Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Comic Books vs. Scenery

The smart phone generation catches a lot of flack from older generations for having their heads constantly buried in their handheld devices while trudging about in a zombie-like manner and apparently ignoring the world around them. Fair enough, though there is of course a world of valuable information in your phone as well, for example: photo jpegs from the earliest days of newspapers showing crowds of people with their heads buried in the fine print of the day. Hell, I have photos of me from the 80's with my head buried in my handheld Mattel electronic games. So, let's add another log to the fire with this funny midcentury postcard I found the other day of a kid with his head buried in some comics. Guilty as charged here as well...

3 comments:

top_cat_james said...

The "kid immersed in a comic book during vacation" trope seemed to have been somewhat prevalent in Fifties' pop culture, that it even made it into a Donald Duck cartoon ("Don's Fountain of Youth"), and an episode of Leave it to Beaver ("Happy Weekend").

Mr. Cavin said...

Oh man, somehow I totally missed this one down here when I read the more recent post. Whoops! Glad I rectified that because this is a really neat image. Sure, the content is funny (and I really liked your intro again), but also the color scheme here is kind of unique. They went ahead and printed the usual offset process colors--light, with 25% screens, except for the red car--but then they added that background field of even black dots to the key art, also quarter-tone, darkening everything right back up again. It kind of threw me for a minute, because that's just not normal. But it's a cool effect and it really works well to push the foreground at the viewer.

Neat comic.

Mr. Karswell said...

>somewhat prevalent in Fifties' pop culture

you can include every other decade since as well!

Thanks for the print breakdown on this one, Mr C... it's always interesting to hear howz'they doodit!