On my first visit to the half of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition that is at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, I was accompanied by Ken Wong, the president of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. At one point while we were there we encountered a lecturer giving a group a guided tour of the exhibit. Listening in, it soon became evident to Ken and myself that this woman was in over her head: she may have been knowledgeable about the usual sorts of drawing and painting that one finds in a museum, but not about the sequential art of comics. As they entered the section devoted to Robert Crumb’s work, she told her group. “I haven’t read up on Crumb.” Well, why not? Isn’t that the proper preparation for lecturing about him?

But more importantly, she was describing the artwork on display as single images, missing the point that the essence of comics is visual storytelling through a succession of images. (Of course, Ken and I were animatedly discussing the works on display, and afterwards Ken told me that he noticed that some of the other visitors to the exhibition were listening to us! Well, after all, we know what we’re talking about with regard to comics.)

“Masters of American Comics” undertakes the formidable task of persuading the world of art museum professionals and visitors that comics should be taken seriously as art. This exhibition therefore is meant to teach people a new way to see, to open their eyes to understanding and moire deeply appreciating an artform which they may well have previously underestimated. But the show offers little guidance to visitors, who run the risk of missing the point just as that tour guide did.

There is no audio guide tour for “Masters” at either the Jewish Museum or at the Newark Museum, where the first half of the exhibit is currently housed. At each museum there is a lengthy introductory wall text to the show as a whole, and wall texts that introduce each artist. Labels for the individual works restrict themselves to listing the artist, the means by which the work was created (pencil, or pen and ink, and the like), the source (where the work was originally printed), and the name of the lender. The labels do not identify the characters portrayed, not do they explain the storyline, of which the individual page or strip is an excerpt. More importantly, the labels do not direct the viewer’s attention to any particular aspect of the works; hence, the labels do not inform the viewer why the curators chose to include these particular examples of the artists’ work. And sometimes, as we shall see, the labels are wrong about what they do say.

Picking up where I left off last time in my travel through the Newark Museum’s half of “Masters,” proceeding chronologically through the history of the comic strip, I now come to the first of the Masters whom I have seen in person, the late Milton Caniff (1907-1988), creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. His introductory wall text correctly declares Caniff to be “one of the greatest storytellers ever to work in the comics medium.”

The wall text continues, “Caniff’s characters, in contrast to the predictable behavior of most adventure heroes, had multifaceted personalities. . . .” (This line comes from page 84 of co-curator John Carlin’s text for the Masters of American Comics catalogue, published by Yale University Press.) I think it was comics writer Don McGregor who once observed that Stan Lee did for superhero comic books what Caniff had done three decades earlier for the adventure comic strip. Each man wreaked a revolution through endowing the cardboard character types of adventure melodrama with multidimensional characterization.

But who are Caniff’s characters? Caniff did Terry and the Pirates from 1934 to 1946, and Steve Canyon’s prime was in the late 1940s and 1950s. How many visitors to “Masters” who are under the age of sixty will know what the premise of Terry and the Pirates is, or will even know who Caniff’s most famous creation, the Dragon Lady, who appears in this show, is? Surely museum visitors could better appreciate the Terry and Canyon strips on display if they were given some background information about the series and their characters. There is a reason for the title of my column: comics should be placed in context. But the wall text provides no help in this regard, and Carlin’s text in the catalogue does little better.

On the other hand, journalist Pete Hamill’s essay about Caniff in the catalogue not only clearly explains who Canyon and Terry’s main characters are, but also vividly conjures up the atmosphere of Terry at its height, with mystery, exoticism, danger, and romance. Hamill points to Caniff’s own comparison of his comic strips to the picaresque novels of past centuries: a series of adventures in which supporting characters appear, disappear, and then return, just as people we know may do in our own lives. (Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones are classic examples.) I especially like Hamill’s observation that Caniff’s “women were his finest creations, each distinct, all with sophisticated emotional lives, all exuding erotic possibilities” (p. 232). This is a matter that Carlin himself does not even address.

