cartoonists often shift formatting as their comic strip ages, whether for personal, editorial, or audience-related reasons. However, the trend continues throughout the strip’s lifetime until Schulz’s death in February 2000. From March 1988 onward, Schulz returns less frequently to the four-panel format that he popularized through his strip, retaining an average of three panels or less.

In a 1997 interview with comics journalist Gary Groth, Schulz comments on this change in format as a pivotal evolution, where he is finally able to shed the “restrictive” four-panel format foisted upon him by his original editors in the 1950s. While this sheds insight into the practices of a cartoonist creating new entries in the same comic strip for almost fifty years, it also speaks to the editorial and marketing strategies/constraints of the comic strip industry. Schulz’s career as a newspaper cartoonist is historic due to his insistence on penciling, inking, lettering, and coloring each strip on his own, not to mention writing new stories and gags for every strip. Rare is the cartoonist who can sustain this individual practice and drive for a decade, let alone for several. Further, Schulz managed to accomplish this while dealing with essential tremor (ET), a neurological disorder causes uncontrollable quivering and shaking that particularly affected Schulz’s hands; he was diagnosed with the disorder in 1981.

By March 1988, Schulz had been creating Peanuts daily for 37 and a half years, achieving international, critical, and commercial acclaim in the process. Benjamin Clark , Curator for the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, speaks to Schulz’s longtime resentment of the four equal panels from the beginning of the comic’s publication. He states that “arguably, [Schulz] had the clout to make the change long, long, long before” March 1988 (Clark) . Schulz maintained creative and artistic control over the comic throughout its entire run, never relying on an assistant for drawings as other newspaper cartoonists often do; in other words, Schulz drew each strip with intentionality and craft, right down to choosing the number of panels. Put simply, Schulz contacted his editor at United Feature Syndicate and “told them he wasn’t going to use the strict four-panel dailies any more…nothing to do with his health or any format requirements at the Syndicate.” Michelle Ann Abate , in her astute study of Schulz’s disability and essential tremor, notes that his ET actually did play at least a partial role in this formal move: “while the cartoonist sought more creative flexibility with this change, this decision was also field by his development of ET…on days when the trembling in his hands was especially acute” Schulz might choose to do a one or two-panel strip over a four-panel strip due to their expediency (19). [19]

Further, Clark tells us that:

Even pre-1988 dailies with multiple panels and things still conform to this four-panel format. Schulz would play with it. (See below, 8/31/1954) – Although it is in 8 panels, we see it is actually just the four-panel standard in disguise. These anomalies are just Schulz doing what he pleases – it was never asked of him, never part of publishing constraints or anything else outside of his creativity. Unlike many cartoonists, Schulz worked ahead and stayed pretty tight to his schedule for production. So, if it’s in the strip, it is deliberate. He’s not rushing anything to get in under the deadline.

These consistencies help speak to the universal appeal of Peanuts . McCloud notes that comics panels “fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments” that are joined together by readers mentally connecting panels together by the gutter in between panels (67). Part of what McCloud is getting at here is the infinite expression of comics, that a single comics page, or strip even, can have any number of panels and that readers make meaning by connecting the gutter. Previous scholarship on Peanuts has noted that readers identify with particular characters or narrative-gag sequences, finding a solace in the strip’s steadfast design. But, these findings on Peanuts’ panel regularities suggest an invisible security to the strip, that the panel uniformity across the strip’s lifetime acts as an unseen character and unsung strength to Peanuts.

Through computer vision, Peanuts’ four-panel format is anything but jagged, staccato, unconnected; it is rhythmic and dependable, both for comics readers and for newspaper editors placing the comic into their page layouts. This aligns with existing scholarship from Harvey, Inge, Gardner , Gordon, Ball , and others that highlighted such characteristics via close reading and qualitative sample studies; computer vision cements this stability by seeing this uniformity across the entirety of the comic strip’s fifty-year run. Longtime readers opening the funny pages to find Peanuts would not only be able to recognize Peanuts by its characters or Schulz’s trademark inks, but by its predictable and steady panels. Peanuts ’ stability and uniformity in panels also confirms that our digital methodologies can successfully detect these panels through automated processing and detection, rather than manual annotation. In this, we might also suggest that Schulz’s shift away from the four-panel format in 1988 represents a formal manifestation of his essential tremor. As Abate notes, “the aesthetic articulation of comics panels cannot be separated from the physical articulation of the cartoonist’s body, be it that of Charles M. Schulz or any other artist” (31). So too do we find that distant viewing allows us to see Schulz’s experimentation play out quantitatively, formally: whether that experimentation is due to Schulz’s ET—thereby allowing for a visibility of Schulz’s invisible disability as evidenced quantitatively in the drop of the four-panel format—or readiness to branch beyond the four-panel format he established is nigh impossible to say. However, with such panel detection established, we move inward to content within the panels themselves: in this instance, captions.

Peanuts : Caption Detection

Textual captions are crucial to the nature of comics, particularly newspaper cartoons. Charles Forceville, Tony Veale, and Kurt Feyearts state that “the tailed balloon is one of the most defining visual conventions of the comics medium,” even though they also note that “the presence of balloons is not a defining element of comics” as there are silent comics, comics with text outside of balloons (i.e. in narration boxes), word balloons outside of sequential images, etc. (56). Harvey draws a firmer line in the sand: “‘comics’—the thing that distinguishes it from other kinds of pictorial narratives—is the incorporation of verbal content” (Harvey , “How Comics” 25) . Schulz’s dialogue (writ large) is critical to Peanuts ’ success, giving voice to Charlie Brown’s anguish over yet another missed football kick, Lucy’s sharp advice, and Snoopy’s various activities as writer/pilot/adventurer. Karasik and Newgarden note that “ Peanuts ’ singular dialogue was key to its enormous success,” corroborated by countless appreciations by comics scholars, journalists, fans, and even by fellow cartoonists (166). In a way, this makes sense given Schulz’s own perfectionism with the careful selection of his word placement and dialogue, stating in a 1956 interview with Hugh Morrow that he does not yield to editorial oversights on the words, though occasionally on matters of punctuation (9). Even if Schulz compromised more on dialogue than he revealed in various interviews, its position as second in sequence behind the panels marks it as a prime candidate for continued computer vision analysis.

McCloud notes that “when words [in comics] are bolder, more direct, they require lower levels of perception and are received faster, more like pictures,” and we find this to be a crucial impetus to further understanding Peanuts (49). Within comics and newspaper strips, Karasik and Newgarden find that “in the design of comics, situating the text is primary” meaning that for most cartoonists, textual placement comes first in the design process of a comic (81). Schulz too began his cartooning process by first drawing the panels for a given strip, then penciling in the dialogue balloons and letters before finally drawing in the figures, action, and so on (Morrow 19) . This emphasizes not just Schulz’s dialogue and writing, which has been discussed and lauded at length, but the specific placement and even presence of dialogue within Peanuts . One of the defining traits of Peanuts is its positioning of dialogue as always being above the characters and in a generally level orientation.

To detect which panels in each Peanuts strip contain text, we return again to an automated algorithm applied to the digitized images of the comics. Unlike our approach to panel detecting, here we can start with an existing computer vision algorithm. After experimenting with several options, we decided to apply the scene text algorithms of Baek et al. (2019) as implemented in the EasyOCR Python module (Kittinaradorn 2022) . The algorithm provides locations in the form of bounding boxes for all detected text in an image. We applied this algorithm to each image and then indicated which panels in each cartoon had some text located within it. Schulz commonly signed each Peanuts comic at the bottom of the last panel; this was detected about half of the time by our algorithm as text. To remove the signature from our counts, which does not function as a caption, we automatically removed all text in the bottom third of the last panel. [20] After applying the algorithm to the entire corpus, we randomly selected 100 comics to manually validate our technique. We found that out of the 434 panels, there were only two false detections of the 40 panels without captions and only four of the 394 panels without captions were falsely detected. Most of the errors came from the hard to detect nature of some lettering, such as the letters and words for stylized exclamations and sound effects (“BANG!” “ziiiing!” “Thump.”).

As noted above, Schulz typically places his signature in the bottom third of the panel. Other pieces of writing that fall within these bounds include hand-lettered dates or paratextual copyright information. Fine-tuning the combination of panel detection with caption detection, then, effectively leads to only finding the dialogue and speech of Peanuts characters. While it might be useful in another instance to identify and include the signature of Schulz or other cartoonists—particularly those with multiple creators, or when the signatures contribute something significant visually—ignoring them leads to a greater confidence in caption detection.

With this algorithm, we are able to not just identify the captions, which could be achieved using any number of traditional OCR identification methods, but locate their positions within the panels themselves. Doing so can reveal how often Schulz deploys textual captions within Peanuts , and in which panels. This can be seen clearly in the daily comic strips, which are primarily three and four-panel strips. Concentrating on the four-panel strips as shown in Figure 12 , we see a few trends emerge immediately.

The first is that Schulz used textual captions in the first panel of a four-panel strip—the majority of his daily strips—98% of the time. There are slight drop-offs in panels two and three, with a steep rise in textual captions appearing in the final panels 96% of the time for four-panel strips. As noted earlier, Schulz also relied heavily on three-panel strips in his later daily comics. Textual captions are present in the first panel of 97% of his three-panel strips, just over [80%] of the second panels, and 98% of the panels in the three-panel strips. Schulz’s use of textual dialogue signifies a strong balance between text and image across his daily strips, which comprise the bulk of Peanuts writ large.

Zooming out slightly to examine textual caption distribution in strips ranging from one to twelve panels total, an interesting trend emerges with respect to that first panel. Schulz utilizes textual captions, on average, in at least 93% of all first panels, regardless of number of total panels. In some formats, Schulz utilizes textual captions in 100% of the first panels: strips with rare singular panels, eight panels, and eleven panels. The data across these strips suggests a strong reliance on textual captions paired with images of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the entire Peanuts gang. In many ways, this aligns with typical newspaper publishing practices and general conventions of the comic strip as a medium: comics are sequential narratives borne of the juxtaposition between image and text. We would expect to find the presence of captions within most Peanuts strips, so detecting them with our algorithm on a distant scale confirms that the algorithm functions properly and allows us to dissect captions’ presence and absence as data.

For instance, when the standard reading order of American newspaper cartoons is considered (top to bottom, left to right), rare is the instance of readers encountering a Peanuts strip that begins without text to guide the readerly experience in the first panel. Returning to McCloud 's note about direct dialogue leading to streamlined reading perceptions of comics, we posit that the direct and almost concretized placement of Schulz’s dialogue further contributes to such reading perceptions. In other words, it’s not just that Peanuts strips begin with the title most often in the top-left corner of the first panel: readers also have dialogue from their favorite characters to help establish the story, the set-up to the strip of the day.

