Schulz, Charles M. (1950) Peanuts. (October 5th)
Before writing Laugther: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, somebody should have told Bergson that one of the best ways to kill humor is trying to explain why a gag is funny. However, from the point of view of the comic-strip artist it is sometimes useful to understand why some things make us laugh more than others. Take this Peanuts strip, actually the fourth Charles Schulz drew. It’s a rainy day and Patty forgot her umbrella at home. She crosses her path with Shermy and “borrows” an umbrella from him. We should admit there’s nothing funny about the situation. We could even say it’s a good deal misogynistic by today’s standards. And yet, it’s one of the most hilarious strips Schulz published. We can find in this strip a classic instance of what Benoît Peeters called a “phantom panel”: an action that is not represented but is implied by the concatenation of two panels; that is, the elision of an image followed by an invitation to recreate that image in your mind (Peeters, 1998: 40). In order to explain this concept, Peeters uses a sequence from Tintin in Tibet that speaks for itself:
Hergé (1960) Tintin in Tibet (Paris: Casterman, p.9)
When we see the airhostess sticking plasters in Captain Haddock’s face, we understand in that exact moment he fell to the ground while Tintin was shouting at him, which is far more ingenious than actually showing the fall. The comic effect is based on metonymy: instead of showing the cause of the action (the fall), Hergé shows the effect of the action (the bruises on Haddock’s face). The reader completes the sequence by means of a simple deduction.
Schulz uses a variant of this technique, ten years before Tintin in Tibet. But what makes Schulz strip especially funny is that he complicates the process of deduction by delaying it. Our understanding of the sequence is not as immediate as Herge’s. In the third panel we see Patty with the umbrella, which is the equivalent of Captain Haddock being attended by the airhostess, but when we see Patty’s image we are left with the question: “why does Patty suddenly have an umbrella?” This question lingers in our mind until we read the last panel. Schulz had the ability to make the reader pose that question and then spend some time (maybe a second or a fraction of a second) to imagine the answer before being given the solution in the last panel. Delay becomes a means of creating mystery. Mystery becomes an invitation to use imagination. And what’s humor without mystery and imagination?
REFERENCES
Peeters, B. (1998) Lire la bande desinée (Paris: Flammarion)
Hergé. (1960) Tintin in Tibet (Paris: Casterman)
Thank you Roberto for inaugurating the blog with such a great post. What I also find incredible is the symmetry, rhtyhm and tempo of the piece: four panels, two characters, each appearing twice in alternating panels. The words in the speech balloons are also four: “rain, rain, rain, rain…” Each pair of panels and each character are also opposed to each other like mirror images of themselves.
The strip seems to me poetic not unlike an American haiku. Think of this one by Jack Kerouac:
The taste
of rain
—Why kneel?
Whilst Kerouac’s stanza is of three lines, there is in my view a similar sense of structure and closure, and the repeated use of two words in each line (though the punctuation would augment the character count to four in the last one) contributes to a regular pace– like walking, or alternating between drums, or the drumming of rain on the pavement.
If the “phantom panel” (the “invisibility” described by McCloud) works through metonymy, the last panel also performs an anaphoric function by repeating, inverted or in reverse, the dialogue we started with.
Simultaneously, unlike Kerouac’s haiku, Schulz’s strip can be read left to right (as most of us in the West would undeniably read it) or right to left: depending on the order of reading, the “villain” would be either the girl (left to right) or the boy (right to left).
Logically, the second option would impose a chronological rupture that would be completely inverosimile in a synchronous medium such as film or animation, but somehow the horizontal panel sequence, the gutter between the panels and the parallel girl-boy-girl-boy structure could , if we are willing to engage in a poetic suspension of disbelief, allow for her to appear again in the boy’s direction. The double two-panel structure with alternating characters produces this “folding” event, not unlike a moebius strip representing the infinite (cfr. this example by Jim Woodring!)
