Hergé, Barks, and Edelstien

I'm starting to discover in this class that, in reading a comic, I felt utterly like an adventurous kid again. Hergé made it all too easy with "Explorers on the Moon" and the marvelous escapade that is journeying to an unexplored moon! I was more so surprised upon reading Hergé comic to see the huge and sophisticated vernacular of the character and the dialogue. Most of the comic dialogue took up the top quarter of the page, or even half at some panels because of the density of the words, but I still found all of the material to be fairly digestible. Still, the comic seems to prioritize and utilize the panels to help emphasis the setting and certain actions. The rare action panels or question panels were also pretty helpful to helo fill the silences of characters, as you would see TinTin and the Captain look over in a direction curiously and their dialogue bubble would only read a question mark. Or during a scuffle, the bubbles would be filled with colorful stars and exclamation points. These little symbols easily convey interests or quarrels without a need to describe it at all.

I also have the pleasure of reading Carl Barks's Donald Duck comic, "The Hard Loser." It actually seems pretty in line with how I've seen Donald Duck portrayed in television and film, and has a very heavy reliance on the comedic value at all times as most of the story relied on Donald's competitive nature with his nephews, who are also portrayed as good-willed and idyllic child relatives. It was a very quick comic as well, and I could very well see the strip evolve into a short animation today, but probably with a few tweaks.

The last comic I dived into was the January to February of 1951 edition of "Weird Science." I was only able to read the first section of the comic, "Made of the Future," where Alvin Blank accidentally travels to the year 2150 and brings how a kit that allows you to assemble your own wife. While the stories are truly an indicator of the context within the times, I still found the whole story incredibly entertaining. The trope within the comic also seems to have been something that became vastly explored as humanity looked to the future, and I found the comic to be within the same stylistic vein of "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers" from 1956.