Karasik and Newgarden state that “in a well-conceived comic strip, the strategic placement of word balloons generally takes graphic precedent,” meaning improper or ineffective caption placement disrupts the delicate image-text relationship balance at the heart of comic strips (80). Whereas many other comic strips played with convention, form, and design—ranging from the wild layouts of Little Nemo in Slumberland to Nancy strips that use repackaged gags in different formats—Schulz offered a dependability to the form and layout of Peanuts beyond the four-panel format, in the caption placement itself. Fellow cartoonist and Reuben Award winner Bill Watterson noted that:

Peanuts pretty much defines the modern comic strip, so even now it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humor, the unflinching emotional honesty, the inner thoughts of a household pet, the serious treatment of children, the wild fantasies, the merchandising on an enormous scale – in countless ways, Schulz blazed the wide trail that most every cartoonist since has tried to follow. (n.p.)

While most comics scholarship surrounding Peanuts ’ form focuses on the sparse lines, economical and unique characters, our findings suggest that one of the “countless ways” that Schulz’s Peanuts defines the modern comic strip is through the often invisible nature of caption placement.

This reveals new insights into Peanuts ’ engagement with global audiences, and new insights into legacy aspects of Peanuts ’ form. Again, as with our findings on the four-panel format in the previous section, here we do not suggest that Schulz was the first to find a symmetrical balance to the cartoon form in placing captions at the very top of his panels strip after strip, [21] nor that his reliance on them for that balance is unique amidst cartoonists before or after him. What these findings do suggest is a longstanding attention to the formal qualities of a cartoonist working steadily for fifty years, that some amount of Peanuts ’ longstanding critical acclaim is owed in some small part to Schulz’s consistency and dedication to precise lettering and caption placement: a Schulzian Symmetry. Visual media scholar Gene Kannenberg Jr. argues that the formal elements of Peanuts are so iconic, readers familiar with the strip acquire a kind of Peanuts grammar: recognizing not just character imitations and narrative situations borrowed from Peanuts , but visual motifs used elsewhere (97). We suggest that some of these visual motifs are not just Schulz’s trademark hand lettering, but a nearly-symmetrical caption placement.

On its own, caption placement in Schulz’s work may not seem groundbreaking; our findings align with much of the existing Peanuts scholarship. But, these findings also firmly rationalize computer vision’s necessary intervention in comics studies and visual media more broadly: distant viewing provides new avenues of inquiry through the capacity for investigating cartoon strips at scale in their entirety. We can learn more about the elusive and often-overlooked formal qualities that lead to commercial and critical success for certain comic strips like Peanuts by studying formal elements often ignored due to their ubiquitous nature—like panel layouts and caption placement. We can now be more precise in critical conversations about comic strips by saying Schulz’s style helped inform the genre, noting a visual and aesthetic balance between text and image, paneling and caption placement, what we call a Schulzian Symmetry. We demonstrate this potential through a combination of panel and caption detection in the following case study on Peanuts .

Peanuts: Panel + Caption Detection = Gag Panel Study

The connection between text, image, and meaning is key to reading, seeing, and understanding comics. According to Forceville et al. , balloonic information (textual and pictorial information in comics balloons) conveys its full meaning only in conjunction with images, visuals, and panels (56). For McCloud , comics’ defining feature is the sequencing of pictorial images (which include textual dialogue, lettering, and balloons), and that while sequentiality is key, it cannot be achieved without panels, images, and text aligned deliberately in a specific order. Harvey similarly notes that comics’ quintessential quality is their blending of the three: “in the best examples of the art form, words and pictures blend to achieve a meaning that neither conveys alone without the other” (25). In other words, to understand comics requires a firm focus on how the interplay between pictures and words generate meaning—and for newspaper cartoons like Peanuts , that means especially studying their unique formal traits, such as how gags are achieved.

Comics scholars Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden offer a succinct definition of a gag as it relates to strips: “Gags, like jokes of all kinds, are formal, hermetic constructs whose success depends upon (as much as any perceived funniness) the deft arrangement of innumerable interconnection systems by a discerning engineer”—in essence, jokes at the end of a strip wholly dependent on every other element preceding it within the comic. In their seminal study deconstructing a singular Nancy strip across an entire book, Newgarden and Karasik note that visual elements including lines, dots, implied action, panels, and even negative space all combine with textual components and paratextual or invisible aspects of comics in unity or discordance. Within comic strips particularly, these elements work towards landing the gag, what is often seen as the point of many strips’ essential function: the funny at the heart of “the Funnies.” The gag at the end of a newspaper strip thus provides a pivotal role in the reading experience, bringing narrative closure and humor at once. As highlighted earlier, Schulz is a lauded master of the gag, whether through what he termed the “slight incident” (character-driven ordinary, mundane events contrasted with more classic “situational” humor of previous gag comics); through the dichotomy of child characters espousing views, dreams, and woes that closely echo the adult world; or through kids being kids, dogs being fighter pilots, and kites landing in trees.

Of note here is that computer vision reveals an interesting trend in how Schulz ended Peanuts comic strips—both daily and Sundays. Overall, Schulz utilized dialogue or captions in the final panel for over 80% of his comic strips, and 92.5% on average across the entire run. Harvey, Karasik and Newgarden , and Duncan and Smith note the significant formal role that final panels play within comic strips: punchlines for gag strips; resolving the narrative arc for the day’s strip; or for adventure/episodic strips, setting up the next scene or storyline. These findings indicate that Schulz utilized captions to achieve the gags in the majority of his strip, relying on purely visual gags less as time goes on. The data here does not suggest that Schulz relied purely on text for final panel gags in Peanuts ; rather, Schulz deployed a firm balance between text and image to achieve said gags, one that only grew more prevalent over time. Again, taken together, these trends provide a deep insight into the formal elements of a long-running newspaper comic strip.

The Schulzian Symmetry noted above—Schulz’s aesthetic balance between caption placement and image in each panel—plays out narratively, too, with ramifications beyond the strip in isolation. The larger implication, then, is that Schulz and Peanuts may contribute more than just the standardization of the four-panel strip as has been highlighted by scholars and historians alike; these findings imply a Schulzian codification of textual-visual gags through a clearly identifiable symmetry between text and image especially prominent in the first and final panels of a given Peanuts strip.

Schulz himself acknowledges the formulaic nature of Peanuts stories and gags, stating that throughout his craft and his relationship to his audience, he determined twelve formulaic events that contributed to the overall popularity of the strip:

the kite-eating tree that frustrates Charlie Brown’s every attempt to fly a kite

Schroeder’s music, the elaborate visual of a stanza of classical music, and Beethoven

Lucy’s psychiatry booth from which the fussbudget delivers her pragmatic and unsympathetic verdicts

Snoopy’s doghouse, the vehicle for the beagle’s overactive imagination

Snoopy himself, another example of a second banana taking over a strip

the bird Woodstock, Snoopy’s sidekick

the Red Baron, symbolizing Snoopy’s emergence into stardom

the baseball games that Charlie Brown always loses

kicking a football, an annual exercise in which Lucy tricks Charlie Brown into trying to kick the football she holds then yanks it away at the last moment, landing the hapless Charlie Brown flat on his back

the Great Pumpkin, Linus’s yearly search for the confirmation of his spiritual sincerity

the little red-haired girl with whom Charlie Brown is hopelessly in love

and, Linus’s blanket

Just as caption detection uncovers trends in the first panels of strips, so too can it be applied to all panels of Peanuts strips. Of note is that, on average, Schulz deployed captions in his final panels 92.5% of the comic’s lifetime. Combined with findings concerning first panels, we find that Schulz relied heavily on opening and closing Peanuts cartoons with panels featuring captions. Peanuts was not just consistently formulaic in its content and visual gags, but its formal elements as well. The final panel in a comic strip serves a significant narrative and humorous function, extending comics into the following days or ending the given cartoon on a humorous gag, often both at once. Schulz’s consistency in ending these strips with textual captions combined with visuals suggests a strong correlation in balancing the two to achieve narrative or humorous closure.

Digging deeper into the findings shown in Figure 13 , a few notable trends emerge when viewed on a distant scale. For the first five years of Peanuts (1950-1955), Schulz used captions in his final panels around 85% of the time. For the rest of the comic strip’s run (1956-2000), that number increased dramatically. Peanuts featured final panel captions for over 93% of its comics on average from 1956-2000, with only three years dipping below 90% during this time period (1957: 89.8%; 1959: 87.9%; 1975: 87.4%). Similar to the shifting trend of panel conformity in Peanuts ’ later years, this discrepancy in Peanuts ’ final captions for the first five years raises interesting questions about the comic strip’s production during this time.

Schulz notes his early Peanuts strips were created in the shadow of the 1940s gag strip magazine-cartoon style. These Peanuts strips are more self-contained, containing a singular short joke unrelated to the following daily comic strip, echoing a form popularized by say, Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy . For Schulz, this distinction between his earlier gag-centric cartoons and later narrative, verbose comic strips is key: he states his later work is more firmly in the style of comic strip cartoons, those that might end on a gag but continue a longer story day after day for weeks on end. While Schulz does not explicitly mention when his style evolves into the longer form of narrative cartooning, these findings indicate that the shift may occur in 1955.

Cartoonists of course include verbal and nonverbal gags throughout their strips, but Schulz’s clear shift away from nonverbal gags from 1955-onwards could teach us much about the creator, the strip, and its readers. Benjamin Clark attributes this, in part, to Schulz reaching “100 papers, which is the ‘break-even’ point for UFS” earning a contract extension, and, further, that Schulz “gets more into a fully developed strip by 1955” leaving behind the wordless magazine-style gag cartoon format (2023) . Comics scholar Barbara Postema argues “wordlessness in comics is always a self-imposed constraint, and cartoonists play around with that limitation, or break it, as they see fit” (206). Because Schulz was so constrained to a smaller size and hewed to the four-panel format in these early years, nonverbal gags and silent comics in this era could signify a yearning for formal experimentation and play. Conversely, it could have been efficiency: writing less words (particularly in a small format) may have simply been easier on the cartoonist or rendered the comic more legible in its restrictive early years.

As with the tried and true structure of panel-length for the dailies, so too does Peanuts seem to settle into formulaic formats with textual captions for first and last panels, along with the bulk of its contained panels. Schulz identified twelve narrative devices that fans routinely value and that he attributes to the popularity of the strip; so too can the coalescing of the comics form and its routine panel structure be read as contributing to Peanuts’ popularity. Based on our findings, fans could reasonably expect textual captions in the first and final panels, even more so than assuming a given character or gag formula might appear. What’s more, textual captions appear in at least 80% of all panels in the most common daily formats: three- and four-panel strips. Within the Sunday strips and those few daily strips with more than four panels, there are some interesting variations in final panel gags for five-panel strips (78%) and six-panel strips (76%). These strips and those with more than four panels (primarily Sunday strips) were more likely to feature nonverbal gags than three- or four-panel strips. Yet, even with this trend, all Peanuts comics on average featured captions at least 50% of the time, including Sundays.

