So Flat, They Should Come With a Spatula: Irony and deadpan in the second dimension
November 22, 2003

Comics don’t have to be mighty fancy in terms of artistic rendering. In fact, it could be said that the essence of good illustration is in the lesser detail; pared-down images that provide the imagination with more scope, more room to breathe. But there’s still the matter of interpreting the text visually in some way, of forging a link between dialogue and character. Or is there?

An unusual but prevalent new trend in comedic cartoons – both strips and animation – plays with the conventions of the medium, opening new avenues to comedy by divorcing words from pictures completely. Recycling old stock graphics, digitizing images into 8-bit abstraction, using blobs and sometimes having no picture at all, these cartoons approach humour the old fashioned way. They acknowledge our most basic expectations, then proceed to ignore or debunk them. It’s ‘shock and awe’ at work: comedians waging war on their audiences.

Eliciting genuine laughter from contemporary crowds is a challenge, given the blasé seen-it-all attitude of youth culture. There’s a constant demand that boundaries be pushed further (see “Green, Tom – cow brain boat sketch”, for more details). These stripped-down comics, with their insistence on viewer interaction and denial of instant gratification through use of extended silences or blankness, force a high level of participation. They’re turning the tide of the ‘entertain me’ attitude back on itself, insisting that the viewer take a hand in their own amusement. There’s often no pictorial change at all from one panel to the next, so the flow of the piece is entirely dependent on the language (or lack thereof) and how the person observing at it decides to piece it together. There’s no concrete terminology for this mode of art, but given the similarity to what is known as ‘deadpan’ (appropriately defined as “an expressionless face”) humour, that is how it will be referred to here.

Capturing the subtleties of Deadpan is difficult at the best of times. Animated cartoons have the advantage of allowing for triggers like intonation and temporal pacing of delivery. ‘Space Ghost: Coast 2 Coast’ and ‘Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law’ (both by Adult Swim) have the same visual characterization, as well as the same slow sense of timing. The opening of SG:C2C is a blank screen with the word “waiting” and a slowly blinking cursor positioned on the screen. This remains for several seconds, preparing the viewer for the open range of spaces that lie ahead, setting the pace. Within the show, monologues and group dialogues trail off or are suddenly distracted and are then punctuated by long silences or periods of manic repetition or sublimely post-modern self-reflexivity from the characters.

This silence allows space, freedom, an opening where the seed of absurdity in the situation has time to germinate. There are characters parading on screen, reacting to modern-day situations, speaking and rehashing modern-day colloquialisms. But they are pulled directly from the stock archives of Hanna Barbera’s work from the fifties and sixties. They even move and sound like their original characters, given only a limited scope they can operate within. The juxtaposition of old and new creates precisely the right atmosphere for hilarity.

The reshaping and revamping now-defunct characters or scenes has a noble comedic lineage. Most notably, Tom Stoppard plays, particularly “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, Woody Allen films such as “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”, and Mystery Science Theatre 2000, the undisputed Master of Remastering old pictures with a new, updated twist.

Returning to the idea of Deadpan in the second dimension, comic strips face the difficulty of presenting the same silence that is so integral to the humour of Space Ghost and Harvey Birdman, but without the dimensionality of time. Time is measured in panels and gutters; a meaningful silence now translates into multiple panels of repeated images with no words in them, or an extra-large gutter might indicate a long pause. This occurs in the work of Max Cannon of ‘Red Meat’, Toronto artists M@B’s ‘Nachos for Sven’ and also in the work of David Rees. Rees, by far the most successful comic artist to attempt to draw comics without ever actually drawing anything, uses old stock graphics of office workers from the eighties to illustrate ‘Get Your War On’, which runs weekly in Rolling Stone magazine.

M. Zole pushes the envelope somewhat further, reducing his ‘visuals’ (and I use the term VERY loosely) to a pair of numbered blobs that engage in witty banter. Chad Walker’s ‘Eggpants’ is a twist on the Deadpan situation, in that there is no written dialogue at all to his story of an egg and its pants, nor are there facial expressions. Simple line drawings of geometric shapes make up the comic, but it’s clear what’s going on between the egg and the pants, and it’s also clear that what’s going on is really funny. Taking it to the max is Mr. Mockery, whose ‘The Guy Who Can’t Draw Comics’ work hinges on the joke that there’s nothing in his panels at all. Eschewing Zole’s visual crutches, Blob1 and Blob2, as they carry out Samuel Becket-style conversations with one another, his characters speak out from a complete void. Blatantly ignoring the existential flavour of this act, he speaks in an interview, saying:

“The purpose of this comic is to make you laugh. It’s a comic. That’s generally what they’re used for. The one different thing you’ve probably noticed about my comic is the complete lack of art. Well, complete lack of art unless you consider boxes and speech bubbles to be “art”. The reason for this is quite simple… I can’t draw.”

So, that’s what it comes down to. For all the perfectly sound academic arguments as to why there’s been a recent explosion of comics with no real drawings, for the most part it’s just a bunch of funny guys who want to write comics, but have no drawing skills.

Comic Strips

1. Max Cannon’s ‘Red Meat’
2. David Rees’ ‘Get Your War On’
3. David Rees’ ‘My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable’
4. David Rees’ ‘My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable’
5. M. Zole’s ‘Death to the Extremist’
6. Chad Walker’s ‘Eggpants’
7. M@B’s ‘Nachos for Sven’
8. Mr. Mockery’s ‘The Guy Who Can’t Draw Comics’
9. Mr. Mockery’s ‘PixelPals’
10. R. Stevens’ ‘Diesel Sweeties’

Animation

1. Adult Swim’s ‘Space Ghost Coast to Coast’
2. Adult Swim’s ‘Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law’