Yeah, it's another multi-panel toon coming off the drawing board this week.
Four panels worth of trying to make characters look like the same person wearing the same outfit and hairstyle and jewelry from frame to frame without making them utterly static by copying and pasting like some editorial cartoonists who shall remain nameless but you know who they are do.
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| "The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, June 25, 1967 |
There used to be a comic strip in the local Sunday paper when I was growing up, "The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, in which the facial expressions of the characters always appeared to be cut and pasted from some master file of grins and smiles. Looking back on it, one imagines a factory full of junior cartoonists in South Korea or some such gluing bits of the cartoon together every week, a la "The Simpsons" animators.
I don't care to wade through every Sunday strip today, but I'm fairly certain that there were occasions when a everything in an old panel but the dialogue was copied into a new strip (if not the entire strip itself). But compare the last panels of these next two, a month apart:
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| "The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, July 16, 1967 |
The family was the antithesis of much of early comic fare of bickering couples, henpecked husbands, ditsy wives and trouble-making children. Mrs. Berry didn't call Peter a nut every Sunday, but whatever arguments they had, they could laugh all the way through them.
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| "The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, June 18, 1967 |
Yet somehow, their incessant smiling was ... creepy.
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| "The Berrys" by Carl Grubert, October 29, 1967 |
Even in silhouette!
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