On the one hand, the steadfast nature of Schulz’s captioning makes sense in the context of Schulz’s significant feat in generating, writing, lettering, drawing, and inking all of his own cartoons for nearly fifty years, nearly twenty of which Schulz was drawing the strip while dealing with his hand tremors. But on the other hand, this finding—like that of the panel length and first panel caption—suggests Schulz may have had an even larger unseen influence on the cartooning industry and later cartoonists than previously thought in terms of content, visual style, themes, and more. Our findings on Peanuts ’ final gag panels suggest Schulz profoundly impacted the evolution of the comic strip’s aesthetic itself, tied indelibly to his own symmetrical practices of captioning and paneling—formal attributes that go beyond the editorial stipulations of newspaper printing.

Final Gags and Final Thoughts

Through Peanuts , Schulz had an undeniable influence on American cartooning, even globally through a large, expansive, indirect effect. We know this for an indelible fact through decades of comics scholarship, newspaper reporting, interviews with cartoonists both contemporaneous to Schulz and those after. And yet, as Ian Gordon and Jared Gardner note:

given the impact of Peanuts and its unparalleled influence on the history of American cartooning over the past sixty-seven years, one might expect a treasure trove of academic scholarship on Schulz’s creation. But the truth is in fact very different…the number of peer-reviewed academic volumes and scholarly essays dedicated to Peanuts over the past twenty years can likely be counted on two hands. (4)

Within Gordon and Gardner 's own Good Grief: The Comics of Charles Schulz , itself the first edited volume of essays on the comic, the chapters focus on four broad categories: philosophy and poetics, identity and performance, history, and transmedia. Indeed, these categories also capture much of the scholarship outside of Good Grief , though we might add essays on education and aesthetics. Michelle Ann Abate further illuminates this paradox in her book, Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts: “On the one hand, Peanuts was—in the apt words of Geraldine DeLuca—‘the most successful comic strip in newspaper history’ (308). At the same time, however, it was also arguably the most critically neglected” (6). Indeed, Gordon and Gardner , along with Abate , also note one major hurdle to studying Peanuts to be its scale: with almost fifty years of comic strips, almost 18,000 strips within that catalog, studying the breadth of the comic is difficult to say the least. Our present case study attends deeply to the formal elements of Peanuts , again an oft-praised but critically-overlooked aspect of the comic, working to better understand Schulz’s mastery of the form through the aid of computer vision.

Throughout this case study, we move back and forth between studying panels, captions, and gags as ways of understanding the relationship between image, text, and meaning within American comic strips. Panel detection, reveals evidence that confirms existing scholarship on Schulz’s uniformity and stability in panel usage, but panel detection also uncovered instances of Schulz’s formal experiments that might go overlooked via traditional close reading. As noted previously, our panel detection findings further allow us to see the exact moment in Schulz’s career when he begins to deviate from his four-panel format, whether due to his essential tremor or to formal experimentation, or both. Caption detection demonstrated Schulz placed the bulk of his dialogue balloons at the top of each panel, suggesting his consistency extends not just to panel construction, but caption placement—a consistency that newspaper readers could depend on. This process also demonstrates capacity for automated text detection in comic strips on a large scale, aiding in the study of a medium that has historically been difficult to study due to their large volume. Panel detection and caption placement applied in unison shows Schulz relies less on nonverbal panels and nonverbal gags as his career goes on, focusing more on the relationship between text and image central to comics as a medium. Taken together, computer vision reveals a Schulzian Symmetry underlying Peanuts that, we argue, contributes to what makes the comic so powerful, pioneering, and influential.

Schulzian Symmetry refers to the aesthetic comics unity forged by Schulz’s uniform panel formula, historically consistent caption placement, and especially, the narrative cohesion between opening and closing panels in gag strips. Given the dearth of scholarship on Schulz, and given that the bulk of this scholarship is devoted to the content of Peanuts and its transmedial legacy, these findings offer new insights into Schulz’s formal aesthetics throughout his storied career, as well as provide fertile new ground for analysis of contemporary newspaper cartoonists that follow in Schulz’s wake.

More than simply testing out hypotheses on Schulz’s panel structures or caption placement, computer vision deepens our understanding of unseen and overlooked qualities to Peanuts . Through computer vision, we uncover a great significance for the role that panels play in revealing tendencies in cartoonists’ aesthetics longitudinally. Moving between caption and panel detection allows for trends to emerge that we might otherwise take for granted as consumers of American visual media, as comics scholars or digital humanists. Humor, poignancy, and charm are all hallmarks of Peanuts ; distant viewing allows us to add steadfast panel structures, caption distribution, and textual gags to this list. Seeing even just hints of these trends also encourages deeper, large-scale readings of comics that emerge in the wake of Peanuts to see how cartoonists follow in Schulz’s footsteps or when they diverge—not just aesthetically, which can be understood through close reading, but formally. Rather than simply accepting the four-panel newspaper strip format at face value, we argue that computer vision allows for new ways of seeing comic strips, encouraging returns to the formal traits of Golden Age/public domain comic strips and contemporary strips alike.

While we focus closely on Peanuts due to its longstanding popularity and critical successes, we also demonstrate how distant viewing can be applied to the study of comics as a medium, and further, how computer vision can intervene particularly in the study of comic strips due to their large production volume. This is just the beginning. By expanding our studies to other comic strips, with particular attention to the pioneering work of comics by women and people of color, we can see how creators forged a unique, visual form along with new narratives and aesthetics in print, daily, and across the country. These case studies and methods can be adopted to further formal studies of comic strips such as linework, textures, character recognition and representation, which are ripe for computational study.

Our own plans involve deepening this methodology by applying distant viewing to additional contemporary comic strips, including Luann , Cathy , Curtis , and Jumpstart , as means of enriching conversations surrounding the aesthetics of the “funnies.” Given the dearth of scholarship on Peanuts , there is even less scholarship on many contemporary and recent comic strips for many of the reasons outlined earlier (comics studies’ focus on comic books and graphic novels/memoirs, the sheer volume of comic strips’ production, etc.). This case study on Peanuts will provide a strong initial or baseline comparator for future applications, allowing us to compare future findings against the Schulzian Symmetry of Peanuts for instances where strips seem to align with the seminal strip’s formulaic conventions or deviate from them. Ultimately, we hope to work together to see where we can go in comic studies, and enjoy a few laughs along the way.

Peer reviewer : Kathryn Eccles Data Repository : https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5H0NCA

For a more complete survey, see: Heer, Jeet, and Kent Worcester, eds. A Comics Studies Reader . Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2009; Duncan, Randy, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz. The Power Of Comics: History, Form, And Culture . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015; Hatfield, Charles, and Bart Beaty, eds. Comics Studies: A Guidebook . Rutgers University Press, 2020.

For a more comprehensive overview of Sunday strips, see: Allan Holtz , “The Stripper’s Guide Dictionary Part 1: Sunday Strips,” Stripper’s Guide , August 14th, 2007, http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/2007/08/strippers-guide-dictionary-part-1.html

One notable example can be found in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes , which ran from 1985-1995. Watterson famously made an unprecedented change to Calvin and Hobbes ’ format after returning from a brief hiatus in 1992: rather than following the rote Sunday format of regular squares and rectangles that allowed newspaper editors to reformat the comic according to their individual layouts, Watterson vowed to publish Calvin and Hobbes strips in an unbreakable ½ page format that newspaper editors were not allowed to break up in any way. Bill Watterson , “Introduction” Calvin and Hobbes - Sunday Pages (1985-1995) , Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2001, pages 13-17.

Arnold, Taylor, Lauren Tilton, and Justin Wigard. “Automatic Identification and Classification of Portraits in a Corpus of Historical Photographs.” Proceedings http://ceur-ws . org ISSN 1613 (2022): 0073.

Arnold, Taylor, Lauren Tilton, and Annie Berke. “Visual style in two network era sitcoms.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 4, no. 2 (2019).

Our corpus of Peanuts strips was collected from the popular online distributor GoComics.com , itself a subsidiary of the larger publishing syndicate Andrews McMeel Universal . We created a web scraper to collect these comics, pulling the comic strips along with their associated metadata, from publicly available web pages on GoComics.com .

Using ten-year intervals as their samples, White and Fuentez note, “eleven weeks were randomly selected from each of the nine years chosen,” and of those comics, “non-editorial comics were coded Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of each of the selected weeks,” meaning that only a fraction of daily or weekly published comic strips were selected. White and Fuentez , “Analysis of Black Images in Comic Strips, 1915-1995,” 77.

Cohn , Neil. The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images . A&C Black, 2013.

Topham, Kate, Julian Chambliss, Justin Wigard, and Nicole Huff. “The Marmaduke Problem: A Case Study of Comics as Linked Open (Meta) data.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 6, no. 3 (2022): 1-8; Chambliss, Julian Carlos, Nicole Huff, Kate Topham, and Justin Wigard. “Days of Future Past: Why Race Matters in Metadata.” Genealogy 6, no. 2 (2022): 47.

Manovich, Lev, Jeremy Douglass, and William Huber. “Understanding Scanlation: How To Read One Million Fan-Translated Manga Pages.” Image & Narrative 12, no. 1 (2011): 206-228.

von Reumont, Frederik, and Alexandra Budke. “Strategies for successful learning with geographical comics: An eye-tracking study with young learners.” Education Sciences 10.10 (2020): 293.

Murel , Jacob. “An Exploration in the Digital Analysis of Comics Images.” INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 7, no. 1 (2023): 23-48. doi:10.1353/ink.2023.a898385 .

See: Dunst, Alexander, Jochen Laubrock, and Janina Wildfeuer, eds. Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, And Cognitive Methods . Routledge, 2018.; and the special issue of DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly devoted to “Comics and the Digital Humanities.” Whitson, Roger Todd, and Anastasia Salter. “Introduction: Comics and the Digital Humanities.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 4 (2015). In particular, Olivier Augereau, Motoi Iwata, and Koichi Kise provide an excellent and comprehensive overview of computational studies of comics images and elements in “An Overview of Comics Research in Computer Science,” 2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) (IEEE, 2017), 54–59.

Iconic in the McCloudian sense, meaning, abstract and recognizably cartoonish figures that readily lend themselves to readers identifying with the characters, contrasted aesthetically with realistic figures in comics that might resist such identification (McCloud 46) .

These include: the National Cartoonists Society’s Humor Comic Strip Award in 1962 for Peanuts ; the Society’s Elzie Segar Award in 1980; the first two-time winner of the NCS Reuben Award for 1955 and 1964; and the NCS’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999.

When he passed away in 2000, the Peanuts empire was said to be bringing in $1.1 billion each year, and reportedly, Schulz himself was earning “about $30 million to $40 million annually” ( Boxer n.p.).

