Home About us Products Services Contact us Bookmark
:: wikimiki.org ::
Comic Strip

Comic strip

:This article is about the sequential art form. See also Daily strip and Sunday strip. For the British comedy group, see The Comic Strip. A comic strip is a short strip or sequence of drawings, telling a story. Drawn by a cartoonist, they are published on a recurring basis (usually daily or weekly) in newspapers or on the Internet. In the UK and Europe they are also published within comic magazines, with a strip's story sometimes continuing over three pages or more. They usually communicate to the reader via speech balloons. As the name implies, they can be humorous (as in "gag-a-day" strips like Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois, or Hagar the Horrible) but not by necessity. Serious soap-opera continuity strips (like Judge Parker or Little Orphan Annie) have serious story lines in serial form. They are, however, nonetheless known as "comics" – though the term "sequential art", coined by cartoonist Will Eisner, is becoming increasingly popular.

Origins

In America, the great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. The Little Bears was the first American comic with recurring characters; The Yellow Kid the first color comic, part of the first Sunday comic section in 1897 and the source of the term "yellow journalism"); Mutt and Jeff the first daily comic strip, first appearing in 1907. The comic strip, in a manner of speaking, began in 1865 in Germany with Max and Moritz, a strip about two trouble-making boys. It was more a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children's stories like "Struwwelpeter" ("Shockheaded Peter"): in one, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill, and consumed by a flock of geese. Max and Moritz did provide an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, leading to the debut of The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897, probably the first comic strip in the modern sense of the term. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, speech and thought balloons, and sawing logs for snoring originated in Dirks' strip. Hugely popular, Katzenjammer Kids was responsible for one of the first comic-strip copyright ownership suits in the history of the medium. When Dirks left Hearst for the promise of a better salary under Pulitzer (unusual, since cartoonists regularly deserted Pulitzer for Hearst) Hearst in a highly unusual court decision retained the rights to the name "Katzenjammer Kids", while creator Dirks retained the rights to the characters. Hearst promptly hired a cartoonist named Harold Knerr to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks renamed his version Hans and Fritz (later, The Captain and The Kids). Thus, two versions distributed by rival syndicates graced the comics pages for decades. Dirks' version, eventually distributed by United Feature Syndicate, ran until 1979. Hundreds of comic strips followed, with many running for decades.

Conventions and genres

Most comic strip characters stay the same age throughout the strip's life, but in strips like Lynn Johnston's award-winning For Better or For Worse characters age. The first strip to feature aging characters was Gasoline Alley. The history of comic strips also includes series that are not humorous, but tell an ongoing dramatic story. Examples include Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Mary Worth, Modesty Blaise and Tarzan. Sometimes these are spin-offs from comic books, for example Superman, Batman, and The Amazing Spider-Man. All the comic strips mentioned so far in this article are centered on human beings, but a number of strips have also included animals as main characters. Some are non-verbal (Marmaduke), some have verbal thoughts but aren't understood by humans, (Garfield, Snoopy in Peanuts), and some can converse with humans (Get Fuzzy). Other strips have centered entirely on animals, as in Pogo or Donald Duck. Gary Larson's The Far Side was unique, as there were no central characters. Instead The Far Side used a wide variety of characters such as humans, monsters, aliens, chickens, cows, worms, amoebas and more. Wiley Miller not only mixes human, animal and fantasy characters, he does several different comic strip continuities under one umbrella title, Non Sequitur. Newspaper comic strips come in two formats, daily strips and Sunday strips. Daily strips usually run Monday through Saturday, and are usually in black and white. Sunday strips are much larger and are usually in color.

Social and political influence

The comics have long held a distorted mirror to contemporary society, and almost from the beginning have been used for political or social commentary. This ranged from the staunch conservative values of Little Orphan Annie to the unabashed liberalism of Doonesbury. The aforementioned Pogo used animals to particularly devastating effect, caricaturing many prominent politicians of the day as animal denizens of Pogo's Okeefenokee Swamp. In a fearless move, Pogo's creator Walt Kelly took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, caricaturing him as a bobcat named Simple J. Malarkey, a megalomaniac bent on taking over the characters' birdwatching club and rooting out all undesirables. Kelly also defended the medium against possible government regulation in the McCarthy era. At a time when comic books were coming under fire for supposed sexual, violent, and subversive content, Kelly feared the same would happen to comic strips. Going before the congressional subcommittee, he proceeded to charm the members with his drawings and the force of his personality. The comic strip was safe for satire. Some comic strips, such as Doonesbury and Boondocks, are often printed on the editorial or op-ed page rather than the comics page, because of their regular political commentary. Conservatives have long warred against Doonesbury, and were recently successful in convincing a major printer of Sunday comics sections to refuse to print the strip (see Media bias in the United States). In another case, Dilbert is sometimes found in the business section of a newspaper instead because of the strip's commentary about office politics. The world's longest comic strip is 88.9 metres long and on display at Trafalgar Square as part of the London Comedy Festival. The record was previously 81 metres and held in Florida. The London Cartoon Strip was created by fifteen of Britain's best known cartoonists and depicts the history of London. The Reuben, named for cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is the most prestigious award for U.S. comic strip artists. Reuben awards are presented annually by the National Cartoonists' Society (NCS). Today's comic-strip artists, with the help of the NCS, enthusiastically promote the medium, which is considered to be in decline due to fewer markets and ever-shrinking newspaper space. One particularly humorous example of such promotional efforts is the Great Comic Strip Switcheroonie, held on April Fool's Day, 1997. For that day, dozens of prominent comic-strip artists took over each other's strips. Garfield’s Jim Davis, for example, switched with Blondie’s Stan Drake, while Scott Adams (Dilbert) traded strips with Bil Keane (The Family Circus). Even the United States Postal Service got into the act, issuing a series of commemorative stamps marking the comic-strip centennial in 1996.

Internet comics

The advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s led to an explosion of amateur webcomics, comic strips created solely for Web sites. Webcomics differ from published comic strips, in that anyone can start his own comic strip and publish it on the Web; there is no longer any need to for a creator to meet the approval of a publisher or syndicate. Currently there are hundreds of webcomics, most of which are low-quality and sporadically updated. However, a number of webcomics have endured, and the best webcomics rival their newspaper and magazine counterparts in terms of quality and quantity. Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, PvP, Sluggy Freelance, and User Friendly are considered to be among the best of the webcomics. The majority of traditional newspaper comic strips now have some Internet presence. Syndicates often provide archives of recent strips on their websites. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, started a trend by including his e-mail address in each strip.

Related articles


- List of comic strips
- Comic book
- List of movies based on comic strips
- Webcomic
- Yonkoma - Japanese comic strip

External links


- [http://forums.delphiforums.com/bhob2 Fusebox Vintage Newspaper Comic Strips]
- [http://www.HavenWorks.com/comics/links HavenWorks' list of comic strips available online]
- [http://cartoons.osu.edu/ Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library]
- [http://www.reuben.org/ncs/awards2.asp Reuben Awards]
- [http://www.marklansdown.com/pinbacks Comic strip pinbacks]
- [http://www.mainada.net/comics Comics @ Mai'Nada.net - Sketch your own comics online]
- Category:Comics Category:Pop culture ko:연재 만화

Daily strip

See also Comic strip and Sunday strip. A daily strip is a newspaper comic strip that appears in newspapers Monday through Saturday, as contrasted with a Sunday strip which appears on Sunday. Daily strips are usually in black and white, though a few newspapers, beginning in the later part of the Twentieth Century, published them in color. The major formats are strips -- wider than they are tall -- and panels -- taller than they are wide. Strips usually, but not always, are broken up into several smaller panels, with continuity from panel to panel. Panels usually, but not always, are not broken up and lack continuitity. The daily Peanuts is a strip, the daily Dennis the Menace is a panel. Early daily strips were large, often running the entire width of the newspaper, and were sometimes three or more inches in height. At first, one newspaper page only included one daily strip, usually either at the top or the bottom of the page. By the Nineteen-twenties, many newspapers had a comics page on which many strips were collected. Over the years, the size of daily strips became smaller and smaller, until by the start of the Twentyfirst Century four standard daily strips could fit in the area once occupied by a single daily strip. NEA Syndicate experimented briefly with a two-tier daily strip, Star Hawks, but after a few years Star Hawks dropped down to a single tier.

