Explanations & Comics

I create my comics in hopes that it will make others smile.  Communicating only with a few panels of lighthearted pictures, a short string of words and a twisted idea, a comic is somehow able to translate the essence of a concept without the need for further explanation.

There are methods of sharing experience, insight, feeling and understanding that transcend prose and the written word.  A poem can grasp the spirit of a feeling more absolutely than a long-winded sentence;  a short, simple song can strike at personal chords of the human experience with more focus than could a textual analysis of that music.

Comedy is no different.  I could explain each comic—in fact, I have considered pairing each strip with a short analysis—but I felt it would subtract from the original intent of the comic.  The simplicity of a comic allows the reader to inhale the event in its entirety.  Marrying a comic to its explanation would corrupt the attributes of the comic itself, leaving it crippled with ambiguities and over-explanation.

Fundamentally, the experience a reader of a comic draws is another kind of understanding in itself.  Much in the same way an analytical paper on Walt Whitman drains his poetry of its life, or how a description of an otherwise emotion-evoking Beatles song may scrape at the skeleton but never quite find the meat of significance, so too does a comic communicate to its reader in an wholly different way.

I can’t explain why some of Gary Larson’s strips—images of cows driving cars and chickens dining at restaurants come to mind—are strangely hilarious.  I can’t explain why I find Bill Watterson’s art—images of an imaginative child and his stuffed tiger roaring down a hill on a wagon or building snow fortresses come to mind—a perfect vehicle for social criticisms and wry philosophies.

I can’t explain the work of Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman (Zits), Georges Remi (Tintin), or Scott Adams (Dilbert) because a strong comic communicates its message more effectively than any other medium.  To try to fully explain their significance would be to miss the idea, swinging at a fastball with a golf club.  They are two different sports.  A comic stands alone.