Nguyen, Nhu-Van, Christophe Rigaud, and Jean-Christophe Burie. 2018. “Digital Comics Image Indexing Based on Deep Learning” Journal of Imaging 4, no. 7: 89. https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging4070089

Xu, Chenshu, Xuemiao Xu, Nanxuan Zhao, Weiwei Cai, Huaidong Zhang, Chengze Li, and Xueting Liu. “Panel-Page-Aware Comic Genre Understanding.” IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2023).

For more on Schulz’s essential tremor and its impact on his cartooning practices, see: Michelle Ann Abate , “Sometimes My Hand Shakes So Much I Have To Hold My Wrist To Draw: Charles M. Schulz and Disability,” Blockheads, Beagles, and Sweet Babboos: New Perspectives on Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts , University Press of Mississippi, 2023: 14-32.

Karasik and Newgarden note that “this information usually skulks along a strip’s bottom, positioned into the originals, as unobtrusively as possible. Unattractive, nearly indecipherable, and seemingly irrelevant to the proceedings, these persistent little marks cannot be entirely ignored and constitute narrative elements in their own right.” How to Read Nancy , 150.

See R.C. Harvey’s The Art of the Funnies for a comprehensive overview of the comic strip’s evolution.

Submitted : May 16, 2023 EDT

Accepted : June 20, 2023 EDT

Works Cited

2023 Theses Doctoral

An Exploratory Study of a Theory-Based Comic Strip to Counteract Misinformation About Covid-19 Vaccine Among Adult Social Media Users in the United States.

Polacow, Viviane Ozores

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic found a fertile ground for the spread of online misinformation, with emphasis on social media. Avoiding misinformation spread requires rapid, engaging, and effective science communication in a clear, easy-to-understand, attractive, and entertaining format that can be readily shared online. Comics fulfill these characteristics, being a promising tool to fight misinformation on social media. The goals of this study were: 1) Develop a novel narrative comic strip to promote recognition of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine among adult social media users (ages 18-65) based in the United States, drawing on the existing research on the Health Belief Model and Theory of Planned Behavior; 2.) Compare the comic strip evaluation and capacity to influence misinformation identification to those of an educational text about COVID-19 vaccination. 3a) Evaluate differences in the key outcomes (misinformation identification, and attractiveness, trust, perceived usefulness, willingness to share, and acceptance of each educational tool) across participants with varying demographic characteristics, health literacy levels, COVID-19 vaccination history, and demographic characteristics. 3b) Across the entire sample, evaluate the correlation between these constructs and health literacy, digital health literacy, vaccine attitudes, trust in science and health authorities, and social media use. Participants (N = 285) were recruited via social media advertisements and randomly assigned to the comic strip group (CS) (N = 92), educational text (TX) (N = 96), or a control 4 group (CL) (N = 97), which had not read any educational material. An online survey accessed the main outcomes (misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, evaluation of the educational tool (attractiveness, trust, perceived usefulness, willingness to share, and acceptance of the educational material). Participants also answered demographics questionnaires, COVID-19 vaccine concerns scale, and questionnaires on Health literacy, eHealth literacy, social media use, trust in health authorities and scientists, and COVID-19 vaccination history. Group CS answered questions regarding transportation into the narrative. There were no differences in misinformation identification between groups, possibly explained by a low sensibility of the misinformation identification instrument, timing of the data collection, and sensitiveness of the vaccination topic, subject to accrued attitudes, such as believing in misinformation. Participants with lower health literacy in group TX scored less on the misinformation identification questionnaire than those with higher literacy, which was not observed in the CS group, indicating that the comic strip may benefit better individuals with low health literacy. Vaccine hesitant/ refusers’ misinformation identification scores seem to have been benefited by the comic strip. The comic strip was better evaluated for trust in its content and acceptance than the educational text. Still, misinformation identification scores were not correlated to any evaluation construct in both groups CS and TX. Transportation into the narrative was positively correlated with all comic strip evaluation constructs but not with the misinformation identification score. Future studies should focus on exploring different styles and sizes of comic strips, using more heterogenous sample and addressing different health topics.

Geographic Areas

• United States
• Health education
• COVID-19 (Disease)--Social aspects
• COVID-19 (Disease)--Vaccination
• Comic books, strips, etc., in health education
• Social media--Influence

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Scientific dissemination via comic strip: A case study with SacreBLEU

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• Corpus ID: 234491121

S CIENTIFIC DISSEMINATION VIA COMIC STRIP : A CASE STUDY WITH S A C R E B L E U

• Published 2021
• Art, Computer Science

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Review of From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative

Stein, Daniel and Jan-Noël Thon eds.  From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative . De Gruyter: Berlin/Boston. 2013.

Stein and Thon’s collection is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature that details theory and methodology for comics criticism; while every chapter uses at least one published comic book or strip as its working example, they are largely case studies that help to demonstrate a particular theoretical approach. The chapter writers are from around the world, from St. John’s to Kytoto, and the book makes that global perspective explicit by listing their cities of origin under each chapter title. The subject matter of the book roughly reflects an Anglo-American/Franco-Belgian distinction, but the book is much more deeply bound together by a focus on critical method, specifically phenomenology: reader- and audience-oriented criticism. It is divided into four parts with four chapters in each part. It must be said that the writing in this book is miraculously free of the kind of obfuscating language that often plagues literary theory; the chapters all cover complex phenomenological ideas in clear, understandable, and above all, practical language. There are no flights of esoteric fancy, here, and any scholar who actually wants to get good work down will be grateful for it.

Part 1, “Graphic Narrative and Narratological Concepts,” largely focuses on formalism, specifically the ostensible presence of narrators in comics and the various kinds of narration that are possible: textual, visual/spacial, framing devices, etc. For example, Thon’s “Who’s Telling the Tale?” addresses narration directly by cataloguing and describing several types of comic-book narration as defined by who’s implicitly speaking/representing the story and what his/her/their/its relationship is to the story world, if any. Thon emphasizes that these types are not categorical but rather exist in relation to each other (93), and he makes the very important point that “it is not necessary to attribute non-narrational representation to a narrator […] a ‘source’ ” (87) even though, as he points out, we generally do. Similarly, Silke Horstkotte’s “Zooming In and Out” rejects the notion that comics are by definition linear and/or grammatical, counter to the received wisdom of our field. She argues that sequences of panels are not sentences, and they are not read in linear order. Instead, comics reference up to four levels of simultaneous framing at any given time: the panel, the scene (what she calls a “sequence” [45]), the narrative as a whole, and within the narrative but across chapters (Thierry Groensteen’s concept of “braiding” from  La Systéme de la Bande Desinée 1 ). The other two papers in the section address embodied reading/viewing and focalization vs. narration: Karin Kukkonen’s “Space, Time and Causality in Graphic Narratives” (Oxford) and Kai Mikkonen’s “Subjectivity and Style in Graphic Narratives” (Helsinki), respectively.

Part 2, “Graphic Narrative Beyond the ‘Single Work,'” is a bit of a catch-all section. Two chapters discuss comics as part of a larger media industry: Stein’s “Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Function of the Comic Book Paratext” and Rippl and Etter’s “Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative.” The other two discuss memoir, a genre of comics, and framing in pre-comics art: Pedri’s “Graphic Memoir” and Smith’s “Comics in the Intersecting History of the Window, the Frame, and the Panel.” Pedri interrogates the “fidelity constraint” (127) of comic-book memoir—how it is expected to depict events that actually occurred but also take on the structure of fiction. She argues that implying doubt in the fidelity of a story can confirm its authenticity, describes how verbal and visual narration play off of each other, and finally, details the different sorts of implied truth claims that photography and stylized drawing can make in comics. Pedri ultimately argues that graphic memoir is suited to, and has tended to, emphasize subjective truths over objective ones. Stein, on the other hand, uses Batman as a case study of authorship and authority in serialized, corporate publishing. He describes it as an attempt to stabilize the inherently unstable. Specifically, corporate publishers outwardly insist on a singular author while employing a stable of creators, and they encourage fans to organize into coherent groups that often make demands of those creators as well as reveal the lie of the singular creator. Stein’s text implies a self-defeating quality to the profit motive of such corporations; they chase money in multiple directions, often at cross purposes.

Part 3, “Genre and Format History of Graphic Narrative,” picks up some of the threads of Part 2, specifically the discussion of, as the title implies, genre and format. Jared Gardner’s “History of the Narrative Comic Strip” places comics into the context of other mass media: newspapers, film, radio, and eventually the Web. The paper describes how the format of newspaper strips lent itself to open-ended narratives rather than one-shot comics, and how audiences and newspapers interacted with them as if they were, to an extent, real. He also details comics’ interaction with film, how film borrowed from comics, because they were an already established form, and then how film overtook them in profits and popularity, thus forcing comics to emulate the slightly younger medium. Pascal Lefévre’s “Narration in the Flemish Dual Publication System” describes the forces that lead to “humoristic [sic] adventure” (255) comics in Flanders, as opposed to the more earnest, French-language comics in Belgium, the most famous of which being Tintin. He separates these forces into three groups: first, “material aspects (size, paper quality, etc.)”; second, “temporal (daily, weekly, monthly, one-shot)”; third, “editorial parameters (length of an episode, regulations regarding content or the public)” (267). He argues that the dual-publication system, under which Flemish strips were first published in newspapers and then collected into books, created compressed storytelling and a rigid structure (e.g., set numbers of panels per episode, set numbers of pages per book), including an omniscient narrator and almost exclusively linear narrative structure. That structure, however, was ideal for containing a farcical and anarchic genre of comic-strip storytelling. Christina Meyer’s “Un/Taming the Beast” (Hannover) formally defines what it is we mean by the term “graphic novel” using  The Unwritten  as a case study, and Henry Jenkins’ “Archival, Ephemeral, and Residual” defines Art Spiegelman’s use of early comics in  In the Shadow of No Towers  as what American cultural studies calls “stuff” (301).

Part 4, “Graphic Narrative Across Cultures,” contains large-scale analyses of national/cultural traditions in comics as well as critiques of the practice of grouping comics into cultural categories to begin with. Thus, Jan Baetens and Steven Surdiacourt’s “European Graphic Narratives” presents a history of comics from the continent that puts aside the desire to differentiate European from American or Japanese comics, the interminable definition debate, and instead concentrates on an internal history. Jaqueline Berndt’s “Asian Graphic Narratives” starts from a very similar premise from an Asian perspective; she exposes several processes by which Western audiences and scholars orientalize manga. Julia Round’s “Anglo-American Graphic Narrative” recounts the story of British writers storming American comics in the eighties, which resulted, she argues, from fifties censorship in the US and UK that sanitized the mainstream and drove everything else underground in the sixties and seventies. SF comics in Britain in the eighties reacted against Thatcherism, and those writers used that same mode to appeal to American audiences who were living under Reaganomics, but they did so by self-consciously revising the superhero and directly addressing readers through metafictional devices. Monika Schmitz-Emans’s “Graphic Narratives as World Literature” describes how comics live within world literature. She briefly describes what a global comics theory might look like (formally grounded, open to cultural variation), and then defines world literature in three ways: “world class,” an assessment of quality; “literature of the world,” a statement of origin; and in terms of “mutual literary influence,” a critical assessment (388). She then describes several types of world-literature comics: realistic genres (auto/biography, history, reports), critical reports/travelogues, and historical novels. She then inverts those groupings by surveying comics that are based on so-called world literature: adaptations and parodies, portraits of authors, and comics that affirm pre-existing canons. Schmitz-Emans’s paper, the last one in the collection, gestures towards a larger world for phenomenological theories of comics scholarship in a way that very much embraces the whole book’s transnational theme.

