Something about Classic ID and Classic Dilbert, should you find them on the Web. The drawing are sketchier, but the humor is edgier.
Compare the king in an old strip:
Something similar happened to Dilbert. Originally, he (and the pointy-haired boss) looked like
That is, he had a longer head, an iconic curled tie, and when standing was tall with long legs. PHB was short out of proportion, not much skull. In the earliest strips, he was even sketchier. Now they look like this:
Now they are the same height, Dilbert's head has become shorter, the boss' head has become normally proportioned, the pointy hair is more stylized. And no one wears ties anymore. The strip had been trending toward cartoons over caricatures. We seldom see anymore Bob the Dinosaur that lives in his basement or even the genius garbage collector and the other outre characters that once inhabited the strip.
There is only one thing that can account for these differences: the Theory of Comic Change.
Garfield went through three major periods of evolution. Early Garfield was a big fat lump, 80's Garfield remained fat and catlike but wasn't as lumpy, and modern Garfield barely looks fat except for a roundish belly.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Davis doesn't write or draw the strip anymore; he has mooks who do that bourgeoise stuff for him, which is why modern Garfield is basically terrible, especially when compared to it's actually very funny heyday in the 80's.
Early Dilbert comics were surreal, man.
Scott Adams also has mooks.
DeleteAnd early Garfield was also the most catlike, and probably the funniest.
I don't know where this leaves Homer Simpson, who appears to have appeared in Iceland in the 1950s:
ReplyDeletehttp://flashbak.com/did-homer-simpson-make-his-debut-in-this-icelandic-comic-14584/
Thanks! I enjoy history.
ReplyDelete