Sunday strip

See also Comic strip and Daily strip. A Sunday strip is a newspaper comic strip format, where comic strips are printed in the Sunday newspaper, usually in a special section called the Sunday comics, and vritually always in full color. It is contrasted with daily strip, where strips are published Monday through Saturday, usually in black and white. Many comic strips appear both daily and Sunday, in some cases, as with Little Orphan Annie, telling the same story daily and Sunday. In other cases, as with Flash Gordon for most of its long run, telling different stories daily and Sunday. Some strips, such as Prince Valiant appear only on Sunday; others, such as Rip Kirby, are daily only, and have never appeared on Sunday.

Early strips

Early Sunday strips usually filled a full newspaper page, but with time they have grown smaller and smaller, until today there are no Sunday strips that stand alone on a page, and some newspapers crowd as many as eight Sunday strips on a single page. The last full page Sunday strip was Prince Valiant, which was published as a full page in some newspapers until 1970. Shortly after the full page Prince Valiant was discontinued, Hal Foster retired from drawing the strip, though he continued to write it for several more years. Manuscript Press published a print of his last Prince Valiant strip in full-page format; this was the last full page comic strip, though it did not appear in that format in newspapers.

Other formats

Other formats for Sunday strips include the half-page, the third of a page, the quarter page, the tabloid page or tab, and the half tab, short for half of a tabloid page. Today, with the ever shrinking size of Sunday strips, many other, smaller formats abound. Usually, only the largest format is complete, with the other formats dropping or cropping one or more panels. Exceptions to this rule include Steve Canyon and, until its last few years, On Stage, which are complete only in the third format. Currently, the largest and most complete format for most Sunday strips, such as Prince Valiant, is the half page. A few strips have been popular enough for the artist to insist on the Sunday strip being run in a half page format, though not necessarily in a half-page size. Calvin and Hobbes was the first strip to do this, followed by Outland and later Opus. The Asbury Park Press is one of the few newspapers that still run half-page Sunday strips. Famous full-page Sunday strips include Prince Valiant, Bringing Up Father, Flash Gordon, Thimble Theater, Little Orphan Annie, Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Blondie, and Alley Oop. Many of these pages also included a topper. During the 1950s, there were a few short-lived attempts to revive the full page Sunday strip, tet such examples as Lance and Frank Giacoia's Johnny Reb and Billy Yank proved artistic though not commercial successes.

Cartoonist

A cartoonist is an artist who specializes in drawing cartoons. The term can also be applied to those who produce comic books, anime, manga, as well as comic strip creators and those working in animation. Those artists whose work is said to have a "cartoony" style are also called cartoonists. A cartoonist traditionally sketches the picture out roughly in pencil first, before going over the sketches in black ink, using either brushes or metal nibbed pens. Cartoonists whose work is intended for online publication increasingly work in digital media. Large comic book publishers (such as Marvel or DC) utilize teams of cartoonists to produce the art (typically one doing the pencil work and another doing the inking, with the coloring added digitally by colorists). When a consistent artistic style is wanted among different cartoonists (such as Archie Comics), character model sheets may be used as reference. Traditional animation houses employ specialized cartoonists, called "inbetweeners", to draw the motions connecting the broad movements of a character.

See also


- List of cartoonists
- Editorial cartoonist
- Comic strip creator
- Comic book creator
- Mangaka

External links


- [http://www.cartoon-crn.com/index.htm Cartoonists Rights Network] Category:Art and design workers
- Cartoonist ja:漫画家 simple:Cartoonist

Internet

:For the more general networking concept, see internetworking. The Internet, or simply the Net, is the worldwide system of interconnected computer networks which makes information stored on it accessible. This information is transmitted by packet switching using a standardized Internet Protocol (IP) and many other protocols. It is made up of thousands of smaller commercial, academic, domestic and government networks. It carries various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.

Creation of the Internet

During the 1950s, several communications researchers realized that there was a need to allow general communication between users of various computers and communications networks. This led to research into decentralized networks, queuing theory, and packet switching. The subsequent creation of ARPANET in the United States in turn catalyzed a wave of technical developments that made it the basis for the development of the Internet. Contrary to popular myth, the DoD did not create the ARPANET so that they could communicate to the US Government after a nuclear war. The first TCP/IP wide area network was operational in 1984 when the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF) constructed a university network backbone that would later become the NSFNet. It was then followed by the opening of the network to commercial interests in 1995. Important separate networks that offered gateways into, then later merged into the Internet include Usenet, Bitnet and the various commercial and educational X.25 networks such as Compuserve and JANET. The ability of TCP/IP to work over these pre-existing communication networks allowed for a great ease of growth. Use of Internet as a phrase to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated around this time. The collective network gained a public face in the 1990s. In August 1991 CERN in Switzerland publicized the new World Wide Web project, two years after Tim Berners-Lee had begun creating HTML, HTTP and the first few web pages at CERN in Switzerland. In 1993 the Mosaic web browser version 1.0 was released, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic/technical Internet. By 1996 the word "Internet" was common public currency, but it referred almost entirely to the World Wide Web. Meanwhile, over the course of the decade, the Internet successfully accommodated the majority of previously existing public computer networks (although some networks such as FidoNet have remained separate). This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary open nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network.

Today's Internet

FidoNets, FTP client, and Telnet client]] Apart from the complex physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is held together by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts (for example peering agreements) and by technical specifications or protocols that describe how to exchange data over the network. Indeed, the Internet is essentially defined by its interconnections and routing policies. In an often-cited, if perhaps gratuitously mathematical definition, Seth Breidbart once described the Internet as "the largest equivalence class in the reflexive, transitive, symmetric closure of the relationship 'can be reached by an IP packet from'". Unlike older communications systems, the Internet protocol suite was deliberately designed to be independent of the underlying physical medium. Any communications network, wired or wireless, that can carry two-way digital data can carry Internet traffic. Thus, Internet packets flow through wired networks like copper wire, coaxial cable, and fiber optic; and through wireless networks like Wi-Fi. Together, all these networks, sharing the same high-level protocols, form the Internet. The Internet protocols originate from discussions within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its working groups, which are open to public participation and review. These committees produce documents that are known as Request for Comments documents (RFCs). Some RFCs are raised to the status of Internet Standard by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). Some of the most used protocols in the Internet protocol suite are IP, TCP, UDP, DNS, PPP, SLIP, ICMP, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, Telnet, FTP, LDAP, SSL, and TLS. Some of the popular services on the Internet that make use of these protocols are e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, file sharing, Instant Messenger, the World Wide Web, Gopher, session access, WAIS, finger, IRC, MUDs, and MUSHs. Of these, e-mail and the World Wide Web are clearly the most used, and many other services are built upon them, such as mailing lists and blogs. The Internet makes it possible to provide real-time services such as Internet radio and webcasts that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Some other popular services of the Internet were not created this way, but were originally based on proprietary systems. These include IRC, ICQ, AIM, and Gnutella. There have been many analyses of the Internet and its structure. For example, it has been determined that the Internet IP routing structure and hypertext links of the World Wide Web are examples of scale-free networks. Similar to how the commercial Internet providers connect via Internet exchange points, research networks tend to interconnect into large subnetworks such as:
- GEANT
- Internet2
- GLORIAD These in turn are built around relatively smaller networks. See also the list of academic computer network organizations In network schematic diagrams, the Internet is often represented by a cloud symbol, into and out of which network communications can pass.

