the death of the parallel narrative

bah i shd have voted for rupert - above is i think one of his stories set in HAIPHONG HARBOUR!! (that is where sailor sam always takes him!)

I liked the super-bold one line explaination for what was happening at the very bottom of the page in Rupert. It meant you could officially read Rupert stories in about ten minutes flat.

yes rupert annuals were very extremely overdetermined narrativewise

i am going to write my next book in this format

We used to have a Bible that used top-of-page summary text, not in rhyme sadly. It was all "A strange thing comes to pass" though, not v.helpful.

What did they rhyme with A straneg thing comes to pass. Was it on the page about Sodom And Gomorrah?

obviously there's an evolutionary pressure towards reduction of number of parallel narrative devices, more narrative and drama actually in the drawing etc - economic if nothing else (couplet poetry skills are surely quite pricey?) - but every time a device is elbowed, there's a loss as well as a gain

(i assume d.c.thomson were actually looking primarily towards a slightly less confidently literate readershop, who were put off by that solid block of text - there's a scene in kes i think where the boy halting spells out some dialogue from (i think) the dandy... i remember being gobsmacked by it when i saw it aged maybe nine, bcz by that age reading comics wasn't difficult, and here was someone than me for whom it was: i had last had friends who couldn't read when i at rural village primary school, some three years before)

(by contrast, when the single panel cartoon moveds towards minimal captions in the early 1920s - awat from old-style punch playlets - the modernism wz effected by the tres chic and upscale jazz-age magazine the new yorker)

"someone than me" = "someone older than me" (tho i haven't seen kes for years and cannot honest remember how old he is: 11? 12?)

ALSO: i remember being gobsmacked that he was reading dandy not beano!! i am not now sure why this was BUT dandy in fact actually still had strips (in 1969) which used the panel-text system, biz BLACK BOB THE DANDY DOG and WINKER WATSON!! so maybe i considered it the "harder read" even then??!?

The parallel narrative made a sort-of-comeback in Cerebus The Aardvark.

cerebus is quite consciously old-skool, isn't it? kinda pogo meets prince valiant: and i think sim is very VERY alert to the various tonal effect which difft narrative devices conjure (one of the reasons why he is so hopless with overt rational politix is i think his extreme intuitive grasp of the covert and the, well, "irrational", if that's a good word for FX not produced by words but by lettering...)