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Herb and Jamaal, 10/4/04

Many people reading this blog no doubt think to themselves, “Josh, why do you always have to hate on Herb and Jamaal? Why be a player hater? When does the hating stop?” I say unto you: today is the day.

One of the great challenges of the comic artists to express a number of non-verbal cues via word balloons, whether that be surprise (see panel three here), a combination of surprise and befuddlement (see last week’s Phantom commentary and the surprisingly erudite community discussion it spawned), or belching. It’s the burping that drew me today’s strip, as you can probably guess. Sure, my friends know me as an Ivy League graduate, urban hipster, and (dare I say it) danged cultural elitist, but they also know that I appreciate a good belch — whether doing it, hearing it, or reading about it in the paper.

Anyway, I’m most intrigued not by the rather pedestrian transliteration of BRAAAPHHH for the main burp, but rather the post-belch noises on the second line of the second panel’s text. Are we to understand these sounds to be secondary and tertiary belches, or do they represent the sort of post-burp glottal events that can follow particularly noisy and satisfying releases of intestinal gas? Only extensive experimentation can resolve the issue, but consider this when planning your preliminary lines of investigation: the typeface shift in the first panel clearly denotes differing volume levels of drinking noises, but everything in the second panel is at a consistent font size, with an absence of punctuation, to boot.

Another phenomenon of note is the collection of bubbles around Herb’s head. (I’m pretty sure that it’s Herb, but there’s a small but non-zero chance that I’m wrong and that it’s actually Jamaal.) Now, normally these would symbolize some sort of chemical (or, in rare cases, romantic) intoxication, but the clearly labeled can of SODA (Hey, kids! You don’t need alcohol to have a good time!) indicates that these little roundels actually represent the expelled CO₂ itself. All and all, its an interesting intersection of chemistry, anatomy, and class conflict that’s still guaranteed to get a laugh out of the all-important 8-to-13-year-old demographic.

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Herb & Jamaal, 9/29/04

It’s move bodies! A real friend helps you move bodies!

I mean, that’s the joke. “A friend is someone who will help you move; a real friend will help you move bodies.”

Seriously, dude. Get it right.

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Panels from Herb and Jamaal, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Shoe, and Doonesbury, 9/10/04

One of the many things about Gary Trudeau that I like is that he’s admitted that, at least initially, he wasn’t very good at drawing. A lot of early Doonesburys consisted of one character sitting in front of the TV for four consecutive identical panels, and while there was a certain pop-art charm to this, I think most people would agree that his strip has improved leaps and bounds since then, especially after his extended early-1980s sabbatical.

Anyway, for me, one of the defining features of modern-era Doonesbury is the “shadow panel,” where the characters are rendered as white against a black background (or vice versa) for a single panel. This is a technique that has spread in one form or another to other comics as well (or maybe it was always there, though Doonesbury is where I noticed it first). It’s kind of arty, and like a lot of art, I don’t have a clue what it’s supposed to mean. I think it’s safe to say that it doesn’t represent a momentary shift in ambient light, or a massive nearby explosion. Sometimes, as in both Herb and Jamaal and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith today, it’s part of a shift in perspective, generally representing something too far away to render details. (Though I should point out that in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, the shadowy characters are not, in fact, too far away to render details; in fact, with their white hands, they look alarmingly like Aunt Jemima figurines.) With the other two, though, we’re looking at the same scene from essentially the same angle, so it’s representing … what, exactly? Time passing? A change in scene? A desire to not draw the same damn details on the same characters for a third time in one day? Anyone who knows more about drawing comics than I do (and Lord knows there must be enough of you out there) should please edify us all.