Internet culture

The Internet is also having a profound impact on work, leisure, knowledge and worldviews. worldviews]]

ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the authority that coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet protocol addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers. A globally unified namespace (i.e., a system of names in which there is one and only one holder of each name) is essential for the Internet to function. ICANN is headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, but is overseen by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and non-commercial communities. The US government continues to have a privileged role in approving changes to the root zone file that lies at the heart of the domain name system. Because the Internet is a distributed network comprising many voluntarily interconnected networks, the Internet, as such, has no governing body. ICANN's role in coordinating the assignment of unique identifiers distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body on the global Internet, but the scope of its authority extends only to the Internet's systems of domain names, Internet protocol addresses, and protocol port and parameter numbers.

The World Wide Web

Through keyword-driven Internet research using search engines like Google, millions worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount of online information. Compared to encyclopedias and traditional libraries, the World Wide Web has enabled a sudden and extreme decentralization of information and data. Some companies and individuals have adopted the use of 'weblogs' or blogs, which are largely used as easily-updatable online diaries. Some commercial organizations encourage staff to fill them with advice on their areas of specialization in the hope that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free information, and be attracted to the corporation as a result. One example of this practice is Microsoft, via whose product developers publish their personal blogs in order to pique the public's interest in their work. For more information on the distinction between the World Wide Web and the Internet itself — as in everyday use the two are sometimes confused — see Dark internet where this is discussed in more detail.

Remote access

The Internet allows computer users to connect to other computers and information stores easily, wherever they may be across the world. They may do this with or without the use of security, authentication and encryption technologies, depending on the requirements. This is encouraging new ways of working from home, collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An accountant sitting at home can audit the books of a company based in another country, on a server situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by home-working book-keepers, in other remote locations, based on information e-mailed to them from offices all over the world. Some of these things were possible before the widespread use of the Internet, but the cost of private, leased lines would have made many of them infeasible in practice. An office worker away from his or her desk, perhaps the other side of the world on a business trip or a holiday, can open a remote desktop session into his or her normal office PC using a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection via the Internet. This gives him or her complete access to all their normal files and data, including e-mail and other applications, while they are away.

Collaboration

This low-cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge and skills has revolutionized some, and given rise to whole new, areas of human activity. One example of this is the collaborative development and distribution of Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) such as Linux, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org. See Collaborative software.

File-sharing

A computer file can be e-mailed to customers, colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or FTP server for easy download by others. It can be put into a "shared location" or onto a file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of "mirror" servers or peer-to-peer networking. In any of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user authentication; the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by encryption and money may change hands before or after access to the file is given. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example a credit card whose details are also passed - hopefully fully encrypted - across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by digital signatures or by MD5 message digests. These simple features of the Internet, over a world-wide basis, are changing the basis for the production, sale and distribution of many types of product, wherever they can be reduced to a computer file for transmission. This includes all manner of office documents, publications, software products, music, photography, video, animations, graphics and the other arts. This in turn is causing seismic shifts in each of the existing industry associations, such as the RIAA and MPAA, that previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.

Streaming media and VoIP

Many existing radio and television broadcasters have provided Internet 'feeds' of their live audio and video streams (for example, the BBC). They have been joined by a range of pure Internet 'broadcasters' who never had on-air licences. This means that an Internet-connected device, such as a computer or something more specific, can be used to access on-line media in much the same way as was previously possible only with a TV or radio receiver. The range of material is much wider, from pornography to highly specialised technical web-casts. The simplest equipment can allow anybody, with little censorship or licencing control, to broadcast on a worldwide basis. Time-shift viewing or listening is not a problem as the BBC have shown with their Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again features. Web-cams can be seen as an even lower-budget extension of this phenomenon. In this case the picture may update only slowly - perhaps once every few seconds or slower, but Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships in the Panama Canal or the traffic at a local roundabout live and in real time. Video chat rooms, video conferencing, and remote controllable webcams have become popular. Some people install webcams in their bedrooms that can be accessed by other voyeurs, often with two-way sound. VoIP stands for Voice over IP, where IP refers to the Internet Protocol that underlies all Internet communication. This phenomenon began as an optional two-way voice extension to some of the Instant Messaging systems that took off around the turn of the millennium. In recent years many people and organizations have made VoIP systems as easy to use and as convenient as a normal telephone. The benefit is that, as the actual voice traffic is carried by the Internet, VoIP is free or costs much less than an actual telephone call, especially over long distances and especially for those with always-on ADSL or DSL Internet connections anyway. The disadvantages are that it is still difficult to initiate a call with someone, unless they also have a VoIP phone or are at their computer and that there are still several competing standards that are mitigating against universal acceptance. In all of these cases, existing large organisations, that have grown accustomed to regular incomes for their services, are finding increased competition in their service areas, coming directly from the Internet. While newcomers strive to make these inroads, the traditional industries are having to adapt, adopt, complain or suffer. Meanwhile the consumer in each case most probably benefits from the increased range of services and possible price reductions. Some worry about censorship and control while others see a continuing globalisation of culture and norms.

Language

Main article: English on the Internet The most prevalent language for communication on the Internet is English. This may be due to the Internet's origins or to the growing role of English as an international language. It may also be related to the poor capability of early computers to handle characters other than those in the basic Latin alphabet (see Unicode). After English (32 % of web visitors) the most-requested languages on the world wide web are Chinese 13 %, Japanese 8 %, Spanish 6 %, German 6 % and French 4 %. (From [http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm Internet World Stats]) By continent, 33 % of the world's Internet users are based in Asia, 29 % in Europe and 23 % in North America.[http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm] The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years that good facilities are available for development and communication in most widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake still remain.

Cultural awareness

From a cultural awareness perspective, the Internet has been both an advantage and a liability. For people who are interested in other cultures it provides a significant amount of information and an interactivity that would be unavailable otherwise. However, for people who are not interested in other cultures there is some evidence indicating that the Internet enables them to avoid contact to a greater degree than ever before.

Censorship

Some countries, such as Iran and the People's Republic of China, restrict what people in their countries can see on the Internet, especially unwanted political and religious content. In the Western world, it is Germany that has the highest rate of censorship. Internet Service Providers are required by law to block some sites that contain child pornography or Nazi or Islamist propaganda. Censorship is sometimes done through government sponsored censoring filters, or by means of law or culture, making the propagation of targeted materials extremely hard. At the moment most Internet content is available regardless of where one is in the world, so long as one has the means of connecting to it.

