In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

107 Marshall McLuhan “Comics: Mad Vestibule to TV” From Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 164–69. Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuhan, is published by Gingko Press. Copyright © The Estate of Herbert Marshall McLuhan. Used by permission. It was thanks to the print that Dickens became a comic writer. He began as a provider of copy for a popular cartoonist. To consider the comics here, after “The Print,” is to fix attention upon the persistent print-like, and even crude woodcut, characteristics of our twentieth-century comics. It is by no means easy to perceive how the same qualities of print and woodcut could reappear in the mosaic mesh of the TV image. TV is so difficult a subject for literary people that it has to be approached obliquely. From the three million dots per second on TV, the viewer is able to accept, in an iconic grasp, only a few dozen, seventy or so, from which to shape an image. The image thus made is as crude as that of the comics. It is for this reason that the print and the comics provide a useful approach to understanding the TV image, for they offer very little visual information or connected detail. Painters and sculptors however, can easily understand TV, because they sense how very much tactile involvement is needed for the appreciation of plastic art. The structural qualities of the print and woodcut obtain, also, in the cartoon, all of which share a participational and do-it-yourself character that pervades a wide variety of media experiences today. The print is clue to the comic cartoon, just as the cartoon is clue to understanding the TV image. Many a wrinkled teenager recalls his fascination with that pride of the comics, the Yellow Kid of Richard F. Outcault. On first appearance, it was called Hogan’s Alley in the New York Sunday World. It featured a variety of scenes of kids from the tenements, Maggie and Jiggs as children, as it were. This feature sold many papers in 1898 and thereafter. Hearst soon bought it, and began large-scale comic supplements . Comics (as already explained in the chapter on The Print), being low in definition , are a highly participational form of expression, perfectly adapted to the mosaic form of the newspaper. They provide, also, a sense of continuity from one day to the next. The individual news item is very low in information and requires completion or fill-in by the reader, exactly as does the TV image, or the wirephoto. That is the reason why TV hit the comic-book world so hard. It was a real rival, rather than a complement. But TV hit the pictorial ad world even harder, dislodging the sharp and glossy, in favor of the shaggy, the sculptural, and the tactual. Hence the sudden eminence of Mad magazine which offers, merely, a ludicrous and cool replay of the forms of the hot media of photo, radio, and film. Mad is the old print and woodcut image that recurs in various media today. Its type of configuration will come to shape all of the acceptable TV offerings. The biggest casualty of the TV impact was Al Capp’s Li’l Abner. For eighteen years Al Capp had kept Li’l Abner on the verge of matrimony. The sophisticated formula used with his characters was the reverse of that employed by the French novelist Stendhal, who said, “I simply involve my people in the consequences of their own stupidity and then give them brains so they can suffer.” Al Capp, in effect, said, “I simply involve my people in the consequences of their own stupidity and then take away their brains so that they can do nothing about it.” Their inability to help themselves created a sort of parody of all the other suspense comics. Al Capp pushed suspense into absurdity. But readers have long enjoyed the fact that the Dogpatch predicament of helpless ineptitude was a paradigm of the human situation , in general. With the arrival of TV and its iconic mosaic image, the everyday life situations began to seem very square indeed. Al Capp suddenly found that his kind of distortion no longer worked. He felt that Americans had lost their power to laugh at themselves. He was wrong. TV simply involved everybody in everybody more deeply than before. This cool medium, with its mandate of participation in depth, required Capp to refocus the Li’l Abner image. His confusion and...

Share