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Thursday, December 2, 2010

Severely damaging the fourth wall

Hi! Today, I'm going to talk about how some comics have been "leaning on the fourth wall". I got the idea from a website.
First off, we have the category of comic strips. In the last week of FoxTrot dailies, it was all about how "some cartoonist" was switching to Sundays only. The most damage to the wall was done in the very last daily, when Roger said "The opportunity to do a comic strip that millions of people read every day is a rare and special privilege. This guy had better thank the newspapers and readers that stuck with him and made it possible. Maybe he'll do something like that in the strip." Andy's reply is
"And break the fourth wall? Not likely."
Also, on Garfield's 25th birthday, Garfield thanked the readers. And in another strip, he "talked" to the reader. Stone Soup also said that you could wear PJ's at Joan and Wally's wedding, and had an invetation in their strip.
There was also a one-week FoxTrot story arc, where an Peter and Jason were wondering how cartoonists do their strip when they're sick, and for each suggestion Peter came up with, it actually happened to him. (e.g. "Did you hear what Dan Quayle saidon Carson last night?" when he said that cartoonists had reserve jokes.) In another strip, Jason was wondering if anything would go wrong with comic strips at Y2K, since so many carttonists used computers with their work, and Peter said "What could go wrong in a comic strip?" As he and Jason suddenly transformed into characters from the early 1900's. There was also a FoxTrot one that involved the Washington Post, but I didn't get it.
In Bloom County, however, there is no fourth wall. All the characters know they're just part of a comic strip. (And yet, Bill and Opus still run for office.) They actually had a strike for bigger strip sizes once.
Now, we have comicbooks. In the DC Universe, before the infamous (at least, to ME) Crisis on Infinite Earths, they have the fourth wall in an interesting way. In their Earth, they're quite real, but, this world is called Earth-Prime, and their dimensional counterparts are just fictional. My favorite Earth-Prime story is When I Flew With Superman! by Curt Swan.
The Marvel Universe in the Silver Age also had an interesting fourth wall. The superheroes were real, but the ones without secret identities had comicbooks about them published, thanks to good ol'Marvel. I'm not sure if the Silver Surfer wanted that to happen or not.
In one Uncle $crooge comicbook, Scrooge McDuck had a bunch of actual Carl Barks paintings, and said he was his favorite artist, and Donald Duck said something like they looked like scenes from nutty children's comics.
And that's how some comics leaned on the fourth wall! Adios!
P.S. Tune in in two posts for my 25th post!

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