From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels  is a rich, complex book. It looks at comics from a phenomenological and transnational perspective and creates an internal dialogue, positing as many ideas as it deconstructs, with individual chapters sitting in tension with one another. This unsettled feeling permeates the book, reflecting the present state of comics scholarship: no longer just finding its feet, constructing canons and deconstructing them in almost the same breath, produced by a wide variety of voices from all over the world, and firmly embedded in a variety of scholarly traditions.

[1] She cites the original French text (1999) rather than the English translation (2007), so I use the French title as well.

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Education Case Studies That Are Also Comics

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By Renee Ghert-Zand September 7, 2011

If it could work for the Holocaust, an Algerian rabbi’s cat, and a Birthright Israel trip, then it could also work for a Jewish day school governance and administration case study. So thought Ken Gordon, social media manager at the Boston-based Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, and he was right.

Looking for a way to re-imagine “A Case Study of Jewish Day School Leadership: How Way Leads on to Way” written by Professor Alex Pomson of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Gordon turned to author and graphic novelist Steve Sheinkin, author of the Rabbi Harvey series, asking him to use his graphic storytelling skills to give the 50-page case study a second life on PEJE’s webzine, “Sustained!”

Sheinkin admits that he found the request “very strange” at first, since this was the first time that he was being asked to take someone else’s narrative — and a long Jewish education case study, at that — and turn it into a comic strip. But he welcomed the opportunity to work on the project, approaching it “like a puzzle” as he extracted the core issues of the case, boiling them down to only a few scenes. “I stuck to the things that I could visualize,” Sheinkin said.

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Sheinkin produced the first episode, titled “Big Picture, Small Picture,” which sets the stage for the story. It opens dramatically: “As the October sun set behind the distant hills of Deer Lake City, Dr. Daniel Moss pulled into the parking lot of the Isaac Herzog Academy.” The rest of the episode shows what happens at a meeting in which Moss, head of the school, tells the members of the school’s board that a group of young parents in a neighboring town want to open a new branch of the Isaac Herzog Academy so that their children can benefit from a Jewish day school education without having to commute to Deer Lake City.

“At the heart of this case study is a debate, so it was easy to represent,” explained Sheinkin. Gordon was confident that Sheinkin would know which information to include and which to cut out for dramatic and graphic purposes. “The nipping and tucking worked,” Gordon said.

Pomson, too, was pleased with the outcome. He wrote that he was excited about this new form and suggested that it would capture audiences’ attention. “Last but not least, the cartoon also provides a wonderful opportunity to have fun and to think. That’s a serious value proposition,” he said.

Some people have reportedly questioned the decision to turn a case study on a serious topic in Jewish education into a cartoon, but most follow Pomson’s thinking. The graphic edition has, indeed, generated additional interest in the case study. Since the first episode went online in the first week of July, 64 orders have been placed for the original text version.

Gordon expects the second episode to be ready for online publication on “Sustained!” at the end of September. However, it will not be produced by Sheinkin, as PEJE is inviting other graphic artists to create the second and third installments. Gordon refers to this as “the Pekar-effect,” and thinks it will “keep people surprised.” Sheinkin agrees with the approach. “I like the idea of a different author for each segment,” he said, complimenting Gordon’s out-of-the-box thinking. “Nothing in comics is too weird.”

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How comics can enhance reader engagement, bring new audiences to narrative nonfiction

Animate the core of the story you’d like to convey.

Erin Polgreen

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Comics like Symbolia’s “Declassified” give readers a personal understanding of a story that may feel remote from daily life Illustration by Lucy Bellwood

Shortly after I co-founded Symbolia , a digital publication that merges comic books and journalism, I got an intriguing pitch. Reporter Sarah Mirk wanted to tell the stories of the veterans who had served at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp to help reframe the public understanding of the base and make the “image of Guantánamo become very clear and personal.”

Mirk took on this story because “media about Guantánamo focuses almost exclusively on policy discussions and the opinions of high-ranking decision-makers.” As a result, human impacts as well as the experiences of those working at the facility are “overshadowed.”

I immediately green-lit the story. Mirk instinctively understood what comic book formats can do for journalism. The form makes heady topics intimate and relevant. Issues that are far away become more personal to the reader. In a world of information overload, beautifully crafted, hand-illustrated comics provide clarity and emotional resonance.

Mirk worked with artist Lucy Bellwood to merge subtle audio, looped animations, and sequential visual narratives in a profile of two Navy veterans. The resulting piece, “ Declassified ,” is one of the most successful stories from our first year of publishing.

“Declassified” has been syndicated at human-interest journalism outlet Narratively , excerpted at political newsblog Think Progress , distributed as a print minicomic, and translated into French for a forthcoming issue of Swiss start-up Sept.

The work is a powerful case study in how comic books can be successfully used to bring new readers into complex issues. As journalism organizations try to connect with new audiences and innovate online, comic book narratives can work across platforms, engage younger, more visually oriented readers, and transcend cultural borders.

Comics are certainly popular. Graphic novels—the popular term for book-length comics—are one of the fastest growing offerings in contemporary publishing and have been growing in popularity since at least 2008. Amazon recently scooped up digital comics publisher Comixology.

Looking at the print spectrum, BookScan’s 2013 report, which covers about 85 percent of book store sales (not including libraries or comic book stores and few big box stores), shows a nearly 4 percent growth in the number of comic books sold in 2013 and close to 7 percent growth in total revenue. Print sales overall have been shrinking since 2008, according to the 2013 annual report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

But why do comics work so well? The secret is in how users consume the content. Comic books make it possible to understand more—and do it faster. Comics theorist and cartoonist Scott McCloud calls it “amplification through simplification,” in which the simplified drawing pares down an image to its “essential meaning.”

This kind of iconic illustration focuses attention on specific ideas and emotions in a process of highly disciplined editorial decision-making. Each stroke of the pen imparts instant meaning because the images are essential and also universal. A few furrows on a character’s brow convey worry. A comic about a veteran’s experiences in Guantánamo Bay becomes a story about a woman that we relate to on an emotional level because we infer complex meaning quickly from the artist’s rendering.

Neuroscientific research supports what narrative nonfiction storytellers instinctively know: Stories with clear, emotionally evocative dramatic arcs are most effective at keeping readers engaged. These stories cause the body to produce chemicals including cortisol, which focuses attention, as well as oxytocin, which is associated with empathy. They also light up areas of the brain linked to understanding others. Neil Cohn of the University of California San Diego, who has been studying comics for more than 10 years, argues that comics can increase overall comprehension as well. “Studies for several decades now have shown that using works written in these visual languages in educational contexts can be helpful for learning,” Cohn says. “The evidence is fairly clear that sequential images (usually plus text) are an effective teaching tool.”

Comics are “great for condensing and coloring stories,” says Roxanne Palmer, who created the story about Ukraine’s YanukovychLeaks investigative reporting project. “You can combine the visual eye candy of a chart with the spine of narrative. You can highlight the humanity of a subject by making their words come out of a face rather than just attached to a name on the page.”

Though comics use simple lines and sparse prose to tell a story, they are anything but simplistic. The best-selling works of Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman, and Alison Bechdel contain numerous examples of the successful integration of nonfiction and comics.

As readers increasingly move toward digital content delivered to multiple screens, theories like McCloud’s and findings like Cohn’s are critical in developing new ways to present journalistic content. To create highly engaging content that works well on multiple platforms, don’t rely too heavily on bells and whistles. If the interactive takes away from the core narrative, you don’t need it. Don’t automate a story’s progression like a timed slideshow. Let the reader control the speed and length of time that they spend in the story. Know the core of the story you’d like to convey, and animate that core—in images and words—in ways that evoke empathy and resonate with diverse user groups.

Erin Polgreen is co-founder of Symbolia and has helped many media outlets tell visual stories

Further Reading

Chasing paper with yanukovychleaks, by roxanne palmer, form follows function, by russ rymer.

Comics and Graphic Novels

• Intro to Comics and Graphic Novels
• How to Read Comics
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Introduction to Comics Scholarship

This section provides recommendations for nonfiction books on the study of comics as described below:

" Comic Studies represents a growing area of academic research with approaches ranging from the formal analysis of how graphic storytelling works to the industrial analysis of how comics get made, from the historical origins of the form to the study of the medium’s representation of race gender, and sexuality, from the study of individual creators to ethnographic attention to comic fans and their gatherings. Comic Studies exists alongside many other media-related films, such as Cinema Studies, Television Studies, Game Studies or Transmedia Studies, each asking questions about the centrality of popular culture to contemporary life."

-Professor Henry Jenkins

Students who are interested in pursuing research in comics will be provided recommendations that introduce the research field, studies centered around comics, history, and culture.

Important Notes:

Books with a blue title are available through USC electronic resources. The link can be accessed by hovering over the title.

Items that are held by USC have their location and call number listed at under the title.

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Derik A. Badman is digital services librarian at Temple University, e-mail: [email protected]

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Comics studies: Resources for scholarly research

Derik A. Badman

Comic books, comic strips, manga, and other forms of what is more generally called comics have gained increasingly serious attention in recent years, such that it is almost at the point where articles entitled “Bif Bam Pow: Comics aren’t for kids anymore” have ceased appearing because of their obviousness. The field of comics studies has had a similar upward trajectory. Avenues for publication of scholarly writing on comics continue to expand (both journals and books), and resources focused on the study of comics are growing.

Comics studies is a broadly interdisciplinary area, often applying the scholarly literature and apparati of literary studies, communication and mass media, art, history, sociology, or philosophy.

This column highlights resources that are more narrowly focused on comics. The resources below cover a range of types from scholarly publications to reference sources and news sites. I have primarily focused on English-language resources, though researchers should be aware of the prevalence of French language comics studies (which one could argue has a larger academic history than studies in English).