Internet access

Germany Common methods of home access include dial-up, landline broadband (over coaxial cable, fiber optic or copper wires), Wi-Fi, satellite and cell phones. Public places to use the Internet include libraries and Internet cafes, where computers with Internet connections are available. There are also Internet access points in many public places like airport halls, in some cases just for brief use while standing. Various terms are used, such as "public Internet kiosk", "public access terminal", and "Web payphone". Many hotels now also have public terminals, though these are usually fee based. Wi-Fi provides wireless access to computer networks, and therefore can do so to the Internet itself. Hotspots providing such access include Wi-Fi-cafes, where a would-be user needs to bring their own wireless-enabled devices such as a laptop or PDA. These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based. A hotspot need not be limited to a confined location. The whole campus or park, or even the entire city can be enabled. Grassroots efforts have led to wireless community networks. Apart from Wi-Fi, there have been experiments with proprietary mobile wireless networks like Ricochet, various high-speed data services over cellular or mobile phone networks, and fixed wireless services. These services have not enjoyed widespread success due to their high cost of deployment, which is passed on to users in high usage fees. New wireless technologies such as WiMAX have the potential to alleviate these concerns and enable simple and cost effective deployment of metropolitan area networks covering large, urban areas. There is a growing trend towards wireless mesh networks, which offer a decentralized and redundant infrastructure and are often considered the future of the Internet. Broadband access over power lines was approved in 2004 in the United States in the face of stiff resistance from the amateur radio community. The problem with modulating a carrier signal onto power lines is that an above-ground power line can act as a giant antenna and jam long-distance radio frequencies used by amateurs, seafarers and others. Countries where Internet access is available to a majority of the population include Germany, India, China, Chile, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Australia, Denmark, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Norway. The use of the Internet around the world has been growing rapidly over the last decade, although the growth rate seems to have slowed somewhat after 2000. The phase of rapid growth is ending in industrialized countries, as usage becomes ubiquitous there, but the spread continues in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East. However, there are still problems for many. ADSL and other broadband access are rare or nonexistent in most developing countries. Even in developed countries, high prices, mediocre performance and access restrictions often limit its uptake. Within individual countries, wide differences may exist between larger cities (often having multiple providers of broadband access) and some rural areas, where no broadband access may be available at all. The expansion of the availability of Internet access is a way to bridge the so-called digital divide.

Capitalization conventions

In formal usage, Internet is traditionally written with a capital first letter. The Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the World Wide Web Consortium, and several other Internet-related organizations all use this convention in their publications. In English grammar, proper nouns are capitalized. Most newspapers, newswires, periodicals, and technical journals also capitalize the term. Examples include the New York Times, the Associated Press, Time, The Times of India, Hindustan Times and Communications of the ACM. In other cases, the first letter is often written small (internet), and many people are not aware of any convention of using a capital letter. Some argue that internet is the correct form. Since 2000, a significant number of publications have switched to using internet. Among them are The Economist, the Financial Times, the London Times, and the Sydney Morning Herald. As of 2005, most publications using internet appear to be located outside of North America although one American news source, Wired News, has adopted the lowercase spelling.

Leisure

The Internet has been a major source of leisure since before the World Wide Web, with entertaining social experiments such as MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related USENET groups receiving much of the main traffic. Today, many Internet forums have sections devoted to neta; short cartoons in the form of Flash movies are also popular. The pornography and gambling industries have both taken full advantage of the World Wide Web, and often provide a significant source of advertising revenue for other Web sites. Although many governments have attempted to put restrictions on both industries' use of the Internet, this has generally failed to stop their widespread popularity. One main area of leisure on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of leisure creates communities, bringing people of all ages and origins to enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing games to online gambling. This has revolutionized the way many people interact and spend their free time on the Internet. Online gaming began with services such as GameSpy and MPlayer, which players of games would typically subscribe to. Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of gameplay or certain games. With the release of Diablo by Blizzard Entertainment, gamers were treated to a built in online game service that was free of charge. With Blizzard's next game, StarCraft, the gaming world saw an explosion in the numbers of players using the Internet to play multi-player games. StarCraft may have been the first non-MMO game in which most players utilized the online gameplay as opposed to the single-player gameplay. Online gaming has progressed so much in the last 10 years that gamers earn a living from being a professional at the subject by winning tournaments and prizes as well as signing sponsor deals. Because there is a large support for certain online games, a new community has been born for people modding games, where users edit games to add a whole new element to it. This is how games such as Counter-Strike were born from the Half-Life Gaming Engine. Cyberslacking has become a serious drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spends 57 minutes a day surfing, according to a study by Peninsula Business Services[http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=914&id=1001802003].

A complex system

Many computer scientists see the Internet as a "prime example of a large-scale, highly engineered, yet highly complex system" (Willinger, et al). The Internet is extremely heterogeneous. (For instance, data transfer rates and physical characteristics of connections vary widely.) The Internet exhibits "emergent phenomena" that depend on its large-scale organization. For example, data transfer rates exhibit temporal self-similarity.

Marketing

The Internet has also become a big market, and the biggest companies today have grown by taking advantage of the efficient low-cost advertising and commerce through the Internet. It is the fastest way to spread information to a vast community of people all at once. The Internet has revolutionized shopping –– a person can order a CD online and receive it in the mail within a couple of days, or download it directly in some cases.

Criticism

Many hyperlinks are outdated as time takes its toll on the existence of URL weblinks. These weblinks are often times defunct and are retained as hyperlinks for extended timeframes as a result of laziness or being busy enough to be sidetracked away from updating webpages. This is a common hoax for people who are fans in the field of what those links provide them with/to.

See also


- List of Internet topics
- An internet of things
- Art on the Internet
- Bogon filtering
- Catenet
- Central ad server
- Cybersex
- Cyberzine
- Dark internet
- Democracy on the Internet
- Dynamics of the Internet
- Extranet
- File Sharing
- Flaming
- Friendship on the Internet
- Hacktivism or Hacker culture
- History of the Internet
- International Freedom of Expression eXchange - monitors Internet censorship around the world
- Humor on the Internet
- ICANN
- Internet 2
- Internet Archive
- Intranet
- Internet forum
- Internets (colloquialism)
- Internet traffic engineering
- NANOG
- Netiquette
- Network Mapping
- Online banking
- Open Directory Project
- Security breaches
- Slang on the Internet
- Trolls and trolling
- Videotex - an early communications technology
- Web browser
- Web hosting
- WebQuest

External links

General


- [http://www.channel101.com/ Internet TV Stations]
- [http://www.isoc.org/ The Internet Society (ISOC)]
- [http://www.techterms.org/internet.php Internet Dictionary] - Definitions of Internet-related terms
- [http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1099-webmaster-glossary/ The Alternate Internet Glossary] (Humor)
- A [http://www.illusivecreations.com Calgary Web Design] company that has put together over 300 articles about the internet and web development. You can view them by going [http://www.illusivecreations.com/articles/ here].
- [http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/geographics/article.php/5911_151151 Internet access stats]
- [http://www.sharpened.net/glossary/ Glossary of Computer and Internet Terms]
- [http://scoreboard.keynote.com/scoreboard/Main.aspx?Login=Y&Username=public&Password=public Internet Health Report] from Keynote
- [http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm Internet World Stats]

Articles


- [http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/29/business/net.php "EU and U.S. clash over control of the Net" - International Herald Tribune article by Tom Wright]
- [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/intro.html "10 Years that changed the world" - WiReD looks back at the evolution of the Internet over last 10 years]
- [http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/ John Walker: The Digital Imprimatur]
- [http://www.addressingtheworld.info addressingtheworld.info] - website accompanying a book (ISBN 0742528103) on the history of DNS
- [http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm How Stuff Works explanation of the Infrastructure of the Internet]
- [http://www.searchandgo.com/articles/internet/net-explained-1.php Internet Explained] Seven part article explaining the origins to the present and a future look at the Internet.
- [http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64596,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7 "It's Just the 'internet' Now" - Wired.com article by Tony Long]

History


- [http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml The Internet Society History Page]
- [http://www.internetvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.txt How the Internet Came to Be]
- [http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ Hobbes' Internet Timeline v7.0]
- [http://www.ciolek.com/PAPERS/e-scholarship2000.html Futures and Non-futures for Scholarly Internet. ]
- [http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/internet_history.html History of the Internet links]
- [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc801.txt RFC 801, planning the TCP/IP switchover]
- [http://www.archive.org/ Internet Archive] - A searchable database of old cached versions of websites dating back to 1996
- A list of lectures, some of which relate to the Internet, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is available [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Comparative-Media-Studies/CMS-930Media--Education--and-the-MarketplaceFall2001/VideoLectures/index.htm here]. Of particular interest is lecture #3 The Next Big Thing: Video Internet which is delivered in Real Player format. The lecture gives a brief history of networking; discusses convergence between the internet/telephone/television networks; the expansion of broadband access; makes predictions about the future of delivery of video over the internet.