Now, imagine if we could not read this strip on single visual “blow”. Say, we are reading it panel by panel on a mobile device. Unless the slideshow allowed for infinite looping in either direction, a standard interpretation would impose the normative, Western Left to Right reading, in which the girl (generally always more cruel than the boy in the Peanuts fictional universe) is the one “borrowing” the umbrella.
Hey Comics Grid folks, congratulations on going live. Really looking forward to seeing what you come up with here (I’m very new to comics criticism, but a long time reader looking to learn a little (a lot) more, so I hope you can guide me!).
To display my naivete further I’ll say what I thought went on in the missing panel: not a bust up, but a romance, of sorts. If I remove my knowledge of the characters (and maybe this is right; as it’s only the 4th Peanuts strip had the character dynamics been set up at this stage?) what makes this funny to me isn’t the sight gag of a *stolen* umbrella, but the real world humour of one given away freely and then almost immediately regretted. When I was 14 I was forever giving away umbrellas, jumpers, and book-saving plastic bags on rainy days to a girl who I thought might, maybe, want to spend some more time with the guy who was a bit more thoughtful than the rest. Not the most sophisticated romancing I grant you, but the strip takes me right back to that walk home, soaked, and wondering “why the hell did I do *that* again?”
The middle panel, the phantom panel, in my mind looks like a combination of the published panels 2 & 3, but reversed so those smiles face each other. The umbrella is passed between them. They go on their way.
Whichever way you read the space though it’s a great strip, thanks for posting.
_m
cryurchin: Maybe one of the reasons this Schultz strip is so good, is because of the manner it allows to project not only your interpretations but also your chilhdood experiences in it, which is what you just did. After reading what you’ve written I can’t help but make the same interpretation you did: Shermy’s face is saying “I did it again”, it’s not her who took the umbrella off his hands, but him who let her take it.
Ernesto: I hadn’t thought that this strip works like a haiku, but it’s true. Haikus always have that point of rupture, of ungrammaticality, that makes the reader “fill in the blank” to make them cohere. The gutter between the second and the third verse in Kerouac’s haiku is the equivalent of the gutter between panels two and three.
The repetitions and the symmetrical qualities of the strip could be the theme of another post. There’re lots of interesting stuff inside this strip. I always use it in class to explain my students what’s a “visual metonymy” and, strangely, there’re always two or three people in the class who “don’t understand what’s going on in the strip”. They just see a boy and a girl walking in opposite directions, but cannot understand why the girl suddenly appears with an umbrella in her hands! I suppose this strip is difficult to read to some people who don’t usually read comics because of the heavy symmetry: they are not accustomed to heavy symmetrical strips such as this one, they percieve the strip as a whole and they feel at a loss when they try to process it panel by panel.
I don’t see the misogyny of the Peanuts strip.
Well, maybe “misogyny” is not the proper term for this strip; but I think it’s not such an innapropriate word to describe Schulz’s general attitude towards women. Or we could just say he had “an old-fashioned attitute towards gender roles” although it would be an euphemism… A simple fact: girls in Peanuts are far more cruel than boys (and this strip is a symptom of it), because that was just the way Schulz thought women are. I’m not criticising him, I’m just saying: “Well, just remember, it’s the fifties…”
So interesting what you are all saying…
I hadn’t thought about reading it from right to left (even though my Diss is about non-linear reading! Hahahahaha!) and it totally changes the story! That is one of the things I love about this medium – the possibility of inverting the reading, of taking different paths, as in a diagramme. Ok, palindromes are not unique of comics but the page layout or mise-en-page is something I consider very unique of comics because, as Chris Ware said in an interview (I think it was with Daniel Raeburn, but I may totally misremember…) in comics you can read the strip bit by bit or you can take the page as a whole, as you would look at a building. In this strip, the first impression when you look at it as a whole, is that there is something kind of missing, because you just see a girl, a boy, rain and something about an umbrella, but you don’t get the story. It forces you to pay more attention and to read closer. It is at this point when you find the “phantom panel” and after you have realized that there was something “missing”, then you take a look at it as a whole and discover how great it is.