One of the Terry Sunday strips in the show (November 27, 1940, on pages 82 and 83 in the book), depicts Terry and another character, Dude Hennick, just after they have buried the latter’s girlfriend. This is an impressive work even if one does not know anything about the characters except what this particular Sunday reveals. Later in the book (p. 114) Carlin asserts that “Caniff’s art is compromised by his sentimental themes.” This is unfair. Similarly to the Dick Tracy funeral sequence I described last week, Caniff uses subtlety, indirection, and understatement to evade the traps of superficial, sentimental excess and to simultaneously convey deeper, dramatic emotion. Caniff distances the reader from potential bathos by repeatedly portraying Terry and Dude in long shot, and once even from far overhead. Caniff also repeatedly casts them into deep shadow. This particular Sunday strip is a prime example of what Hamill calls the “dense, impressionistic brushstrokes” (p. 232) to create what Carlin terms the use of “chiaroscuro” (p. 78), meaning the contrast between light and deep shadow. (Though this style, which Caniff’s friend Noel Sickles devised and Caniff perfected, is often called impressionistic, I prefer Carlin’s term, since Impressionism in painting signifies a bright color palette, and not the ominous black areas of Caniff’s artwork.) Even when Dude and Terry are depicted in closeup, Dude shows a stone-faced stoicism, while the younger Terry only subtly betrays his sorrow in his eyes and mouth. Significantly, Dude is in long shot when he looks at the grave for the last time, his emotions unreadable from the panel’s foreground.

In the catalogue Hamill explains that when Dude’s girlfriend, Raven Sherman, was “suddenly, brutally killed,” “her death was unprecedented in comic strips and set off an outbreak of grief among millions of readers.” To continue the analogy with Marvel, Raven’s death was comparable in dramatic impact to the death of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man in 1973. Each woman’s death marked a revolution in adventure melodrama in its particular comics format. Readers expected that the romantic heroine, however much she was endangered, would always be rescued; the deaths of Raven in an adventure comic strip and of Gwen in a superhero comic book dashed those expectations. These stories put readers on notice that happy endings were no longer mandatory. They thus signaled a new level of realism and even demonstrated that adventure comics melodrama could achieve the level of tragedy. But someone previously unfamiliar with Caniff’s Terry would learn none of this from the “Masters” show.

Carlin called his section of his catalogue text about Caniff, “Milton Caniff–Master of Suspense,” giving the cartoonist the same title associated with Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, in both a wall text in the show and in the catalogue (pgs. 84-85), Carlin writes that “Similar to filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, Caniff took an already established medium and broadened its palette in a manner that significantly changed the way subsequent artists have worked. They both introduced depth of field, atmospheric lighting, and novel perspectives or camera angles to suggest dramatic points of view.” The second sentence overstates the case for Hitchcock: it’s true about Hitchcock’s camera angles, but he borrowed his “atmospheric lighting” from the German Expressionist films of the 1920s and 1930s, and the true cinematic innovators regarding depth of field were Orson Welles and Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane (1941). But Carlin’s basic point is correct: as he wrote earlier in the book (p. 78), Caniff “developed the vocabulary of realistic suspense to its classic form.”

Carlin also asserts that, like Hitchcock’s films in their influence on the French New Wave directors of the late 1950s and 1960s, Caniff’s work had a “delayed impact” on what Carlin calls “new wave” comics artists of the 1960s. Carlin claims that “Caniff inspired Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby to create the comic books produced by EC and Marvel, which highlighted the new wave of comics art” (p. 85). This is misleading in numerous ways.

