Connecting Dots is a monthly column by writer Amy Cowen, inspired by her popular Substack, Illustrated Life. Each month, she’ll introduce a new creative postcard prompt. So grab your supplies and update your mailing list! Play along and tag @print_mag and #postcardprompts on Instagram.
I think comics are something like folk art — sometimes breathtakingly kitschy, sometimes kooky and charming, and once in a while, as interesting and significant as any fine art.
Bill Watterson
Remember rolling and kneading and stretching Silly Putty and then pressing it to a newspaper comic? After pressing as hard as you could, you would peel it off to see if you had transferred a clear copy of the comic onto the stretchy, flesh-colored polymer. The impermanence didn’t matter. These weren’t for keeps. We knew things didn’t last. We drew with Etch A Sketch, where lines disappeared with a shake. We drew beards on Wooly Willy, moving iron shavings into place with a magnetic pen. We drew on an infinitely erasable Magic Slate. Just lift the translucent top layer, and everything disappeared.
Having captured a comic with Silly Putty, we would roll and stretch the putty, the comic lines twisting and warping and thinning, something reminiscent of De Kooning, until they disappeared, absorbed. We might choose another comic and repeat the process. Black and white was fine, but the pastels of the Sunday comics pressed into Silly Putty were magical.
The Sunday comics were the coveted highlight of the weekend paper.
Dennis the Menace. Nancy. Beetle Bailey. The Peanuts. The Family Circus. Cathy. Doonesbury. The Far Side. Dilbert. Blondie (and Dagwood). B. C. Hagar the Horrible. Garfield. So many characters marched in panels across the paper each week.
I was probably a kid when I read or saw most of these comics. My grandparents always read the Sunday paper, and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. I have so little concrete memory, but when I think of the comics, the “funny pages,” I think of my grandfather and Beetle Bailey and Dennis the Menace and The Family Circle. The whole memory is washed in yellows, blues, and greens, with maybe a splash of red. Hagar and B.C. are there.12 It’s a watery impression, one that comes with the crinkle of the pages being opened, folded, and unfolded.
Never Too Old
Had I been born a decade later, I might have discovered Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes earlier than I did. I was a parent before I ran into Calvin and his tiger, but the timing was somehow perfect, somehow serendipitous. The strip, which we read in bound collections, the equivalent of binge-watching a show today, was relatable and smart, a winning combination of whimsy, philosophy, and magical thinking.
So often, the story of a strip, perfectly captured things that happened in our own house. Calvin’s thoughts on learning to ride a bicycle were particularly apt and to this day remain a source of shared humor with my non-biking kids.
Is Hobbes real? Is he a stuffed animal?
Does it matter?
Not knowing is part of the charm of many comics.
If you go into a comic with a willing suspension of disbelief, you don’t have to sort out the details. Did you really think Snoopy was an ace pilot and proficient with a typewriter?
My kids didn’t grow up with the funny pages. But they did grow up with a love of sequential art.
They were manga kids. They read Yu-gi-oh!, Pokémon, One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Death Note, Fairy Tale, and so many others. One of our favorite shared reads was the Bakuman series about two teens who become successful manga artists. We read lots of US graphic novels, too. I have no idea how many times my oldest read Jeff Smith’s Bone series. While they weren’t much on traditional comic books or classic superheroes, we still have a collection of Sonic comics.
Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac. Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (and subsequent graphic novels, Fun Home and Are You My Mother?). Lynda Barry. Roz Chast. Julia Wertz. Nicole Georges. Raina Telgemeier. Maggie Thrash. Julie Doucet. Marjane Satrapi. Kristen Radtke. Tillie Waldman. Will Eisner. Art Spiegelman. Emil Harris. Lucy Knisley. Tom Hart. So many more names go on this list of contemporary comic artists, illustrators, and graphic novelists.
Beyond Funny
These days, comics aren’t necessarily comic at all. The classic funny pages may deliver punchlines and sardonic one-liners, stories contained, start to finish, in a few panels, the completion of a thought, but when they morph into graphic novels, the rules fall away in terms of subject matter, tone, continuity, depth, and intent.