Discussion lists and forums

• Anime and Manga Research Circle. This is a group of scholars, students, and fans interested in research on anime and manga. They maintain a fairly active e-mail list. Access: http://www.cjas.org/~leng/amrc.htm .
• Comics Scholars Discussion List. This is an active e-mail list populated by a large number of academics, students, independent scholars, and even a few librarians involved with comics studies. A good source for CFPs, conference information, publication news, and long discussions (recent examples include discussions of terminology in comics [always contentious] and the “must reads” of comics scholarship). Access: http://www.english.ufl.edu/comics/scholars/ .
• European Comic Art. A newer scholarly journal focused on European comics (bande dessinee). Access: http://eurocomicart.lupjournals.org/default.aspx .
• Image and Narrative. Another peer-reviewed open access journal out of Belgium devoted to the study of visual narrative in all its forms (including comics). One of the chief editors is Jan Baetens, a Belgian scholar who has published widely on comics in French. This journal publishes articles in English or French, with abstracts provided in both languages. Access: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/ .
• ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. A peer-reviewed open access journal out of the University of Florida (which has its own comics studies program). Recent special issues focused on the work of Neil Gaiman and William Blake’s relation to visual culture. Access: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/ .
• International Journal of Comic Art. The premier comics studies journal publishing English-language articles since 1999 by John Lent, a professor at Temple University and a major figure in comics studies and bibliography. While recent volumes are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, the journal’s own site is the best place to get content information for all volumes. Access: http://ijoca.com/ .
• The Comics Journal. The long-running magazine that takes comics seriously is well regarded for long interviews with creators, regular columns, and critical reviews. The Web site includes excerpts from recent issues and hosts an active message board. An index of the first 142 issues is available ( www.english.ufl.edu/comics/scholars/TCJ_Index.html ) but not for the 150 issues since then. Access: http://tcj.com .

Bibliographies

• Comic Research Bibliography. Michael Rhode and John Bullough’s bibliography contains a vast number of citations to articles on comics and comics themselves, unfortunately it hasn’t been updated since 2007 and there are no subjects or abstracts to aid in discovery. Contains a wide variety of source types from newspaper articles on movie adaptations of comics to blog posts to scholarly articles . Access: http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html .
• ComicsResearch.org: Comics Scholarship Annotated Bibliographies. Gene Kannenberg’s large annotated bibliography covers a wide range of publications about comics as well as information on conferences, organizations, library collections, and more, an invaluable resource. Entries often include citations for reviews of books. Access: http://comicsresearch.org/ .
• Online Bibliography of Anime and Manga Research. A bibliography of resources on anime and manga (Japanese comics) that covers publications, presentations, and grey literature and is maintained by librarian Mikhail Koulikov. Access: http://www.corneredangel.com/amwess/academic.html .
• Don Markstein’s Toonopedia. An encyclopedia of cartoon/comic characters. The entries are often long and detailed, providing character histories, publication information, and creator related details. Access: http://www.toonopedia.com/ .
• Grand Comic Book Database. A vast database that indexes comics. Invaluable for information on publications, credits, dates, and more. Cover images are included in many cases. The search interface leaves much to be desired (you can only search on one criterion at a time), but a new version of the databases is apparently in the works. Access: http://www.comics.org/ .
• Lambiek Comiclopedia. An encyclopedia of comics artists/creators/cartoonists from across the globe. The entries usually include at least one image. Access: http://lambiek.net/ .

Organizations

• National Association of Comic Art Educators. NACAE’s Web site is a resource for those who teach comics classes or those interested in comics classes. Included is a directory of comics classes and teachers, as well as schools offering comics programs. For educators, there are syllabi from various teachers and teaching guides for a variety of comics. Of particular relevance to anyone is a handout on comics terminology from comics artists/educators Matt Madden and Jessica Abel. Access: http://www.teachingcomics.org/ .
• Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. The PCA/ACA includes a Comic Art and Comics Area, which puts on programs at the Annual Meeting of the association as well as regional events. Access: http://www.pcaaca.org/ .

Library collections

• Graphic Novel Subject Guide. Karen Green, Columbia University’s graphic novel librarian, maintains this subject guide on comics and comics-related sources. Access: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eguides/graphic_novels/index.html .
• Michigan State Libraries Comic Art Collection. MSU’s collection focuses on published work including pamphlets, books, strips, and journals. The vast collection of U.S. comic books and comics strips is supplemented by international and critical materials. Much of the collection is cataloged in MSU’s library catalog as well as in WorldCat. Worth pointing out is the long list of comics research libraries (comics.lib.msu.edu/director/comres.htm). Access: http://comics.lib.msu.edu/ .
• Ohio State University Cartoon Library and Museum. OSU’s large collection of comic art and artifacts, started with the papers of Milton Caniff and has since grown to include numerous collections and works such as Bill Blackbeard’s famed collection of newspaper comic strips and a collection of Will Eisner’s work and papers. The Web site includes a digital image database with a plethora of wonderful comics to view as well as digital albums, including a full run of Lyonel Feininger’s “Kin-der-kids” pages. Access: http://cartoons.osu.edu/ .
• Cartoon Art Museum (San Francisco). A museum of original art and a research library. Access: http://www.cartoonart.org/ .
• Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée (Brussels). A major museum of comic art, which also houses a large library of comics. Access: http://www.comicscenter.net/en/home .
• La Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image (Angouleme). The Web site of a conglomeration of locations in Angouleme, France, including a museum, research library, bookstore, and “house of authors” (residencies, services for artists). The museum is the primary French museum of comic art. Access: http://www.citebd.org/ .
• Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (New York). A small museum in New York City that features regular exhibits and events, including the annual MoCCA Festival, a highlight of the nonmainstream comics scene. Access: http://www.moccany.org/ .
• Journalista. If you only follow one comics-related blog, then Dick Deppey’s Journalista is the one to pick. The single daily post of link blogging tends to hit the highs and lows of news, commentary, reviews, and more. Access: http://tcj.com/journalista/ .
• New and Improved Comic Book Blog Updates. If you really want to be on the pulse of comics blogging, this site provides a dynamically updated list of posts from a huge number of comics blogs, rather overwhelming but a good way to discover blogs of interest. Access: http://comicblogupdates.blogspot.com/ .
• The Comics Reporter. A major source for news, interviews, commentary, links, and more on all sorts of comics. Tom Spurgeon writes and aggregates his way into being a major hub for goings-on in the comics world. Access: http://comicsreporter.com/ .
• Comics Studies Podcast. An irregularly appearing podcast from A. David Lewis, often featuring recorded audio from presentations and panels at various conferences and conventions. Access: http://captionbox.net/podcast/ .
• Inkstuds. Robin McConnell’s weekly radio show from CITR in Vancouver features hour-long interviews with comics artists and scholars. His archive is large, wide-ranging, and downloadable. Access: http://inkstuds.com/ .
• Comic Art in Scholarly Writing: A Citation Guide. Allen Ellis’ guide to citing comic art as suggested by the Popular Culture Association. Citing comics has also been a bit tricky and is generally not well-supported by any of the major styles. This provides some helpful guidelines. Access: http://comicsresearch.org/CAC/cite.html .
• Enjolrasworld. A collection of annotations (and links to annotations) for a variety of comics, with a particular focus on the works of Alan Moore. Access: http://www.enjolrasworld.com/ .
• Golden Age Comics. A great source to download out-of-copyright comics from the so-called “Golden Age” of comics. Most of these comics are out-of-print and expensive, so this is valuable for research into the early years of comic books. Access: http://goldenagecomics.co.uk/ .
• Institute for Comics Studies. The ICS has a number of ongoing and new projects for the purpose of supporting the field of comics studies, including putting on academic programs, a comics studies calendar and map, and the online publication of “lost works” in comic studies. Access: http://www.instituteforcomicsstudies.org/index.html .
• More than 100 comics-related words in eight languages. Maintained by Belgian comics scholar Pascal Lefévre, this page offers a multilingual glossary of comics terms. Access: http://lefevre.pascal.googlepages.com/morethan100comics-relatedwordsin8languag .

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Inclusive education through digital comic creation in higher learning environments.

1. Introduction

2. literature review, 2.1. comic books in education, 2.2. digital comics in language learning, 2.3. inclusive education through comic creation in higher learning environments, 3. objectives.

• Evaluate the digital skills of teacher candidates in collaboratively creating comic strips for the EFL classroom.
• Investigate the perceptions of teacher candidates regarding the use of digital comic strips in the EFL classroom.
• Examine the impact of creating digital comic strips on teacher candidates’ attitudes toward inclusive and diverse education.

4. Materials and Methods

4.1. research context and participants, 4.2. instruments and procedure, 5.1. digital comic strips created by participants, 5.2. data results, 6. discussion, 7. conclusions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Belda-Medina, J. Inclusive Education through Digital Comic Creation in Higher Learning Environments. Soc. Sci. 2024 , 13 , 272. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13050272

Belda-Medina J. Inclusive Education through Digital Comic Creation in Higher Learning Environments. Social Sciences . 2024; 13(5):272. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13050272

Belda-Medina, Jose. 2024. "Inclusive Education through Digital Comic Creation in Higher Learning Environments" Social Sciences 13, no. 5: 272. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13050272

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Urban Comics as a Research Method and Tool in Social Innovation. Case Study: ArtiViStory Collective

2022, Journal of Media Research Vol. 15, Issue 3 (44)

The present paper proposes an investigation of the use of comics and sequential art as a qualitative research method and a tool in a social innovation approach. It presents an exploratory research on the artistic practice of the ArtiViStory Collective, as a group of artists and faculty members from the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca (UAD) working in the field of urban comics that have developed a specific methodology for using comics in research processes by creating specific artworks as part of the data collection process, of the data analysis process and by using curatorial approaches for results dissemination to different audiences. Starting by inquiring the use of documentary comics and sequential storytelling as an emerging qualitative research method, the article presents the specificity of this case study that renders a new approach in Romania on an urban comics-based research process by focusing on the evolution of the group as a community of practice as well as on the analysis of the specificity of their methodology and working process that act as catalyzers for engaging audiences in urban transitions.

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This paper reflects on the limits and potentialities of "comics-based research" (Kuttner et al., 2020) in marginalised urban contexts, through the interdisciplinary and collaborative perspective of an urban sociologist and a cultural geographer-cartoonist. The analysis starts from the empirical example of the comic book anthology Quartieri. Viaggio al Centro delle Periferie Italiane, which is devoted to five "peripheral" neighbourhoods in Italy and was realised through collaboration between researchers and cartoonists. The paper focuses on the way in which research activities and spatial analyses were influenced by the narrative and stylistic choices dictated by the "spatial grammar" of comics. Through reading the short comics story about the Arcella neighbourhood in Padua, we reflect on how comics allowed us to explore the role of everyday life spaces and of different spatial agencies and spatial structures in the area. Focusing on the role of maps in the narration, the paper further aims to make some relations between graphic and narrative choices in the story and spatial analysis visible. Quartieri is an empirical example that helps us to move beyond the idea of using comics to merely disseminate academic knowledge differently. Despite their prolific accessibility, indeed, comics seem to help us engaging differently with the contemporary debates around the spatial, material and affective turn.

