Gosh, seems like the Guardian is constantly getting a mention these days for comics-friendly content – today Matthew Badham’s better half pointed us in the direction of this article by comedian Phil Jupitus, which touches on themes covered in his recent BBC Radio programme (which can still be played on the listen again feature for a few more days), about how he was introduced to the newspaper comic strip and what he thought of them as he got older, and getting to meet two great newspaper cartoonists from either side of the Atlantic, namely Steve Bell and Gary Trudeau (and in the radio show, meeting Bill Griffith, who inspired Jupitus to try his own hand at cartooning):
“When you’re a long-term fan of sequential narrative art (as they call it nowadays), the many layers begin to reveal themselves. Newspaper comic strips have to work on several levels. First, they have to appeal to the passing consumer: one day, one gag. Then the story needs to work across the week, to follow the narrative arc for regular daily readers. Over those six days, you can work in recall jokes, or build up the comedic tension to a Saturday morning crescendo. And then the whole thing – characters and story – has to make sense year on year for the real, obsessive fans. It’s a complicated beast.”
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