First, Carlin is linking Kurtzman and Kirby to the 1960s. But Kirby started in comics in the late 1930s, and co-created Captain America in 1941, when Caniff’s Terry was in its heyday, and Kurtzman did his innovative EC work in the 1950s, when Steve Canyon was still surging along. I agree that Kurtzman’s war comics and Kirby’s adventure comics show the influence of Caniff’s visual storytelling. Indeed, two daily Canyon strips in the show (August 21 and September 9, 1947, Masters p. 237) feature dynamically staged fight scenes that put me in mind of Kirby action scenes. But was Kurtzman consciously motivated to write his anti-war EC stories in response to Caniff’s gung-ho war sagas? How could Caniff’s work possibly bring about Kurtzman’s creation of MAD? Just how did the comparatively realistic Terry and Canyon inspire Kirby to create Marvel superhero comics? And didn’t Stan Lee have something to do with creating the Marvel superhero comics of the 1960s? In fact, didn’t Lee hire Kirby to collaborate with him on these books?

Another example in the show of the need for context is Caniff’s great Sunday Terry strip for December 29, 1946 (Masters p. 85), which The New York Times ran in its online “slideshow” accompanying art critic Michael Kimmelman’s rave review of “Masters”. Here Terry, the boy hero of the 1930s who has grown up into a military pilot, bids farewell to a woman named Jane, who is leaving for Australia. Except for its first panel, the last two tiers of the strip are free from dialogue. Jane walks away from Terry through the snows of winter (the season of endings), stops, rushes towards him, they embrace and kiss, and then, overwhelmed by emotion, she leaves once more. Caniff’s simple but powerful staging provides a superb lesson in visual storytelling that any viewer, whatever the extent of his or her background in comics, can easily comprehend. The sequence also demonstrates Caniff’s masterful dramatization of emotion. When Jane runs towards Terry, it is in an overhead long shot, distancing the viewer from the characters’ feelings. This makes the impact of the panel showing their passionate embrace, in medium close-up, more powerful. Then Caniff pulls back to a long shot: we can see that Jane has her hand to her face in a gesture of anguish, but we are too far away to see her facial expression. Thus Caniff dramatically evokes emotion, but lets it subside before he runs the risk of falling into sentimental excess. Terry is even further away in the long shot, so his emotions are unreadable. Though literally speaking the reader’s viewpoint is in front of Jane, and Terry is behind her, Caniff has figuratively placed us in Terry’s psychological position: she is leaving both Terry and the reader behind. Jane’s plane takes off, and Terry trudges off through the snow towards the sunset (or sunrise?), in a variation on a standard final shot for ending a film (notably in Chaplin’s work), as he passes a poster for a New Year’s Eve party reading “Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New.” But the mood cast by the farewell scene and by the shadows in the final panel is one of melancholy.

This Sunday strip is powerful just on the level of its literal meaning. But wouldn’t it deepen the museum viewer’s appreciation if he or she were informed by the label that this is also Caniff’s final Terry strip? Terry would be continued by other hands while Caniff went on to create Steve Canyon, a strip he would own. Hence this final Terry is as close as Caniff came to doing metafiction in this realistic strip: the emotion of Terry and Jane’s farewell also represents that of Caniff parting from the Terry strip.

Had the label for this 1946 Sunday strip stated that it was Caniff’s last Terry, perhaps the curators would not have mislabeled two 1947 Canyon dailies in the show as Terry strips. In one of them, Canyon is even called by name! (All Terry and Canyon strips are properly identified in the book.)

Museum visitors are on their own in studying Caniff’s more complex visual storytelling methods in a car chase sequence from the Terry dailies from November 25-30, 1940 (p. 80). But Carlin does a superb job of analyzing the sequence, panel by panel, in the catalogue. I found it rewarding to see what Caniff himself would probably have considered techniques of his craft now being described as the visual strategies of museum-worthy art.

My approach to this sequence is to analyze it in cinematic terms, studying Caniff’s “camera angles,” composition, and “editing” as he shifts from one “shot” to the next. It has been claimed that the “decompressed” storytelling in contemporary comic books is an attempt to make them cinematic. But what is more truly cinematic: the interminable talking heads sequences of current comic books, or Caniff’s mastery of dynamic action, shifts of visual perspective, and his equivalent of rapid editing?