Especially as a conduit for personal story and memoir, sequential art fascinates me as a form and container. I have read about bipolar disorder and eating disorders and cancer and ALS and a range of other medical conditions. I’ve read about loneliness, motherhood, teenage angst, queer identity, and being trans. I’ve read about babysitters and roller derby, ice skaters, women’s soccer, and ballerinas. I discovered Route 66 and the iconic Chicken Boy. I’ve read about artists and writers and poets and thinkers. I lost myself in the wonderful Lumberjanes series during the pandemic, and last year I raced through the Hilda books by Luke Pearson.
Your Newspaper Comics Connection
The comics were the extent of sequential art when I was growing up, but, like Silly Putty, the funny pages are, for most, a thing of the past.
What is your history with early sequential art and the funny pages? Do you have memories of comic strips in the newspaper when you were growing up?
This month pay tribute to newspaper comics. If you don’t remember specific examples, you might look up the strips that were popular when you were a child or in high school or college. Maybe there are characters that are so archetypal that they instantly come to mind when you think about comic strips. (There are lots of others beyond Peanuts.)
Share some comic strip nostalgia on your postcard. You might write about your memory of comics. You might draw something from one of the strips that you admire or that you associate with your childhood. You might draw your own character or the character that you think you would be if suddenly you inhabited a few panels a day. You might tell a story in one, three, or four panels.
Maybe you do a Lynda Barry exercise from Syllabus or Making Comics. Maybe you do something inspired by Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning. Maybe you do a talking-head explainer, a la Scott McCloud. Maybe you want to capture the way you remember the palette. Maybe you remember something specific about reading the comics in your house. The prompt may be a gateway to something else.
The theme is “the comics.” You may find that that leads you down a different path of memory or color or line. Go there. I have newspaper comics in mind this month, but if your memories are tied to comic books, do that. It’s your postcard and your personal connection to sequential art that matters.3
This month, send a comic panel with a message.
I love the unpretentiousness of cartoons. If you sat down and wrote a two hundred page book called My Big Thoughts on Life, no one would read it. But if you stick those same thoughts in a comic strip and wrap them in a little joke that takes five seconds to read, now you’re talking to millions.
Bill Watterson
Explore Making Sequential Art
These are all classic picks for building skill with sequential or comic art, exploring the form, and even integrating more playful drawing into your journaling and illustrated journaling practices:
Syllabus and/or Making Comics by Lynda Barry
Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics by Scott McCloud
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice and Comics: Easy as ABC: The Essential Guide to Comics for Kids by Ivan Brunetti
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative by Will Eisner
For those interested in Calvin and Hobbes, there are lots of volumes available, but Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue contains an introduction that is really worth reading.
Read More
This month’s prompt is really about newspaper comics, but I read a lot of graphic novels, and I have mentioned several here at Illustrated Life in the last year:
Look Again by Elizabeth Trembley
Notes from a Sickbed by Tessa Brunton and Time Zone J by Julie Doucet
Before They Were Authors: Famous Writers As Kids and Before They Were Artists: Famous Illustrators As Kids
Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies by Léonie Bischoff (translated by Jenna Allen)
Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars (Rick Louis and Lara Antal)
(Note: The list above isn’t representative of favorites, although these are all great reads. These are titles I have talked about in posts at Illustrated Life specifically.)
A Year of Postcard Connections
This is number seven in a year-long series of monthly postcard prompts, prompts that nudge you to write or make art on a postcard and send it out into the world, to connect with someone using a simple rectangle of paper that is let loose in the mail system. You can start this month! Feel free to jump in and make and send your own postcard art.
I have to believe I had a problem with Blondie, but I see Dagwood peering from somewhere, part of my mental image of the funny pages at the time. ↩︎I thought a lot about the palette of the Sunday comics in my memory. I would like to pull samples of comics from the 70s and 80s and generate some palettes to see where they fall. In doing some preliminary research on comic strip palettes, I found a number of interesting posts and examples, including “Coloring the Sunday Comics” by Jim Keefe. I also found this about cartoons (animated), which is interesting. ↩︎If you are too young for the idea of newspaper comics to have any resonance, go with the sequential art that you are most familiar with or most enjoy. ↩︎
Amy Cowen is a San Francisco-based writer. A version of this was originally posted on her Substack, Illustrated Life, where she writes about illustrated journals, diary comics/graphic novels, memory, gratitude, loss, and the balancing force of creative habit.
Header image: assorted postcards, including postcards received from readers, courtesy of the author. ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.
Note from the author: Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.
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