Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This project looks at how Bill Watterson’s aesthetics and his employment of the comics apparatus, as well as his advocacy for learning the history of the formal development (and decline) of the newspaper comic strip, influence Calvin and Hobbes’ approach to art, family, education, and other cultural topics. By adapting Thierry Groensteen’s theory of spatio-topia, a term describing comics’ ability to provoke meaning from how graphic, verbal, and structural elements inhabit space and relate to one another within space, I demonstrate how Bill Watterson’s quality as a comics artist comes as much from his ability to activate spatio-topic potentials of comic strips as his much-touted imagination and skill as a draftsman. This theoretical overview provides the background to contextualize the strip’s challenging of the increasing alienation of private life in the late twentieth century, while Watterson’s tendency to reject binary framing of issues and his commitment to the polygraphic tradition of comics and graphic artists invests the strips dealing even with these topics with the semiological pliability necessary to unsettle and provoke.
Date
12-23-2021
Recommended Citation
Mallard, Jack, "See You in the Funny Pages: Forms and Aesthetics of Newspaper Comic Strips in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes" (2021). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 5731.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/5731
Committee Chair
Costello, Brannon
DOI
10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.5731
Included in
American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Other American Studies Commons