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The master thesis aims at analysing innovative ideas and possible ways of building contemporary visual arts audiences. For the purpose, plans and activities of the Independent Artistic Association Third Belgrade (Third Belgrade) pertaining to the Urban Incubator project in Savamala were taken into account. Indisputably, extent and quality of contribution in audience development in post-modern art are important issues, yet rarely analysed in conditions of transitional Serbia. Through examination of the relationship triangle between audience, artists and context, the aim is to bring closer a showcase of fine mechanisms behind contemporary art creation and consumption. In other words, the thesis sheds light on ways artistic rendering of specific issues in a distinct community and space of Savamala, that is said to in many ways mimic Serbian society as a whole, might helps us realise the multi-faceted nature of community's issues, and possibly aid in facing up to them more effectively in future.

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The role of comics journalism in modern media

By Kimberlee Meier — Contributing Writer

When you picture a traditional journalist, what do you see? 

Most people will would imagine a newsreader with a microphone in front of a camera, or a journalist writing down notes inside a courtroom. Yet some of the most impactful journalists in history have neither microphone nor camera. They’ve had a pen, paper — and a comic strip.

Comic journalism is a unique, yet underrated medium, where complex political and social issues have been discussed for decades. From the Holocaust to the Iraq War, comic journalists have used a combination of words and illustrations to report on historical news stories, challenging the reader's concept of reality and offering a different perspective on an event. 

This article will look at how comics journalism has shaped the industry, and what its place is in modern media.

Let’s dive in. 

What is comics journalism, the evolution of comics journalism.

• The benefits of comics journalism and its role in current affairs

The top challenges faced by comics journalists

The future of comics journalism.

What do the BBC, Tripadvisor, and Penguin have in common? They craft stunning, interactive web content with Shorthand. And so can you! Publish your first story for free — no code or web design skills required. Sign up now.

Image captions

Comics journalism is when comics and illustrations are used to report news, current events, and complex, long-form subjects.

Comics journalism — sometimes called graphic journalism — usually mixes visual elements and illustrations with text, commentary, and speech bubbles to tell a story inside panel layouts that are like those in comic books. These non-fiction comics aren’t always published in a newspaper — they also appear on social media, graphic novels, and even webcomics.

The visual nature of comics journalism can provide a different perspective on current events. The reason it’s such a fascinating storytelling medium is that its use of illustrations and text can boil down complex, serious and sometimes controversial issues into a single comic strip.

Aside from political cartooning, comics journalism isn’t something that’s regularly seen in traditional news media. But with the evolution of modern media, might this be about to change? With the rise of graphic journalists in newsrooms, and increased use of interactive content platforms that can support animations, we might be on the cusp of new era of comics journalism.

One of the earliest and most important examples of comics journalism was printed by Arco Publishing Company. The publisher, based in New York, produced a full-page depiction of a concentration camp entitled "Nazi Death Parade" in 1944:

August Maria Froehlich / Arco Publishing Company

A historian at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Kees Ribbens , told Smithsonian Magazine that the comic’s creator, August Maria Froehlich, was trying to reach non-Jewish American readers who weren’t engaging with the devastation of the Holocaust. 

“On the one hand, it was too terrifying to realize what was actually going on there. On the other hand, people thought, ‘This can’t be true—it’s simply unbelievable,” Ribbens says. 

 “[They] realized, if their message comes only in words, it’s not going to make any difference, because if people at the time really wanted to know, they could.” Ribbens says although it wasn’t the first time a gas chamber had been reported on or talked about in wider media, a comic illustrated the atrocities of the Nazi regime in its rawest form. 

This was a pivotal moment for journalists and news organisations: could they use comics to reach disengaged readers?

In 1972, The Smurfs released “ Schtroumpf Vert et Vert Schtroumpf ”, which literally translates to Smurf vs Smurf. It talks about the language barriers between Southern and Northern “smurfs”, but depicted a real-life division in Belgium between the French-speaking Wallonia to the South, and the Dutch-speaking Flanders in the North.

Image source

Although the Smurfs aren't exactly known for biting political satire, this tongue-in-cheek comic strip reflection how comics journalism helped to blur between humour and serious discourse. 

Other well known non-fiction comics include Joe Sacco’s Palestine and, — perhaps most famously — Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus . Modern comics journalists include Dan Archer, Josh Neufeld’s work on New Orleans, Sarah Glidden, Matt Bors, Andy Warner, Susie Cagle, and Patrick Chappatte’s work with the New York Times .

Beyond the confronting nature of some of the topics of comics journalism, there can also be challenges in the realm of production.

For issue #1011 of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, the publishers had a mission to provide a different angle on the news, beyond what traditional outlets were reporting. But it was also met with backlash, and the magazine’s office was attacked by arsonists. Finally, just over two months after the issue was published, two terrorists stormed the magazine’s headquarters and killed 12 people. 

Like any other type of journalism, comics journalism can be risky and controversial.

However, it can also have some serious benefits for publishers — so, let’s take a look at them.

The benefits of comics journalism, and its role in current affairs

Comics journalism can play a crucial role in how a media outlet connects with its audience.

The combination of illustration and text can give a visual representation of a story, making it accessible to a wider audience. This comes with great benefits for outlets that want to expand their reach and tell complex stories with meaning.

Benefit 1: Visual storytelling

Although comic journalism isn't the most widely-used way media outlets tell stories with visuals, it can be one of the most thought-provoking. 

Joe Sacco is one of the world's most prominent comics journalists. He has used comics to report on subjects like war crimes and corruption, winning awards for his reporting on the Middle East, including Palestine and Gaza in this Footnotes in Gaza.

One of his most thought-provoking pieces was published in The Guardian in 2005. The two-page spread came from Sacco's experiences in Iraq:

guardian.co.uk

Political cartoonist Khalid Albaih followed in Sacco’s footsteps a few years later when reporting on the Arab Spring. His cartoons went viral, with some even appearing on walls from Cairo to Beirut.

Albaih considers himself an avid news consumer, so the lack of reporting on the events after the Arab Spring made him search for the reasons. 

Does that mean that the violence has stopped? Or is it not enough violence to make it onto the news? Did citizen journalists stop filming? Or is it just that the Western audience is no longer interested in Syria, that it has exceeded the world’s attention span?,” he mused in AlJazeera. 

This takes me to Sudan where, in 2011, riding the wave of the Arab Spring, people took to the streets to protest for the first time, and where two years later in 2013 more than 200 people were shot dead by the Janjaweed, an armed militia group whose leader Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemeti, is now ironically the deputy leader of Sudan’s transitional government.

Most of the world did not hear about these killings in Sudan because it was not televised. When citizen journalists tried to contact the international media, their replies were mostly that there was not enough TV-worthy footage coming out of Sudan to warrant a report. No videos meant no news – the opposite of what was going on in Syria at the time.

Albaih's subsequent comics helped to keep the spotlight on regions like Sudan post-Arab Spring to ensure citizens remained informed. 

Benefit 2: Engage and reach a wider audience

Comics journalism can amplify marginalised voices and highlight unusual or underrepresented viewpoints. 

In a way, comics journalism can act as an opinions column in a newspaper, offering unique perspectives or opinions different to mainstream thinking, to promote discussion and debate. Here’s a great example from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis : 

The comics tell the story of Satrapi's childhood during the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War. It offers a first-hand perspective on the emotional and psychological effects the war had on the author and her family, along with compelling insights into the unravelling of women’s rights. 

By expressing complex issues like religion and women’s rights in a visual, first-person cartoon, Satrapi makes these issues — which are rarely told from her perspective — more accessible to a wider audience. 

All in all, comics journalism seems like a great way for media outlets to connect with readers. So, what’s stopping them?

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Most of us associate comics with, well… comics. We think of Peanuts or Garfield on page 20 of our daily newspaper. And that association stretches into the journalism industry, where there is limited recognition of comics journalism as a genuine form of reporting. Mainly, this is because there's still a balancing act between artistic expression with factual accuracy.

News comics also lack the support given to traditional reporters, leading to an uphill battle to get featured in mainstream publications. This forces them to turn elsewhere: some comics we've already mentioned have pivoted to social media or self-publishing to get their stories out there.

The other big hurdle comics journalists face is a lack of financial resources and opportunities. As the genre is so niche, there are limited opportunities for comics journalists to make a living through their work. Some comics journalists have even turned to crowdfunding platforms to support their work and get published.

The good news is that, thanks to the rise of online storytelling platforms, the financial barriers are slowly disappearing.

The public’s appetite for media is changing. 

A study by the Technical University of Denmark found the global attention span is narrowing , and it's all down to the amount of information we are consuming. Media platforms have responded by shortening publications and pivoting to mediums like video and visual storytelling. 

There wasn’t much choice. 

A recent Reuters Institute Digital Report found 54% of under-35s in the United States head straight to social media to get their information instead of a news app. And Pew Research Center found the share of Americans who often get news from TV has dropped across all age groups since early 2016. 

The shift to adjust to shorter attention spans has been swift. Instagram binned IGTV from its platform and replaced it with shorter reels. Outlets like NBC News and the Washington Post are using TikTok to publish snapshots of longer news stories. 

But what does this shift in media appetite mean for comics journalism?

Well, it does tick all the boxes, with its ability to reach diverse audiences (especially younger consumers) and cover a wide range of topics in a single comic strip. Plus, there’s a huge opportunity for comics journalists to cross-promote material to gain traction online. 

For example, comics journalists have begun to use social media channels as distribution tools. And it's easy to see why — comic strips are visually appealing and easy to digest. There have been some challenges (like Facebook censoring satirical material ), but the changing media landscape is resulting in comics journalism becoming more recognised and accepted as a valid form of journalism. 

This political satire comic by The Nib was censored by Facebook during the coronavirus pandemic. Image source. 

Damjan Tanaskovic was an editor at Strip Vesti , a site that publishes news comics. He says comics journalism doesn't happen overnight — it takes time and creativity to craft properly. 

The format's simplicity and accessibility could make it a cornerstone of contemporary journalism if there wasn't such an insatiable hunger for quantity rather than quality. In that time, the media outlet will have hoped to publish at least a dozen news pieces, so the journalists are already feeling enough pressure as it is.

But Tanaskovic says comics journalism is incredibly easy for audiences to digest compared to other types of journalism. 

In today's day and age, few people find the time to read anything, so if they are to read something, it better be bite-sized and to the point. That's where comics journalism steps in and saves the day. When done right, it conveys the essence of the news piece in one compact graphic.

Is comics journalism right for your media outlet?

Comics journalism is a criminally underused way to engage and connect with readers online.

The hardest part is getting started. In the past, comics journalism was an afterthought for editors, as it was time-consuming and expensive to produce. But now, the public's appetite for how they consume news has changed, and suddenly a single-page comic strip that relies on a mix of visuals and text may just be a way to engage them.