As cryurchin and Roberto were saying, one of the best things about Peanuts is how it brings back memories of childhood. I always loved Schultz’s strips because they didn’t portray childhood as that kind of heavenly land when we were all innocent, happy and nice to each other. Peanuts, with its ironic and sometimes sarcastic humor, actually helped me realize that (my) childhood didn’t HAVE TO be as happy as it is usually portrayed. For me, Charlie Brown’s strips are a relief…
And about the misoginy Roberto mentioned, I totally agree that Schultz oozed a certain bitterness towards women. It is not only that “it’s the fifties” but it is also kind of personal. And I love it! Hahahahaha!
Excellent comparative comics analysis! This reminded me of a seminar we had at Birkbeck a couple of weeks ago organised by the Spatial Theory group at which we read an article by Dr. Jason Dittmer, a cultural geographer at UCL. Generously, Jason attended so we managed to quiz him on his ideas on comics visualities. Basically Jason used Groensteen’s ideas supplemented with notions of a constituted readership to contrast a Captain Britain comic with Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan – I recommend people track the piece down as it is probably too complicated to summarise in a comments post as it incorporates arguments on emergent causality and under-determination.
He reiterates th importance of the gutter as a topological connection between panels but as non-representational: so, “the gutters should be thought of as an anti-optical void – there is no story to reconstitute in that space, no missing images, only a relationship to be formed in the reader’s mind”, which means that “the sequence of images is not meant to be literalist, it is up to the reader to stitch them together into a meaningful narrative via the topology of images and absences.” (p. 230). I was reminded of this when Roberto mentioned visual metonymy. The full reference for the article is:
Jason Dittmer, “Comic book visualities: a methodological manifesto on geography, montage and narration”, in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (2), 2010, 222-236.
I have the pdf I can mail if anyone is interested, and am sure that Jason would be up for contributing to the Grid.
The term “invisible panel”, used to described what happens in the gutter, was coined by Benoît Peeters, I think, because he found several people who compulsively affirmed they REMEMBERED seeing Captain Haddock’s fall in that sequence I included in my post. When I read about that I thought it was an interesting phenomenon, but after seeing many other examples of sequences with “invisible panels” I doubt that there is any image to fill in. Maybe it’s more like Dr. Dittmer says, what the reader does is to make the causal connection between panels, deduct the meaning, but without the need of providing a mental image of what happens in the gutter. I think there’s a similar theory to explain what happens when, in a movie, the spectator sees a shot of a person talking, and then the reverse shot of another person talking: the spectator understands, by means of a quick causal/metonymic connection, that they are in the same space and that they are talking to each other, even if you don’t see the two of them in the same shot. I think this is called the theory of “suture”, by Jean-Pierre Oudart.
I’d love to have that article by Jason Dittmer.
Something else that Jason touches on is the contrast between comic book and cinematic visualities. We live in a visually dominated culture, characterised (he argues) by (borrowing a term from Benjamin) an “optical unconscious”, a tendency to reconstruct our experiences via cinematic metaphor: focusing/panning/zooming/slow motion etc. Comic visualities offer (potentially) opportunities for more plurivectoral narration and montage. Anyway, here’s a dropbox link to the article for anyone interested:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10461538/comicvisualities%5B1%5D.pdf
Still struggling with emergent causality though…
Thank you for sharing the article, Tony. Will read and come back…!
Un artículo magnífico, a la altura de una tira espectacular. “Delay becomes a means of creating mystery, Mystery becomes an invitation to use imagination. And what’s humor without mystery and imagination?” A esto lo llamo yo saber rematar un post. Hats off!
Children, how many times did I tell you not to speak Spanish in class!!?? Thank you for your kind words about our inaugural post. It encourages
me. I have to present a paper about Charlie Brown in Manchester next Tuesday and I’m a little bit nervous about it. So happy to have you
here, Moderator!