The Far Side from Comics?

If it is just one image, is it a comic? Scott McCloud, a famous cartoonist and comic scholar, says no. He expels single panel works, for instance comics found in the New Yorker or works akin to The Far Side. But is this fair? Perhaps under the strict definitions of sequential art…

“Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Is this the best definition? Probably not, but it isn’t half bad either. But the key word in the definition is “juxtaposed” In The Far Side, the images are not juxtaposed because there is only one image. Lets look at this comic for example.

Here we see a single panel (at first, we will exclude the captain at the bottom from our reading), with dogs running around, repeatedly exclaiming, “Hey!” In the foreground, we have a man who appears to be a scientist wearing some sort of electrical contraption on his head. As is, we could make a variety of guesses as to what’s going on. Is his contraption making the dogs go wild? Perhaps it is emitting a particular pitch much like a dog whistle. I won’t try to sustain this mystery any longer, because I didn’t photoshop the image to exclude the caption, so you probably already know what is going on.

But with the added caption, we now know that the scientist is listening to what the dogs are saying and I think he is less than ecstatic to hear the mundane word repeated non-stop.

So the caption is critical in the understanding of the comic, yet it’s still not a comic to McCloud’s definition. However, we know for a fact that The Far Side is one of most celebrated comic strips ever, only sitting behind the likes of Peanuts, Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes.

I propose that the caption is an image in and of itself. Sure, it isn’t pictorial (I suppose you can go into a lengthy debate of why it is, but I won’t do that here for I am unprepared for such a task), but it juxtaposes with the panel perfectly, not only explaining the panel itself, but also adding depth to the emerging form created by the unification of words and pictures. From the caption, we get a glimpse of the past, when the scientist was excitedly building this contraption and the caption along with the picture tells us of the present.

In other words, the caption adds such a unique depth to the singular panel, that it’s hard to suggest this isn’t a comic. Perhaps you can compare this to a photograph with a caption explaining the photograph. But it isn’t, for there are speech bubbles and the specific use of the word “hey” is absolutely crucial to the joke. You are never going to convince me that you can see speech bubbles floating above dogs in un-tampered photographs.

It’s strange to me that McCloud feels the need to define a comic in such a fashion. Perhaps the most critical medium it needs to differentiate itself from is the storyboard, but this definition doesn’t exactly do that, for the differences between those two mediums is far subtler.

To me, comics have always been a very fluid medium. Web comics have incorporated moving images or scrolling effects. Perhaps this definition doesn’t work, for it seems to exclude the masters of the simplest of comic forms – the one panel punch line.