The Charm of the Color Funnies: A 2003 Essay From Patrick

In anticipation of the October publication of Patrick’s MUTTS Sunday Funnies Volumes 1 and 2, we unearthed this essay from Patrick sharing his thoughts on creating MUTTS Sunday pages for the newspapers. It was originally published in the 2003 book MUTTS: The Comic Art of Patrick McDonnell.

A cartoonist should stay out of the joke’s way. I continually pare the strip down to what I feel is just the right amount of information. When laying out a Sunday page I’m concerned with pacing and eye movement. How dialogue reads, the placement of word balloons, the positioning of characters — all help to set up the rhythm of the joke, the music of the page. The number of panels and their placement all help to make the story flow.

I am always aware of the overall design of the page. The comic as an entity should be pleasing to the eye with balanced proportions. It is galvanizing to push the boundaries of the layout, but the design should not predominate or interfere in the telling of the story.

There’s not as much room to play in the daily strips. In the past, most dailies had a linear four-panel grid as the basic design. Today, due to space limitations, the three-panel layout seems to work best. This works to the cartoonist’s advantage in that it parallels the classic story structure archetype: beginning, middle, and end. Succinct.

Over the years, the Sunday comics have lost much of their early splendor. Not only have they become smaller in size, their color palette has shrunk, too. Colors have become flat and primary. When I started doing MUTTS, I mistakenly believed that today’s printing process could not reproduce the old, more painterly look. After two years of experimenting with the traditional and time-consuming method of annotating my watercolored Sunday page drawings, I found I could capture some of the color richness of earlier days. This is why I don’t have a life, but it’s worth it. Sunday mornings are like Christmas for me, my first opportunity to see the printed results of my efforts. Living in New Jersey, I am able to pick up newspapers from three states. Each printing is slightly different. Depending on where the comic section is in the print run, the blues could be heavy, the reds might be washed out. On a rare occasion, the entire strip could be off register. It’s the charm of the color funnies.

My Sunday MUTTS has a separate title panel, which is also known as a “throwaway panel” because newspapers have the option to discard it. Most cartoonists use the same title panel every week. This saves time, a valuable commodity in the business. Inspired by the diversity of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat titles, I decided to reinvent the MUTTS title panel each week.

I started with my own imagery, but soon began to create homages to art in its many forms. Most of the images I use in my title panels have personal meaning — paintings, sculpture, folk art, magazine illustrations, children’s books, album covers, advertisements, movie posters, and comics that I’ve absorbed over the years. Ninety-nine percent of the time I write the joke first and then go through my memory bank to find an image that is analogous or gives the story a twist or different perspective.

“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” — Paul Cezanne

These homages add another dimension to MUTTS. These tributes are in part a result of my having been a fan of Frank Zappa. Zappa filled his compositions and his album liner notes with quotations from his musical influences. This was the start of my music education, opening up to me the worlds of classical and jazz. Frank’s sharing of his favorites has inspired me to do the same with mine.

With these title panels I get to revisit art pieces and study them again. It’s a fun exercise and it has taught me a lot. In studying other artists’ use of color, my own color palette has expanded. Trying to recreate the unlimited palette of oil paintings in newspaper print has helped me learn the finer points of getting the most out of the somewhat limited reproduction process.

— Patrick