Carlin describes Caniff’s “cinematic” methods, but he also points out design elements in the sequence. Carlin can go too far: he asserts that “The entire sequence is held together obliquely by a thread that runs through it in the form of the serpentine line” (p. 79). But he locates only four examples of this serpentine line in three strips out of the entire six. Moreover, how could the original readers perceive a continuing design element like this running through the sequence when they saw each strip printed a day apart from the next? The technique of a recurring design element makes more sense within the confines of a single installment. For example, in the November 28 strip Carlin points out a white stripe which appears along the bottom of each panel, and finally turns into a road in the final panel. Carlin contends that “The abstract diagonals of car forms, roads, rivers and streams give the strip a strong sense of design that created the suspenseful impact of the story’ (p. 79). I am not persuaded that such design elements created the suspense, rather than the aforementioned more cinematic methods, but they certainly contribute to the beauty of the sequence, and I’m grateful that Carlin points them out. By showing me how to see in as new way, the Masters book is doing its work.

Hamill states in his essay that Caniff’s work was “widely imitated by two generations of cartoonists” (p. 229), in other words, from the 1930s into the 1960s. Yet despite the fact that Caniff, as Carlin says, established the visual vocabulary for action-adventure comics, how aware of Caniff’s work have subsequent artists doing adventure comic books been? I rarely see comic book artists of the last thirty-five years listing Caniff as an influence. My impression is that the work of Alex Toth and Frank Robbins, artists who were unmistakably influenced by Caniff, are more appreciated by comics professionals than by the comics readership at large. (When Bruce Timm mentioned Toth as an influence on stage at this year’s San Diego Con, there was not one clap of recognition from the audience.) If post-1960s comic book artists are influenced by Caniff, it is usually indirectly, through his influence on Kirby, and even Kirby’s influence, once ubiquitous in superhero comics, has drastically diminished in recent years under the growing domination of “decompressed” storytelling and manga.

The saga of the American comic strip comes to a close at the Newark Museum with Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000), the creator of Peanuts. Of all the classic comic strips at the Newark Museum, many of which were quite famous in their heyday, Peanuts is the only one that maintains that level of popularity in the 21st century, thanks to continuing reprints in newspapers, reruns of the classic TV specials, and licensing ranging from greeting cards to Met Life commercials. (I expect that even Popeye is less well known to today’s kids than he was to Baby Boomers; like Looney Tunes, his animated cartoons have been exiled to appearing on Boomerang.)

Schulz’s introductory wall text at the Newark Museum proclaims him to be “the most influential cartoonist of the post-war era.” This is an overstatement, but if the Museum had limited the accolade to the world of American newspaper comic strips, it would unquestionably be true. (In the world of postwar American comic books, Jack Kirby would likely be “the most influential cartoonist.” And somehow I doubt that Schulz was “the most influential cartoonist” for manga; wouldn’t that honor go to Osamu Tezuka?)

In the Masters book Carlin asserts that “By the late 1940s the size and printing quality of newspaper comics diminished dramatically. . . ” (p. 86). This may be somewhat misleading: I can recall that in my early childhood Prince Valiant still took up a full page of a Sunday broadsheet newspaper. But it appears that from the beginning, Schulz labored under sharp restrictions on the size of Peanuts, and usually each daily consisted of four small panels. Carlin states that Schulz utilized the limitation to his advantage, becoming a “master of minimalism.” In his superb essay in the catalogue, Patrick O’Donnell, creator of the comic strip Mutts and a friend of Schulz, perceptively describes each four-panel Peanuts strip as a “graphic haiku” (p. 244).

An example of Peanuts in the show (Sunday, October 13, 1968), the catalogue (p. 245) and the online slideshow may even be Schulz’s joke about people who dislike a minimalist approach to art, including his comics. Linus is drawing a simple picture of a row of trees, but his sister Lucy declares, “That’s not art.” She insists on his adding more and more–a lake, a waterfall, a deer, and a multicolored sunset, making it sound like a vast Hudson River School canvas of the mid-19th century–and then shouts, “That’s art!” with such force that it literally turns Linus the Artist upside down.