References


- Walter Willinger, Ramesh Govindan, Sugih Jamin, Vern Paxson, and Scott Shenker. (2002). Scaling phenomena in the Internet. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99, suppl. 1, 2573 – 2580. Category:Communication Category:Digital media Category:Internet Category:Digital Revolution Category:Technology Category:Computer networks Category:Networks ko:인터넷 ms:Internet ja:インターネット simple:Internet th:อินเทอร์เน็ต fiu-vro:Internet

Speech balloon

Speech balloons (also speech bubbles, dialogue balloons, or word balloons) are a graphic convention used in comic books, strips, and cartoons to allow words (and much less often, pictures) to be understood as representing the speech or thoughts of a given character in the comic. There is often a formal distinction between the balloon that indicates thoughts and the one that indicates words spoken aloud: the bubble that conveys subjective thoughts is often referred to as a thought balloon.

History

Labels that reveal what a pictured figure is speaking have appeared in Western graphic art since at least the 13th century. More recognizably modern "speech balloons" begin appearing in 17th century printed broadsides. With the development of the comics industry in the 20th century, the appearance of speech balloons has become increasingly standardized, though the formal conventions that have evolved in different cultures (USA as opposed to Japan, for example), can be quite distinct. The Yellow Kid is generally credited as the first true comic strip character. His words appeared on his yellow shirt. But word balloons very much like those in use today were added almost immediately. The Yellow Kid speaks inside a word balloon as early as 1896. By the start of the 20th century, the use of word balloons was ubiquitous, and since that time only a very few comic strips and comic books have relied on captions, notably Hal Foster's Prince Valiant and the early Tarzan comic strip. For many years, word balloons were less common in Europe than in the USA, or were used together with captions. One example is the Dutch cartoonist Marten Toonder's comics about Tom Puss and Oliver B. Bumble, where the literary captions are printed out below the strip and almost take up as much space as the drawings, so that the strip fills twice the space of most newspaper strips. A similar example from England is Rupert the Bear.

Popular forms

Speech bubbles

The most common is the speech bubble. It comes in two forms for two circumstances: An in-panel character and an off-panel character. An in-panel character (one who is fully or mostly visible in the panel of the strip of comic that the reader is viewing) uses a bubble with a pointer, called a tail, directed towards the speaker coming out of it. Rupert the Bear An off-panel character (the comic book equivalent of being "off screen") has several options, some of them rather unconventional. The first is just a standard speech bubble with the tail pointing to the side of the panel that the speaker is closest to. The second option, which is currently only used in manga, has the tail pointing into the bubble, instead of out. (This tail is still pointing towards the speaker.) The third option appears to be the creation of graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi (author of Persepolis), and replaces the tail with a sort of bottleneck that connects with the side of the panel. Some American comics have used a speech bubble without a tail, to show that the location and identity of the speaker are nondescript or part of a large crowd. Often the balloon's tail has a zigzag like the conventional drawing of a lightning flash, to show that the words came over a radio link (either public broadcast or two-way communication).

Thought bubbles

Thought bubbles come in two forms: the chain thought bubble and the "fuzzy" bubble. The chain thought bubble is the almost universal symbol for thinking in cartoons. It consists of a large, cloud-like bubble containing the text of the thought, which is connected to the area next to a character by a chain of increasingly smaller circular bubbles. Another, less conventional thought bubble has emerged: the "fuzzy" thought bubble. Used in manga (by such artists as Ken Akamatsu), the fuzzy bubble is roughly circular in shape (generally), but the edge of the bubble is not a line but a collection of spikes close to each other, creating the impression of fuzziness. Fuzzy thought bubbles do not use tails, and are placed in the area of the character who is thinking.

Other forms


- Scream bubbles have a spiny "exploding" outline, often a flash-like tail and usually contains bold large lettering. They indicate that the speaker is screaming.
- Broadcast bubbles (also known as radio bubbles) may have a jagged tail and a squared-off, jagged outline. Letters are sometimes italicised without also being bold. Broadcast bubbles indicate that the speaker is communicating through an electronic device, such as a radio or television.
- Whisper bubbles have a dashed outline, and usually contains small dim lettering. They indicate that the speaker is whispering.
- Icicle bubbles have large "icicles" dropping from them. They indicate that the speaker is "ice cold" towards someone or something.

Captions

Captions are generally used for narration purposes. They are generally square and connected to the edge of the panel. Often they are also colored to indicate the difference between them and the bubbles used by the characters, which are almost always white.

Artist-specific variations

narration Some characters and strips use highly unconventional methods of communication. Perhaps the most notable is the Yellow Kid, an early American comic strip". His (but not the other characters') words would appear on his large, smock-like shirt. Also noteworthy are the many variations on the form created by Dave Sim for his comic Cerebus the Aardvark. Depending on the shape, size, and position of the bubble, as well as the texture and shape of the letters within it, Sim could convey large amounts of information about the speaker. This included separate bubbles for different states of mind (drunkenness, etc), for echoes, and a special class of bubbles for one single floating apparition. In Asterix, Goscinny and Uderzo use bubbles without tails to indicate a distant or unseen speaker. They also have had fun experimenting with many different types of lettering, where Gothic was spoken in a "black letter" font, Greek had a more angular font than normal, Norse used Nørdic åccents on the characters, Egyptian was in faux hieroglyphics etc. An early pioneer in experimenting with many different types of speech balloons and lettering for different types of speech was Walt Kelly, in his Pogo strip. A similar tactic, as the ones used by Sim and Kelly, is used in the reoccurring "Monroe" comic strip in MAD Magazine, in which certain words are written larger or in unusual fonts for emphasis. Singing characters usually have musical notes drawn into their word balloons. Archie Comics' Melody Valentine, a character in their Josie and the Pussycats comic, has musical notes drawn into her word balloons at all times, depicting the fact that she speaks in a sing-song voice. In manga, there is a tendency to include the speech necessary for the storyline in balloons, while small scribbles outside the balloons add ironic comments.

Order

In order for comic strip and graphic novel dialogue to make sense, it has to be read in order. Thus, conventions have evolved in the order in which the communication bubbles are read. The individual bubbles are read in the order of the language. For example, in English, the bubbles are read from left to right in a panel, while in Japanese, it is the other way around. Sometimes the bubbles are "stacked", with two characters having multiple bubbles, one above the other. Such stacks are read from the top down. Poor use of speech balloons can unintentionally make the proper reading order ambiguous, confusing the reader.

Fonts

The cartoonist may or may not draw in all the individual letters in the balloons by hand. An alternative is to use a computer, a technique universal in translated manga. Either way, the font style used is almost an industry wide constant: all capitals in a rounded typeface similar to Comic Sans. Exceptions that are sometimes found are:- : The "c" in a surname of Scottish origin starting with "Mc". : To indicate a frightened or quiet manner of speech. : There has been at least one example of a speech beginning with a polite attention-getting interjection "Er," with lowercase, followed by all uppercase as usual. : In a few comics (for example the English language version of Tintin), uppercase and lowercase are used as in ordinary writing. In the United States, the speech balloon font often uses a sans-serif "I" for the letter "i" appearing in normal words, but a serifed "I" for the English language pronoun "I".

