The way Al Jaffee tells it, his daily panel Tall Tales, which started in 1959, went wrong when his editors at the syndicate paper insisted he started adding dialogue to what was essentially a silent panel (in a weird and chalanging shape). This meant he lost most of his foreign sales, which made the panel unrewarding to do. Here is a large selection of Tal Tales panels from the earliest to the last perion. There are text gags in between, but you can really see the change toward the end in 1964.
3 comments:
The non-text gags remind me Sergio Aragonés' marginals in MAD years later. Tha Abrams book collecting some of jaffee's Tall Tales features only the non-text gags (I didn't know there were some with text until seeing this).
In Spain in the late 1950s an art agent came up with the idea of doing a vertical strip. That is to say, instead of having three panels placed horizontally, they were placed vertically, so you read the top panel, went to the one just underneath it and so on. It must've been kind of popular, because at least a half-dozen strips (western, sci-fi, adventure) were done like this and sold all over Europe. However drawing a horse galloping in a vertical format is really hard to do.
It kind of reminds what people film with their cellphones: those narrow (vertical) videos are just so annoying to watch.
These gags work really well on the telephone. Somebody should make an app.
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