In the book Carlin states that Schulz’s “visual minimalism was perfectly in keeping with the style of its times–shoebox skyscrapers, color-field painting, black-and-white TV, early rock ‘n’ roll, and frozen dinners” (p. 88). This seems to me a one-sided view of the 1950s and 1960s, when Peanuts originated and rose to its creative peak. These were also the time of Cinemascope movie epics and unprecedented postwar prosperity for the middle class, permitting them to buy big houses and cars in the suburbs: how does this relate to minimalism? In animation the 1950s were the heyday of the UPA Studio, which pioneered limited animation and preferred strong, stylized, often minimal visual design to attempts at detailed naturalism. In both regards UPA was reacting against the Disney studio. Wouldn’t it make more sense to compare Schulz’s minimalism (in both visual design and characters’ “movement”) to UPA’s? In his essay O’Donnell points out the influence that Segar and Herriman had on Schulz. Is it more likely that Schulz was part of a generational rebellion against the illustrative realism of comic strips by Hal Foster and Alex Raymond (who aren’t in the “Masters” show) and was attempting to recapture the “cartooniness” and simplicity of Krazy Kat and Popeye?

Carlin explains that “the minimalism that defines Peanuts forces its readers to focus on subtle nuances rather than broad actions or sharp transitions. . . . Everything is kept in the same minor key so that the simplest turn of a line can transform a character’s expression. . . ” (p. 88). O’Donnell compares Schulz’s work to Japanese poetry; through the use of the term “minor key,” Carlin likens it to music. Carlin goes on to observe that “by 1960 Schulz went even further by routinely drawing strips that repeated the same image in every panel, with subtle variations. . . .By maintaining the image from frame to frame, Schulz shifts our focus from action to the subtle inner psychology of his characters” (p. 88). (I wish that Carlin did not sometimes substitute the word “frame” for the correct term of “panel.”)

A Sunday strip from August 14, 1960, illustrates Carlin’s points. It presents Lucy, Charlie Brown, and Linus lying atop a small hill, looking upward at the clouds. (It’s a classic triangular composition.) As Linus describes how some clouds “look to me like the map of the British Honduras,“ Charlie Brown raises his head with a deadpan expression, with two dots representing his eyes, that nonetheless subtly indicates his surprise and perhaps puzzlement at what Linus said. (This also may represent a subtle breaking of the fourth wall, since Charlie Brown is effectively looking out at the viewer, perhaps inviting our sympathy for his reaction, as Oliver Hardy used to do after Stan Laurel instigated yet another fine mess.) Charlie Brown puts his head back down in the succeeding panel, But in the next panel, when Linus claims he sees clouds resembling the stoning of St. Stephen and the Apostle Paul, Charlie Brown raises his head again, and this time Schulz drew curved lines next to his eyes, indicating that his surprise and bewilderment have sharply increased. But as Carlin said, this is “inner psychology”: Charlie Brown does not manifest these emotions in action or in dialogue. He turns his head when Lucy asks him what he sees in the clouds. Then, in the last panel, as if returning to the dominant key, Charlie Brown again places his head down, as he calmly delivers the punch line: “Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind.”

This Sunday strip makes an interesting pairing with the previous Sunday strip I described, in which Lucy rejects the simplicity of Linus’s original drawing. But in the second Sunday I don’t get the sense that Schulz is ridiculing Linus’s imaginative interpretation of what he sees in the clouds. Rather, Schulz seems to me to be acknowledging that there can be more to something than a surface interpretation might indicate. Here Linus is again portrayed as an imaginative artist, who sees more and further than the everyman Charlie Brown.

Carlin states that Schulz’s repetition of the same image, with slight variations, “shifts our focus from action” to the characters; “inner psychology.” But one could see how, in less talented hands than Schulz’s, this stratagem could shift the readers’ attention from the visual aspect of the strip to the dialogue, and hence a strip could become a visually inert sequence of talking heads. It seems to me that in this Sunday strip about clouds, Schulz skillfully choreographs the “slight variations” in the image so that the reader focuses on them–on Charlie Brown’s changing head movements and subtly changing facial expression, and the psychological reactions they express–equally as much as on the dialogue. Looking around the room with Peanuts art at the Newark Museum, I was struck by how much Schulz actually has his characters move from panel to panel, in contrast with the conventional wisdom that he basically repeats the same image over and over.