See also


- Balloon help Category:Comics ja:ふきだし

Beetle Bailey

Beetle Bailey (begun on September 4, 1950) is a comic strip set in the United States Army, created by Mort Walker. It is among the oldest comic strips still being made by the original creator, and it is also among the most popular comic strips. King Features Syndicate is the publisher.

History and origins of Beetle Bailey

In 1948 and 1949, Mort Walker submitted his comics to magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. The editor of the SEP, John Bailey, suggested he draw some comics in a college setting, having seen some of Mort Walker's work during college. Walker did so, and Bailey suggested that he feature one character, who wore a hat down over his eyes. Walker named him Spider, after a fraternity brother. Walker then decided to do a comic strip about college, putting all of his fraternity brothers from the University of Missouri-Columbia in it. Changing the name from Spider to Beetle, King Features Syndicate bought it; it was the last comic strip personally approved by William Randolph Hearst. Bailey was added as a last name in honor of John Bailey. Beetle Bailey first ran in twelve newspapers on September 4, 1950, the day after Mort Walker's birthday. On March 13, 1951, during the Korean War, Walker had Beetle Bailey enlist in the Army. All characters other than Beetle were dropped, and new ones created. The struggling comic strip (King Features was considering not renewing the one-year contract) soon appeared in more newspapers, beginning Beetle's rise to popularity.

The strip

Most of the humor revolves around the mostly inept characters stationed at Camp Swampy. Private Bailey is a lazy sort and usually naps and avoids work, and thus is often the subject of verbal and physical chastising from his Sergeant. The comic strip currently takes place in present day. The characters in Beetle Bailey have never seen combat themselves, with the exception of mock battles and combat drills. Beetle's sister is Lois Flagston of the comic strip Hi and Lois, a spinoff which debuted in 1954. Beetle is always seen with a hat or helmet over his head, forehead, and eyes. He was only seen without it once in the real strip, when he was still in college. In a Mad Magazine parody in the 1960s, Beetle's hat is removed and on his forehead is written "Get out of Vietnam". Over the years, Mort Walker has been assisted by (among others) Jerry Dumas, Bob Gustafson, Frank Johnson, and his sons Brian and Greg Walker, of which the latter is credited on the strips today.

Cast


- Beetle
- Sgt. Orville Snorkel - Beetle's nemesis
- Otto - Sgt. Snorkel's anthropomorphic dog
- Gen. Amos T. Halftrack - the inept commander of Camp Swampy
- Martha Halftrack - the General's domineering wife
- Miss Buxley - Halftrack's beautiful secretary
- Pvt. Blips - Halftrack's competent secretary
- Lt. Jack Flap - the strip's first black character, introduced in 1970
- Killer Diller - the ladies man
- Zero - the uneducated country boy
- Lt. Sonny Fuzz - overearnest, by the book, always trying to impress uninterested superiors, introduced 1956
- Cookie - the cook
- Plato - the intellectual
- Corporal Yo - the strip's first Asian character, introduced in 1990
- Capt. Sam Scabbard
- Maj. Greenbrass
- Chaplain Staneglass
- Julius Plewer - fastidious fussbudget, who eventually became Halftrack's chauffeur
- Cosmo - Camp Swampy's resident "shady entreprenur"
- Rocky - Camp Swampy's resident "rebel-without-a-clue", introduced 1958
- Dr. Bonkus - Camp Swampy's staff psychiatrist, whose sanity is questionable at best
- Specialist Chip Gizmo - Camp Swampy's resident computer geek, named by a write-in contest in 2002
- Sgt. Louise Lugg - wants to be Sarge Snorkel's girlfriend, introduced in 1986
- Bella - Sgt. Louise Lugg's pet female cat

Controversy

The strip became the focus of feminist animosity in the '90s because of Gen. Halftrack's unrestrained (if ineffectual) libidinous approach to women. Reacting to this, Walker put the General through a bit of sensitivity training.

External links


- [http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/bbailey/about.htm Beetle Bailey at King Features]
- [http://www.beetlebailey.com BeetleBailey.com]
- [http://www.mortwalker.com Mort Walker's website]
- [http://www.toonopedia.com/beetle.htm Toonopedia] Category:Comic strips Bailey, Beetle Bailey, Beetle

Hi & Lois

Hi and Lois is a comic strip about a suburban family. It debuted on October 18, 1954 and is distributed by King Features. Hiram ("Hi") and Lois Flagston are typical American suburbanites. They have four children: a slovenly teen named Chip, rambunctious twins named Dot and Ditto, and a baby named Trixie. They also have a large shaggy dog named Dawg. Their neighbors are the Thurstons, the fat and lazy "Thirsty" and his skinny wife Irma. The Flagstons first appeared in Mort Walker's strip Beetle Bailey. They spun off into their own strip, written by Walker and drawn by Dik Browne. Lois Flagston (née Bailey) is Beetle Bailey's sister and the two strips make occasional crossovers. One of these occurred on the strip's 40th anniversary in 1994, when Beetle visited his sister Lois and her family. Today many consider Hi and Lois to be rather dated, although it has made some efforts to keep up with the times, such as housewife Lois Flagston taking up a career in real estate in 1980. However, in previous decades the strip was acclaimed; in 1962 it earned Dik Browne a Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society. The strip is now written by Brian and Greg Walker and drawn by Robert "Chance" Browne, the sons of the original creative team.

External links


- [http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/hi_lois/about.htm Hi and Lois at King Features]
- [http://www.toonopedia.com/hilois.htm Toonopedia entry] Category:Comic strips

Hagar The Horrible

Hägar the Horrible is the title and the name of the main character of a syndicated comic strip by Dik Browne, first seen in February 1973 and distributed to 1,900 newspapers in 58 countries, in 13 languages. Hägar is a Viking warrior who regularly goes off to invade England. The humor of the comic strip comes from his interactions with his longship crew (whose first mate, contrary to depictions of Vikings as big muscled warriors, is a short naïve fellow named Lucky Eddie) and his family (his wife Helga, his son Hamlet, his daughter Honi, his duck Kvack, and his dog Snert). For a brief time, the strip had its own brand of sponsored soda, which was unfortunately named "Hagar the Horrible Cola." It is generally recalled as one of the funnier flops of the marketing industry. Since Dik's retirement in 1988, his son, Chris, has continued the comic himself. The strip is popular enough to warrant a book, Hägar the Horrible's Viking Handbook, which purports how to loot, where to loot, and how to be a good Viking. It includes a list of the Top Ten Most Sackable Cities (of 10th century Europe): London, Paris, Venice, Madrid, Novgorod, Cologne, Geneva, Dublin, and Byzantium. See also: Hägar the Horrible (telefilm)

External links


- [http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/hagar/about.htm Hägar at King Features]
- [http://www.hagardunor.net Hagar The Horrible (unofficial)]
- [http://www.toonopedia.com/hagar.htm Toonopedia] Category:Comic strips Category:Comics characters simple:Hagar the Horrible

Judge Parker

Judge Parker is a soap opera-style comic strip created by Nicholas P. Dallis. It debuted on November 24, 1952. Alan Parker was a widower with two children, Randy and Ann, who later married a younger woman named Katherine in the strip. Initially a dashing figure who solved crimes and chased criminals, in the 1960s he became an upstanding and serious judge who didn't stray as much from his courtroom. Instead, the spotlight began to focus on handsome young attorney Sam Driver, and Parker was almost entirely phased out of his own strip. Most stories revolve around Driver, his wealthy client and lover Abby Spencer, and her two adopted children, Neddy and Sophie. Dr. Dallis, a psychiatrist who also created the comic strips Rex Morgan, M.D. and Apartment 3-G, used the pen name "Paul Nichols" writing the strip. Shortly before his death, he retired, turning over the writing chores to his assistant Woody Wilson in 1990. The strip's first artist was Dan Heilman, who left in 1965 and was replaced by Harold LeDoux. Wilson and LeDoux continue to collaborate on the strip today. There is no connection between this Judge Parker and Judge Isaac Parker, the infamous "hanging judge" of the old west.

