If I do, then my right to live is more important than your desire to eat me” ( All Natural Pogo, 1991, p.23).Įdward Shannon attributed to Krazy Kat (1924-1944) a “postmodern denial of truth… that readers of the strip depend on for its meaning” (in ‘That We May Mis-unda-stend Each Udda’: The Rhetoric of Krazy Kat’). We’re all potential food… But that doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to eat me whether I like it or not. Norman Hale pinpointed the thinking of the Pogo gang of animals as: “We all feel the instinctive desire to eat each other, and there’s nothing wrong with feeling it.
Naturalness and natural morality were among the philosophical themes of Walt Kelly’s Pogo (1950-1974). Short to write two very lucrative volumes of theological commentary – The Gospel According to Peanuts (1964) and The Parables of Peanuts (1968). He paid a heavy price for his preaching, as he lost his strip, wealth and marriage, and after a suicide attempt ended up in a mental institution, where he spent the last 20-plus years of his life.Ĭharles Schulz addressed philosophical, theological, and psychological questions aplenty in Peanuts (1950-2000), sparking Robert L. Crosby was very polemical, filling Skippy balloons, and 14 books, with his fulminations on the soul, cosmology, war, art, the church and other topics. Skippy (1925-1945), drawn by Percy Crosby, was a curbside philosopher. Caron in ‘A Call from the Wild: Tigers, Monsters and other Beastly Fantasies’). One observer wrote, “Thus, as Calvin humorously evokes John Calvin’s view of people (as creatures ruled by appetite and living in a brutal natural world) his stuffed tiger at times suggests a comic strip version of natural behavior in the world according to Thomas Hobbes” (James E. Memorable to me are the stances of Popeye (1935-present): “no matter what I yam – I yam what I yam an’ that’s all I yam” or of Beetle Bailey (1950-present): “Whenever the urge to work comes over me, I lie down until it goes away.”Ĭalvin and Hobbes (1985-1995) creator Bill Watterson strove to make his strip philosophical and psychological in tone, the characters’ very names calling to mind 16th Century Protestant reformer John Calvin and 17th Century social philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Gems of philosophy have permeated comics almost from their beginnings. The three areas I’ll survey are: philosophies about life embedded within comics depictions of formalized philosophies in comics and theorists’ and cartoonists’ philosophies about the comics profession. The interrelatedness of comic art to philosophy is both long-lived and far-ranging.
SUBSCRIBE NOW Comics Comics and Philosophy John Lent explores three dimensions of philosophy in 2D comics.
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