I take issue with the book’s contention that Peanuts always remains in the same “minor key.” Look again at the Sunday in which Lucy critiques Linus’s drawing, in which Schulz quietly builds to the next to last panel, in which Lucy shouts “That’s art!” and Linus suddenly flips head over heels, as if hit by the force of an explosion. Now there’s an abrupt shift into a major key, before Schulz returns in the final panel to calm, as Lucy quietly delivers the anticlimactic punch line: “Sometimes it takes a layman to set these people straight.” Now that I’m writing this, it also reminds me of Caniff’s minimalist treatment of Terry and Jane’s intense emotions in the panels on either side of the panel in which their passions “explode” in their tight embrace.

Then there is a sequence in the Masters book from June 9-13, 1958 (p. 90), set during a baseball game, in which Charlie Brown ends up standing immobile, panel after panel, looking upward, waiting to catch a fly ball. Schulz moves to a close-up as Charlie Brown, with only a dot for an eye and no visible mouth, thinks to himself that if he catches the ball, his team will “win the championship, and I’ll be a hero!” Then in the next panel, he thinks, “If I miss it, I’ll be the goat!” and that curved line appears around his eye, indicating inner stress. In the following panel Charlie Brown tells himself, “I can hear it now. . . ‘Charlie, the goat, Brown!’” Here Schulz moves back to the medium close-up with which he began the daily, showing Violet and Lucy, the two women most likely to call Charlie Brown “the Goat,” and Schulz adds a line to Charlie Brown’s face that indicates a tightly clenched mouth, indicating his growing inner sense of impending disaster.

After this long build-up, the explosion has to take place: the emotions must be released. Inevitably, Charlie Brown, in keeping with his role as the archetypal loser, drops the ball. Lucy immediately bursts into wailing, Schroeder and a visibly upset Patty shout their dismay (in large, bold letters), and in panel three the entire team, their mouths wide open, joins Lucy in a chorus of wailing. There’s nothing minimal about this. Even when Schulz returns to relative calm in the last panel, in which he typically had team manager Charlie Brown understate his reaction in dialogue (“It depresses a manager to see his team cry. . . .”), Schulz drew Charlie Brown looking far more emotional than he did previously in this four strip sequence.

Speaking of E. C. Segar’s influence on Schulz in his essay, O’Donnell says that “Knowing that Popeye could meet Eugene the Jeep and Alice the Goon gave Schulz the freedom to make Snoopy a WWI flying ace” (p. 243). Looking at the Sunday, Feb. 13, 1966 strip in the catalogue (p. 241), in which World War I aerial ace Snoopy makes his way through the French countryside, I thought instead of two other Masters in the show: Winsor McCay and Frank King.

Supposedly, on a literal level, Snoopy is merely fantasizing his adventures as a World War I pilot. But his imagined world is visualized as real: Schulz shows us one of the abandoned trenches, complete with barbed wire, and a sign to Pont-a-Mousson. At one point Schulz shows us Snoopy’s familiar doghouse, which Snoopy, in the midst of his fantasy, calls “a small French farm house.” But once Snoopy goes inside, it really does seem to be a French farm house, with a table, lighted candle, and even a window! In other words, like Nemo entering Slumberland, or Skeezix entering the world of his daydreams, Snoopy is depicted as entering a fantasy world. This obviously is the forerunner of Calvin’s fantasy worlds in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. And the final panel of this Peanuts Sunday shows Snoopy asleep in bed, as if to make the connection with Little Nemo clear.

An even more explicit representative of the artist than Linus in Peanuts is Schroeder, Schulz’s boy virtuoso pianist. Schroeder might even be Schulz’s metaphor, conscious or unconscious, for the cartoonist as artist: Schroeder plays a child’s toy piano, but somehow he can get it to produce Beethoven’s masterworks.