External links


- [http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/jparker/about.htm Judge Parker at King Features]
- [http://www.toonopedia.com/parker.htm Toonopedia] Category:Comic strips Parker, Judge

Little Orphan Annie

right Little Orphan Annie is a full page (later half page or tab) comic strip created by Harold Gray which first appeared on August 5, 1924. Gray's character was loosely based on James Whitcomb Riley's eponymous character from his 1885 poem "Little Orphan Annie". In Gray's version, Annie, an orphan, was taken in by "Daddy" Oliver Warbucks, a prototypical capitalist of almost unlimited wealth and influence. With his right-hand men, Punjab (an eight-foot native of India) and The Asp (an inscrutably generalized Oriental), Warbucks tackled international intrigue and the neverending plots to kidnap or harm Annie. Probably no other comic strip has ever so completely glorified the American business ethic, although Warbucks enjoyed good relations with his unionized employees and there were a share of corrupt businessmen as villians. Daddy repeatedly suffered seeming death at the hands of his enemies, leaving Annie to fend for herself until his next reappearance. Annie's main physical characteristics are a mop of red, curly hair and vacant circles for eyes. She is always accompanied by her dog, Sandy. Her catchphrase is "Leapin' lizards!" In 1995, the strip was one of 20 included in the Comic Strip Classics series of commemorative US postage stamps. After Gray's death, the strip continued in lesser hands and was replaced with reruns in 1974. Following the success of the Broadway musical (see below), the strip was resurrected in 1979 as Annie by Leonard Starr, who retired in 2000. Since then the strip has been written by Jay Maeder and drawn by Andrew Pepoy, Alan Kupperberg and Ted Slampyak.

Episode Guide


- 1931: Maw Green; Blind!
- 1932: Trixie; Miss Treet; Cosmic City
- 1933: Elmer Pinchpenny; Dan Ballad
- 1934: The Bleeks; Prison!
- 1935: Eonite; Hollywood
- 1936: Jack Boot; Ginger
- 1937: Boris Sirob; Mr. Am
- 1938: The Brittlewits; Rose Chance

Adaptations

On April 6, 1931 Little Orphan Annie debuted on the Blue Network of NBC. The next year it was made into a movie starring Mitzi Green as Annie, and Edgar Kennedy as "Daddy" Warbucks. In 1977, Little Orphan Annie became a Broadway musical, called Annie, with music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin, and book by Thomas Meehan. The original production ran from April 21, 1977 to January 2, 1983; there have been other productions around the world, and the musical has been filmed several times, notably in a 1982 version starring Albert Finney as Warbucks, Aileen Quinn as Annie, and Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan, the matron of the orphanage. The Broadway Annies were Andrea McArdle, Shelley Bruce, Sarah Jessica Parker, Allison Smith, and Alyson Kirk. Some of the notable actresses who portrayed Miss Hannigan are Dorothy Loudon, Alice Ghostley, Betty Hutton, Ruth Kobart, Marcia Lewis, June Havoc, and Nell Carter. Famous songs from the musical include "Tomorrow" and "It's the Hard Knock Life".

Parodies

The strip lent itself easily to parody, which was taken up by both Walt Kelly in Pogo (as "Little Arf 'n Nonnie") and by Al Capp in Li'l Abner, where Punjab became Punjbag, an oleaginous slob. Harvey Kurtzman produced a long-running parody for Playboy Magazine called Little Annie Fanny where the lead character is a busty waif who keeps running into the strangest sexual situations and losing her clothes. The 1980s children's television program You Can't Do That on Television in its - later banned - "Adoption" episode, parodied the character as "Little Orphan Andrea". Andrea, like Annie, sported curly red hair and a red dress, but unlike her was a very naughty orphan who had a habit of beating the other kids up.

"Orphan Annie Eye"

The unusual appearance of her eyes has been used by histologists to label a type of cell associated with thyroid disease. [http://www.macmed.ttuhsc.edu/Oliver/endocrine/pages/newpage10.htm Illustration]

Reprints


- Arf -- the Life and Hard Times of Little Orphan Annie reprints about half of the daily strips from 1935 - 1945.
- Some of the very early Little Orphan Annie daily strips have been reprinted in 14 volumes by Pacific Comics Club.
- All of the daily and Sunday strips from 1931 to 1935 have been reprinted by Fantagraphics.
- Picking up where Fantagaphics left off Comics Revue magazine is reprinting both daily and Sunday strips (currently reprinting 1938).
- Dragon Lady Press reprinted daily and Sunday strips from September 3 1945 to February 9 1946.

External links


- [http://www.comicspage.com/annie/annie.html Annie]
- [http://www.toonopedia.com/annie.htm Toonopedia]
- [http://www.marklansdown.com/pinbacks/pages/strip-orphanannie.html Orphan Annie Pinbacks] [http://www.matmice.comhome/orphana Orphan Annie Fan Page] Category:Comic strips Annie, Little Orphan

Will Eisner

Will Eisner (March 3, 1917, Brooklyn, New York City – January 3, 2005, Lauderdale Lakes, Florida) was an acclaimed American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and known for the cartooning studio he founded, his highly influential series The Spirit, his use of comics as an instructional medium, his leading role in establishing the graphic novel as a form of literature with his book A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, and his educational work about the medium as exemplified by his book Comics and Sequential Art. In 1988, the comics community paid tribute to Eisner by creating the Will Eisner Awards, more commonly known as "the Eisners", to recognize achievements each year in the comics medium. Eisner enthusiastically participated in the awards ceremony, congratulating each recipient. Will Eisner died of complications from a quadruple bypass surgery performed on December 22 2004.

Biography

Early life and career

The son of Jewish immigrants — his father a former painter, marginally successful entrepreneur, and one-time manufacturer in Manhattan's Seventh Avenue garment district — Eisner attended De Witt Clinton High School. There he worked on the school newspaper and did stage design, leading him to consider doing that kind of work for theater. Upon graduation, he found a job as an advertising writer-cartoonist for the New York American newspaper. New York American In 1936, fellow cartoonist Bob Kane, future creator of Batman, suggested that the 19-year-old Eisner try selling cartoons to the new comic book Wow, What A Magazine!. "Comic books" at the time were oversized collections of comic strip reprints, which since 1935 had began to include occasional new comic strip-like material. Editor Jerry Iger bought an Eisner adventure strip called Scott Dalton, an H. Rider Haggard-styled hero who traveled the world after rare artifacts; the strip is listed on the cover of issue #3, at left.

Eisner & Iger

Wow lasted four issues (cover-dated July-Sept. & Nov. 1936). The enterprising Eisner suggested he and the out-of-work Iger form a partnership to produce new comics, anticipating that the well of available reprints would soon run dry. In late 1936 , the two formed Eisner & Iger, one of the first, if not the first, comics "packagers" that produced completed work for publishers looking to enter the emerging field.
"I was out of work, so I had some time to sit at home and think about things. I don't think it took a genius to see the way things were shaping up in the comic book field. At Wow, Iger was looking for original material, and other publishers were entering the field, and they were going to be using original material. The idea I had was to supply complete, finished stories to the publishers, because that's what I had been working toward in my own work. What I was doing was emulating the pulps, which had complete short stories in every issue...." [http://www.adventurestrips.com/spirit/spirit_origin_heintjes_2.html]
Eisner & Iger began with Eisner as the sole writing and art staff and Iger handling sales and also lettering the comics. For its first client, the Editors Press Service, Eisner & Iger created the leggy, leopard-wearing jungle goddess Sheena for the British magazine Wags. Eisner & Iger created material as well for Fiction House, Fox Comics, Quality Comics (for whom Eisner co-created such characters as Doll Man and Blackhawk), and others — turning a profit of $1.50 a page at a time when the company's first office rented for $5 a month. Eisner claimed, "I got very rich before I was 22." In 1939, the Register & Tribune syndicate asked Eisner to create a 16-page comic-book insert for Sunday newspapers. Selling his share of their firm to Iger, who would continue to package comics as the S. M. Iger Studio through 1955, Eisner left to create The Spirit.

