Today on the site it's R.C. Harvey profiling the great Sergio Aragones.
Astonishingly, he draws directly on the paper with a pen, relying upon barely penciled roughs for only the vaguest guidance. And he seldom re-draws anything: “I see the gag in my head and it goes directly to the finished drawing stage.”
Again and again he successfully pulls the same stunt: he presents a puzzle, often building it in a succession of pictures in strip form, and then, in the last picture, he “explains” the puzzle. And we laugh at the ingenuity of the contrivance.
Sometimes though, he draws a picture that is, simply, in-and-of-itself, funny. The people in the picture look funny: Sergio’s typical humanoid begins with a big-nose visage and doodles down through a squat body to the stilt-like legs that seem grafted on at the bottom of the body, all balanced on flat not necessarily large feet. His anatomy is cartoon anatomy, but his cartoony people are doing ordinary human things, and they are being forever fooled and flummoxed by their fellow creatures or by circumstances over which they have absolutely no control. And we laugh at their endless frustrations. And then, a second or so later, we realize that we’re laughing at ourselves.
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