If you're thinking about exploring the use of comics journalism but aren’t sure where to start, Shorthand is the perfect place to publish modern comics with a twist. Mixing visuals and text with scrollytelling technology, Shorthand gives readers a truly immersive experience when they read a comic.

Publish your first story free with Shorthand

Craft sumptuous content at speed. No code required.

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10 funniest far side comics that somehow found the funny side of fossils.

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10 Funniest Far Side Comics Starring God

15 funniest far side comics that somehow found the funny side of war, this far side comic was a direct insult to gary larson's editor.

• Larson's love of science allows him to even find the funny side of fossils.
• The Far Side shows scientists messing with dinosaur bones, mysterious disappearances around a T-Rex skeleton, and the tragic fate of the Flintstones.
• Don't forget to vote in our reader poll to decide which of these strips is officially The Far Side 's funniest fossil comic.

Gary Larson's The Far Side may love wordplay and goofy jokes, but the comic's biggest obsessions are nature and science. It's therefore not surprising that Larson wrote so many great gags centered around fossils, despite the fact that the study of petrified plants and animals doesn't exactly have a 'laugh a minute' reputation. While Larson has plenty of hilarious dinosaur comics , he also specifically focused on the surprisingly hilarious potential of their remains.

Screen Rant has collected the 10 funniest Far Side comics about fossils, along with some extras to showcase Larson's funniest themes and major obsessions. Don't forget to vote in our end-of-article poll for the funniest Far Side comic about fossils.

10 In the Chicken Museum

This far side strip is a successful take on larson's biggest flop.

Larson uses several types of animals again and again across The Far Side 's run. Cows are the most famous, but Larson also often used chickens, insects, and giant squid in his gags . Clueless, silly, and doomed, chickens are a perfect target for Larson's mix of belly-laugh humor and morbid fascination with death, offering up protagonists who are painfully aware they're going to be eaten but with no real plan to avoid it.

In the case of the chicken museum, Larson actually depicts some poultry who aren't destined to be eaten by humans, including details like models of saber-toothed chicken ancestors and one chicken checking the museum floor map in confusion. The idea of animals having their own equivalent of a human concept is the same basic idea as in Larson's 'Cow Tools' comic, however with a far more successful execution.

As Larson has explained multiple times, the gag of cow tools is simply the surreal idea of what bovine tools would even look like - something he describes in The Prehistory of The Far Side: A 10th Anniversary Exhibit as an "exercise in silliness." However, when the comic was published, readers didn't get the gag. Countless readers wrote to their local newspapers asking to have the joke explained, but since The Far Side was a syndicated strip, the people they were contacting didn't have any direct connection to Larson and didn't know themselves. The confusion was so widespread that Larson's 'Cow Tools' debacle actually made headlines. Thankfully, the chicken museum pays off the gag in a clearer way,

15 Funniest Far Side Comics Starring Its 'Nerdy Kid' Recurring Character (Including 2 of Gary Larson's All Time Best)

Gary Larson's Far Side didn't officially use recurring characters, but his repeated use of 'the Nerdy Kid' led to some of his best comics.

9 Museums of the Future

In a weird gag, larson kind of predicted the future.

In another gag rooted in surreal equivalence, Larson imagines a futuristic society that looks back on modern technology in the same way we look back at the distant past. Larson pictures everyday technology out on display with cod Latin/Greek names that evoke species of dinosaur. Of course, this being The Far Side , all the names are also puns on what the devices were used for.

While Larson's image of a future museum is funny, it also somewhat predicted how quickly modern gadgets would be replaced and forgotten. While toasters, laundry machines and blenders are still in use, objects like floppy discs actually have fallen out of use and now occupy a strange place in culture - in many cases, the symbol to save a document uses the image of a floppy disc, despite the fact that an increasingly large number of people have never used one. It's therefore not difficult to imagine some version of Larson's comic playing out in the real future.

8 Fossilized Footprint

Larson loves the image of people getting stepped on.

Humans being crushed underfoot by large animals is a bizarre recurring image in Larson's comics, but this is the best version of the gag simply because of the paleontologist's absolute joy at the discovery. It's been said that "comedy equals tragedy plus time," and Larson essentially proves this true, as what should be a tragic image - a person being crushed underfoot by a dinosaur - is a subject of joy for both the scientists and the reader.

Given his love of science and the natural world , it's surprising that Larson would ever think to depict brachiosaurus and homo habilis as existing at the same time. In The Prehistory of The Far Side , Larson admits that despite using the idea so often, he's always felt uneasy about depicting early humans interacting with dinosaurs. Larson writes:

I've always felt that I've committed some heresy by doing cartoons (like the ones above) that mixed dinosaurs with primitive people. I think there should be cartoon confessionals where we could go and say things like, "Father, I have sinned - I have drawn dinosaurs and hominids together in the same cartoon.

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These iconic Gary Larson comics are the cream of the crop from May 1984, with some of The Far Side's most iconic recurring characters.

7 Cub Scout Attire

In another timeline, gary larson is a great horror writer.

There's a thin line between horror and humor, especially since both hinge on turning everyday expectations and rules on their head. While Larson's comic turns the idea of a fossilized T-Rex secretly eating visiting kids into laughs, it's the kind of idea that Stephen King could easily turn into a horror masterpiece (as he's done for subjects as diverse as sentient trucks, cell phones and dancing clowns.) This may be why Stephen King is such a huge fan of The Far Side , naming a comic where a dog shows off its trophy kills as his favorite.

In The Far Side Gallery 2 , King sings the praises of Larson's humor. King particularly praises the cumulative effect of The Far Side 's strips, and the way that their bizarre shared logic creates an alternate way of looking at the world. King writes of Gary Larson, "he does what artists and humorists are supposed to do: he sees what I could see if I could have his eyes. I don't have them, but thank God they are on loan."

6 I Distinctly Yelled 'Second'

Gary larson's #1 obsession returns.

While Gary Larson revisits a lot of themes in The Far Side , his #1 obsession is scientists behaving like little kids. Asked about the frequency of this idea in a 1987 interview with 20/20 , Larson admitted "It's the theme that occurs to me most frequently" while also professing to have a sense of reverence towards real-life scientists.

As funny as the visual of a scientist saddling up a fossilized dinosaur is, Larson's love of language comes through in the verbose way the characters argue over their silly hobby - having one scientist accuse the other of being facetious only enhances the humor of their behavior being so immature.

We Asked You to Vote for Far Side's Funniest Superman Comic & the Winner Is a Perfect Movie Parody

We asked Screen Rant readers to vote on Gary Larson's best Far Side comics starring Superman, and the winner includes an iconic movie reference.

5 Another Skull, Another Fortune

Larson doesn't settle for the easiest version of a joke.

In another gag that could easily be a horror story if it was presented with a different tone, two anthropologists studying human fossil remains keep finding Fortune Cookie-style fortunes when they crack them open. Where Larson rises about his fellow comic strip writers is in sensing that while an anthropologist finding a fortune inside a hominid skull is funny, it's even funnier if we're seeing the second time it happened. A lot of The Far Side 's genius comes from Larson finding a genuinely funny idea, then taking the time to make it even funnier.

4 Chicken Bones

The far side loves making picnics as weird as possible.

Chickens make a grisly return in this goofy comic, where a new 'theory' explains the existence of fossils. One of The Far Side 's lesser-known themes, Larson loves depicting weird picnics, especially if the gag hinges on non-humans doing the most innocent human acts. The Far Side loves to show aliens , monsters and animals enjoying a picnic, sitting at the breakfast table, or arguing over a white picket fence, airdropping the weirdest possible characters into the most mundane situations, then finding the most bizarre way for them to interact.

The Far Side's Gary Larson worried that he was "bucking for a lightning bolt" when it came to these 10 Far Side comics starring the Almighty..

3 Fred and Wilma

Gary larson has it out for the flintstones.

The Far Side 's humor is famously timeless, with Larson only targeting pop culture or celebrities where he knows the references will be just as funny decades later. In this case, two paleontologists dig down through layers of fossils, discovering the remains of the Flintstones' home . It's a great gag that uses Larson's single-panel style to its maximum potential, presenting the funny context in a small box right at the bottom of the image to ensure that you fully take in the scene before discovering the detail that makes it funny.

As much sense as it makes for scientists to discover the town of Bedrock while looking for ancient remains, it does seem like Larson thought it was particularly funny to target the iconic cartoon, as this isn't the only strip where he finds the humor in Fred Flintstone's untimely passing.

War isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, but Gary Larson managed to find Far Side's unique brand of humor in some of civilization's biggest conflicts.

2 Laid Yesterday

Larson tells an entire story in a single panel.

While Gary Larson's comics are always funny, one of his most remarkable skills is telling a complete story in one image. Larson often finds the perfect 'moment' in a narrative to communicate the most information. In The Prehistory of The Far Side , he reveals that he uses short stories and preliminary sketches to decide where in the series of events to set a comic and even which character in it to follow. While The Far Side 's contemporaries had multiple panels to show a story unfolding, Larson had to both narratively and literally fit all the elements into a single image.

In this case - where two paleontologists have discovered an inexplicable surviving dinosaur, mistaking its eggs for fossils - the use of the dino's shadow tells readers exactly what's about to happen next. Larson has a ton of tricks for showing what's going on 'elsewhere' while still only using one panel (for instance, using the foreground or background to add new context), but this might be the best example of how masterfully he can make this split perspective seem totally natural. Few readers will consciously realize how effectively Larson has created space 'off-panel' and how this contributes to the narrative, but everyone who reads the strip instantly benefits from the effect.

One of Gary Larson's The Far Side comics is actually a dig at his editor, who admits the strip "doesn't cast me in the most flattering light."

1 DO NOT TOUCH

One of far side's best comics.

While 'Laid Yesterday' has a great grasp of narrative, it's way easier to imply what's about to happen than to create an incredibly clear sense of what just happened in a reader's mind. This strip creates a whole story about a curious museum-goer deciding to prod a T-Rex fossil only to bring it crashing down, solely by showing the aftermath. Imagining a more traditional comic where the perpetrator looks around in one panel, reaches out in the next, then causes the fossil's destruction shows just how much information Larson packs into a fun, immediately comprehensible gag.

Small touches like the billowing dust and the characters' comically understated reactions create an incredibly specific timeline of what just happened, and the posing of the fossils - utterly destroyed beyond belief, with the skull and leg making it clear what this display used to look like - makes a funny idea brilliant in execution. Larson's style is minimalist , but he never misses a detail that can actually make the joke better - for example, the slightly curled toes of the fossil emphasize the complete, comical destruction in a moment of physical comedy somehow performed by a shattered pile of dinosaur bones.

Those are the 10 funniest Far Side comics that take the millennia-old bones of ancient beings and somehow make them the subjects of brilliant comedy - be sure to vote below and have your say on the best comic on this list .

The Far Side

Which of Gary Larson's Far Side comics about fossils are the funniest?