Two strips that pair Schroeder and Snoopy, one from April 27, 1990 in the Newark Museum, and another from September 14, 1986 in the book (p. 93), show Schulz venturing into metacomics territory. In the 1990 strip Schroeder plays his piano, and, as usual, Schulz represents the music by means of upper and lower musical staffs bearing notes. We see the staffs again at Snoopy’s doghouse, where bones replace the notes. Just what is going on here? Does Schulz mean to suggest that Snoopy is imagining his own musical staffs, but that Snoopy is interested not in music but in his own appetite? Hence, Snoopy’s “art” is all about food. Or have the musical staffs somehow become physical objects, on which Snoopy can hang bones as if they were ornaments on a Christmas tree?

In the 1986 strip Snoopy is asleep atop Schroeder’s piano, as Schroeder plays his music, which again is represented by notes on musical staffs. Snoopy awakens and inadvertently places his head between the upper and lower staffs as he yawns. Snoopy then walks off, taking the staffs with him. Schroeder grabs the upper staff, and the lines connecting it to the lower staff stretch like rubber bands. Then Schroeder lets go, and the upper staff snaps back, knocking Snoopy down as the notes fly into the air. Snoopy hangs the notes (some of which are now bent) back on the staffs, which are now quite crooked, places it above the piano, and falls asleep once more, as Schroeder looks at it with a minimalist expression. perhaps denoting a placid sort of wonderment.

In this case the staffs and the notes seem not only to have become solid objects, but have also seemingly lost their original purpose of denoting music. (What would the severely dented notes and staff sound like? Yet Schroeder has stopped playing the piano, so presumably these “signs” have ceased denoting musical sounds.) Schroeder and Snoopy inhabit a world in which one of the visual signs of comics language–musical notes and staffs–are as “real” as they are. Presumably, then, at least in strip installments like these, Snoopy ands Schroeder know they themselves exist in a comic strip. This is a gag that could only be done in the comics medium. It’s as if the word balloons over their heads had physical reality for the comic strip characters, as, actually, sometimes happened in Walt Kelly’s Pogo. (Once Kelly’s turtle, Churchy La Femme, even went around shooting the balloons.)

With Peanuts the Newark Museum’s portion of “Masters” and the show’s history of comic strips come to an end. (Will Eisner’s Sunday Spirit sections not only started before the 1950 debut of Peanuts, but are really more like comic books than newspaper strips.) The implication is that Schulz was the last true “Master of American Comics” who worked in newspaper comic strips. “Masters” co-curator Brian Walker is aware of this implication and expressed his concern in an interview: “I think one of the biggest differences I have from the Spiegelman/Carlin canon is that I don’t really believe that newspaper comics died at some point or that they were completely eclipsed by what is going on now, beginning with underground comics. I still think there are cartoonists doing incredibly creative work in newspapers these days.”

But has there been anyone who started in newspaper comics after Schulz who matched him and many of the other Masters as an innovator in visual storytelling and design? I don’t know that there has been. Still, is it right to give museumgoers the impression that comic strips stopped being a creatively vital artform after the creation of Peanuts?

So, as you shall see next week, the Masters show moves on to the Jewish Museum, the history of American comic books, and even more questionable assumptions about the evolution of the comics medium.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Becker and Mayer has recently published Marvel Classic Heroes, a book written by myself, recounting the history of Captain America, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Wolverine, which comes in a box including statuettes of the aforementioned heroes. Looks to me like the sort of thing that would make a good Christmas present!

My lecture series “1986: The Year That Changed Comics,” finally reaches the high point of that fateful year on Monday, November 13. That’s when I tackle the first six issues of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, starting at 6:30 PM at New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art.

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

Comments: 1 Comment

One Response to “Comics in Context #154: Master Class” jane benn Says: June 25th, 2009 at 1:28 pm your site has giberish in it very hard to read Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Δ