Tribute to a poorly drawn dolphin
In 1998 Bill Griffith wrote about the state of the comic strip and it’s fair to say that the creator of Zippy the Pinhead was disappointed at how the centennial artform looked. He says that:
“Comic strips today seem more of a comfort than an artistic statement. They’re there. And, with a mind-numbing regularity, they’ll be there, recycling the same diet jokes and lifestyle gags again and again, day after day. They’re not really meant to be read. They’re meant to be scanned, quickly absorbed and just as quickly forgotten.”
Then he adds that
“Sure, comics are still funny. It’s just that the humor has almost no “nutritional” value. In the tiny space alloted to them, daily strips have all too successfully adapted to their new environment. In this Darwinian set-up, what thrives are simply drawn panels, minimal dialogue, and a lot of head- and -shoulder shots. Anything more complicated is deemed “too hard to read”. A full, rich drawing style is a drawback. Simplicity, even crudity, rules.”
He is talking, of course, about the ever more conservative and risk averse syndicates, about the newspapers restricting the space on the page for each strip. He is talking about competition from TV and video games. But I think he could very well be talking about webcomics and social media. Especially since one of the examples he uses is Dilbert, a newspaper strip which pioneered the use of the web to spread itself out.
In my last video I talked about how the rise of social media and mobile devices flattened webcomics because the strips have to be readable and understandable regardless of context. The kind of strips that don’t have storylines or characters, but branded mascots through which to present relatable situations. I also said that NHOJ is not only an exception, but a proof that even in this environment substantial work can be done.
Of course, most of Cullen’s strips are already more ambitious than the usual comics you’d find on social media. They have more panels, they feature detailed drawings and present style variations appropriate to the gag and subject. But where the strip shines the brightest is when it takes all this ambition and condenses it into the four panel gag cartoon akin to the vast majority of comics you’d see on your Facebook feed. The most recent one started with a poorly drawn dolphin telling the reader to eat fiber so they can poop good.
From then on, every strip with the character becomes more and more experimental and self-reflexive, playing with the reader’s assumptions, especially with those relating to the spatial coherence of the rendered objects. For example, the punchline in the second strip is the dolphin starting to float out of the water showing that it was just half of a dolphin all this time. This comic, all these comics, revert the usual relationship between text and image in humor strips. The script is important, I think it’s very nice that the dolphin encourages the reader and it helps create the impression that you have a character you’re familiar with, so when they arrive at the purely visual punchline, it becomes even more punchy.
But the comic isn’t a narcissistic exercise in metafiction and optical illusions. It’s not self-centered. Instead it transcends the format.
NHOJ in general is informed by the breadth and depth of the comic book medium, and the poorly drawn dolphin series isn’t an exception. In this particular strip where the dolphin advises the reader to try transcending, it wears its influences on its sleeves by aping the style and iconography of three comic book masters whose work was concerned, at least in part, with elevated states of consciousness. There’s Moebius there in the second panel, Steve Ditko in the third and Jack Kirby in the fourth.
Having his feet planted in the history of comic book form, Cullen knows that there aren’t really any firm, unbreakable rules in making art. Rather, there are conventions established between the work and the reader. These are the rules of art. Rules which can be examined, questioned and broken, then new ones established.
One such rule is the way the dolphin is drawn. And the fact that it’s not really poorly drawn. The mascot isn’t a flat caricature of a dolphin. Instead it’s a carefully simplified form that makes sense in 3D space. It can leap out of the page. This is why you can have strips where the gag comes just from circling around the dolphin. Or by drawing the perspective grid used for it. Or by simplifying the character down to primitive forms. And why it’s so incredibly affecting and even terrifying when the flesh peels off the character revealing a clean skeleton or when the dolphin actually appears to be a strange sea snake.
If most humor webcomics are simply delivery mechanisms for jokes, and the drawing is there to hang the words on or to illustrate some hashtag relatable situation, in NHOJ the drawings are the point. The way they function as a comic is the point. It’s a comic that agrees with Bill Griffith when he says that
“Comics is a language. It’s a language most people understand intuitively. If cartoonists use a large and varied “vocabulary” to entertain their readers, those readers will usually come along for the ride. It’s not a problem of the audience’s expectations having been hopelessly lowered, it’s a problem of the cartoonists’ ambitions needing a boost.”
And what a boost it gives.