The Spirit

The Spirit, a seven-page, urban-crimefighter strip, ran with such other features as Mr. Mystic and Lady Luck in a 16-page Sunday supplement ("The Spirit Section") distributed in 20 newspapers from 1940-1952, with a combined circulation of as many as 5 million copies. 1952 strips could be whimsical, gritty, folklorish, sentimental, horrifc, or mystical, yet always humanisitic.]] Eisner recalled its genesis in a 1997 interview: "[T]he newspaper syndicate came to realize the importance of comic books. They wanted me to make a comic book for newspapers. At that time, it was a big risk! They gave me an adult audience and I wanted to write better things than super-heroes. Comic books were a ghetto. I sold my part of the enterprise to my associate and then began The Spirit. They wanted an heroic character, a costumed character. They asked me if he'd have a costume. And I put a mask on him and said, 'Yes, he has a costume!'" [http://www.twomorrows.com/kirby/articles/16eisner.html] Eisner's rumpled, masked hero (with his headquarters under the tombstone of his supposedly deceased true identity, Denny Colt) and his gritty, detailed view of big-city life (based on Eisner's Jewish upbringing in New York) both reflected and influenced the noir outlook of movies and fiction in the 1940s. The strip is especially notable in other areas. First, it was the story of people, often the little people overlooked in the city's maelstrom. In many episodes of The Spirit, the nominal hero makes a brief, almost incidental appearance while the story focuses on a real-life drama played out in streets, dilapidated tenements, and smoke-filled back rooms. Second, along with violence and pathos, The Spirit lived on humor, both subtle and overt. He was machine-gunned, knocked silly, bruised, often amazed into near immobility and constantly confused by beautiful women. Set in the Manhattan manqué of Central City, the strip featured a big-hearted supporting cast that included the gruff Irish police commissioner, Dolan; his gorgeous blond daughter, Ellen, whose waifish manner belied the occasional vicious uppercut or scathing remark she could throw; and Ebony White, an orphaned African American child who served as the Spirit's sidekick, surrogate son, and kid-appeal comic relief, whom the other characters treated with a casual, inherent respect not always seen in the pop culture of the time. While Eisner's later graphic novels were entirely his own work, he had a studio working under his supervision on The Spirit. In particular, letterer Abe Kanegson came up with the distinctive lettering style which Eisner himself would later imitate in his book-length works, and Kanegson would often rewrite Eisner's dialogue. Eisner's most trusted assistant on The Spirit, however, was Jules Feiffer, later a renowned cartoonist, playwright and screenwrier in his own right. Eisner later said of their working methods "You should hear me and Jules Feiffer going at it in a room. 'No, you designed the splash page for this one, then you wrote the ending — I came up with the idea for the story, and you did it up to this point, then I did the next page and this sequence here and...' And I'll be swearing up and down that HE wrote the ending on that one. We never agree". So trusted were Eisner's team of assistants that Eisner allowed them to "ghost" the Spirit from the time that he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 until his return to civilian life in 1945. However, it was on his return from service and resumption of his role in the studio that the strips on which his reputation was founded were created. The post-war years also saw him attempt to launch the comic-strips/comic-book series Baseball, John Law, Kewpies, and Nubbin the Shoeshine Boy; none succeeded, but some material was recycled into The Spirit.

Ebony White in perspective

Eisner is sometimes criticized for his depiction of Ebony White, the Spirit's African American sidekick. He later admitted to consciously stereotyping the character, but said he tried to do so with "responsibility", and argued that "at the time humor consisted in our society of bad English and physical difference in identity." [http://www.time.com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,488263,00.html] The character developed beyond the stereotype as the series progressed, and Eisner also introduced black characters (such as the plain-speaking Detective Grey) who defied popular stereotypes. In a 1966 New York Herald Tribune feature by his former office manager-turned-journalist, Marilyn Mercer wrote, "Ebony never drew criticism from Negro groups (in fact, Eisner was commended by some for using him), perhaps because, although his speech pattern was early Minstrel Show, he himself dervied from another literary tradition: he was a combination of Tom Sawyer and Penrod, with a touch of Horatio Alger hero, and color didn't really come into it."

American Visuals Corporation

Horatio Alger]] During his World War II military service, Eisner had introduced the use of comics for training personnel, in the publication Army Motors, for which he created the cautionary bumbling soldier Joe Dope. In 1948, while continuing to do The Spirit and seeing television and other post-war trends eat at newspapers' readership base, he formed the American Visuals Corporation in order to produce instructional materials for the government, related agencies, and businesses. One of his longest-running jobs was P
- S, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, a digest-sized magazine with comic-book elements that he started for the Army in 1951 and continued to work on until the 1970s with Mike Ploog and other artists. Other clients of his Connecticut-based company included RCA Records, the Baltimore Colts NFL football team, and New York Telephone.

Graphic novels

In the late 1970s, he turned his attention to longer storytelling forms. A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Baronet Books, Oct. 1978) is one of the first American graphic novels, combining thematically linked short stories into a single square-bound volume. Eisner continued with a string of graphic novels that tell the history of New York's immigrant communities, particularly Jews, including The Building, Dropsie Avenue and To the Heart of the Storm. He continued producing new books into his seventies and eighties, at an average rate of nearly one a year. Remarkably, each of these books was done twice - once as a rough version to show editor Dave Schreiner, then as a second, finished version incorporating suggested changes. In the introduction to the 2001 reissue of A Contract with God, Eisner revealed that the inspiration for the title story grew out of the 1969 death of his leukemia-stricken teenaged daughter, Alice, next to whom he is buried. Until then, only Eisner's closest friends had even been aware that he and his wife, Ann Weingarten Eisner, had a daughter. They also have a son, John. Some of his last work was the retelling in sequential art of novels and myths, including Moby Dick. In 2002, at the age of 85, he published Sundiata, based on the part-historical, part-mythical stories of a West African king, "The Lion of Mali". Fagin the Jew is an account to the life of Dickens's character Fagin, in which Eisner tries to get past the sterotyped portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist. His last graphic novel, The Plot, an account of the making of the anti-semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was completed shortly before his death and published in 2005.

Academic work

In his later years especially, Eisner was a frequent lecturer about the craft and uses of sequential art. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and wrote two books based on these lectures, Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, which are widely used by students of cartooning.

Books

Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative
- A Contract with God (1978, Baronet Books ISBN 0894370359; DC Comics' reissue ISBN 1563896745)
- Will Eisner Color Treasury (1981, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 087816006X)
- Spirit Color Album (1981, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160027)
- Spirit Color Album, v2 (1983, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160108)
- Spirit Color Album, v3 (1983, Kitchen Sink) (ISBN 0878160116)
- Life on Another Planet (1983) (ISBN 0878163700)
- Comics and Sequential Art (1985) (ISBN 0961472804)
- The Dreamer (1986) (ISBN 1563896788)
- The Building (1987) (ISBN 0878160248)
- A Life Force (1988) (ISBN 0878160388)
- Art of Will Eisner (1989 2nd ed, Kitche