Week Three: The Comic Strip (4)

The comic strip I decided to focus on from this week's reading went by the name of "Polly and Her Pals". From the bits that are featured in the collection, It wasn't that easy to figure out why exactly it was named that way, but after some research, I found out that the comic strip was originally centered around a young woman by the name of Polly Perkins, but as time went on it slowly started to shift focus to the people surrounding her, namely her various family members, hence the name change to“Polly and Her Pals”.


I think what stood out the most to me about this comic was the dialogue. All of Polly’s family spoke in a manner that was very informal, with a lot of abbreviated words and eye dialect thrown into the mix, which made for a very interesting, if not slightly confusing, read. I found myself having to go over every speech bubble at least two or three times before I felt like I got a good grasp of what each character was saying. At the same time, I found it kind of refreshing because the dialogue wasn’t as cut and dry as some of the other comics I’ve read. It made it seem more personal and added a bit of flavor to each of the characters. 


I also noticed that the art style often used very graphic and odd shapes when depicting certain things. There’s one strip where the family cat is awoken in the middle of the night by the coughing of one of the family members and almost every door frame and window is some odd, oblong or stretched out form and the staircase leading upstairs is like a wild twisting roller coaster. The first strip featured in the collection is about the father accidentally putting on the wrong pair of glasses. The scene plays out like a cubist's wet dream: everything around him -- the people, the animals, the environment --becomes a warped and distorted version of itself. Between the dialogue and the visuals presented, it's easy to see why this would be such a memorable strip to include in this book.

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