Exhibits and Design, Part III

This is the final planned post about the Schulz Museum, and this time, it’s going to cover the “Language of Lines” exhibit itself. At first glance, the exhibit doesn’t seem entirely exciting. The vast majority of the pieces are black and white comic strips. It takes a long time to go through and read them all, and that’s only if you have either patience or interest in the pieces. However it becomes interesting when the mission of the collection becomes clear; that these pieces were chosen to somehow represent the great variety of characters that have been produced in the last century of cartooning.

The panels strips on the walls range in dates from the 1920’s to cartoonists currently in syndication. The exhibit compares strips which only have a handful of characters ever shown, such as Calvin and Hobbes, to strips like Doonesbury which have an immense number of characters. It shows different relationships common among characters; often they’re part of a single family, or work at the same office, or are part of any sort of community which has to go through daily life together. The exhibit does a good job showing how much cartoonists need to think about their characters. It takes a lot of work to design characters that both have their own individual personalities yet are universally identifiable.

Interestingly enough, cartoonists have been so consistently good at this character design that the comics from the 1920’s can appeal to the viewer just as strongly as the modern ones. They’re still funny. Considering how much culture has changed through the decades, that’s quite an achievement. The true test of a cartoonist’s good design isn’t just whether or not their characters are universally identifiable among all the readers, but whether or not they are universally identifiable through time as well.