Paper Assignement#1: Questions of method in cultural analysis of graphic humor
UNIVERSITY OF
MASSACHUSETTS AT AMHERST
DEPARTMENT OF
SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE
Language, Literature
and Culture 597M
Special Topics: Mutations of
Laughter in Comics – dimensions of graphic humor in Brazilian contemporary
visual culture
Prof. Benjamim PICADO
Paper Assignment #1: Questions of Method in
Cultural Analysis of Graphic Humor
Take into consideration the following quotations
from reading items coming from the first part of the course – all concerning
issues related to the prevailing methodological approaches of cultural analysis
of comics, and the importance of considering the textual dimensions that
constitute visual and narrative structures of these formats:
David William Foster, “Principles of text
production”, p. 8
“Thus, the bulk of the essays that have
appeared in the premier issues of Studies in Latin American Popular Culture
fulfil essentially the imperative to identify and describe the varieties of
mass culture in Latin America, to characterize the themes of these
manifestations, and to relate them, if only by implication, to the
transnational enterprise of commercial culture for mass consumptions. Although
the journal´s editors encourage a variety of methodological approaches, the
comprehensiveness of their coverage and their interest in discovering all the ‘details’
of the industry lead inevitably to essays that are more sociological in focus
than oriented towards the ideological and structural principles of text
production.”
Isabela Cosse, “Mafalda: talisman of democracy”,
p. 88
“Quino used Mafalda to push his irony and ingenuity to their limits.
With inferred references, implicit speech, and open endings, his humoristic
strategies played with the increasingly blurred boundaries between the public
and the private, an effect of bourgeois modernity, by throwing light on the
political via the family and vice versa. The comic began to be published in the
newspaper El Mundo. With the demands of daily submissions, Quino added
new child characters, including Susanita (the “housewife”) and Manolito (the
immigrant who aspires to climb the social ladder). Tapping into different
social stereotypes made the story line more complex”.
Ian Gordon, “Comic strips as culture”, p. 81,82.
“One of the advantages of comic strip style was that it allowed
advertisers to create graphic narratives, through the sequential panels that demonstrated
visually the supposed benefits og using their products. Through these images,
advertisers attributed therapeutic value to their products, and a product´s ‘image’
became less the way it looked and more the intangible qualities it was thought
to embody. Also, by incorporating text into graphics through the use of word balloons,
the comic strip transformed advertising copy from salesmanship in print to
seemingly disinterested commentary or testimonial. More important, the use of
comic art in advertising strengthened the links between leisure, entertainment,
and consumption”.
Donald Crafton, “Graphic humor and early cinema”, p. 225,226.
“For the comic artist, dividing the page into panels was not a
decorative effect but an essential narrative device. The represented action is
divided into its significant moments. Each panel is a successive step in the
story, demarcating where one narrative element ends and another begins. A
problem arises when the artist wishes to denote the passage of time. One
convention that was popular in the nineteenth century (and that survives in ‘Doonesbury’)
was repeated panels, as in one through three in Cohl’s comic ‘On Fire’, which
indicated that little was happening – dead time in the narrative”.
Now, pay attention to these instances of the
graphic works of Brazilian cartoonist Ziraldo, and his character “Jeremias, the
good one”:
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