bogleech:

serialkittycat:

so I was going through the loss.jpg tag and people are getting angry because of how miscarriage isn’t a funny thing. And that’s true! Miscarriage is a sad thing and not at all something okay to laugh at!

But the thing that makes loss.jpg funny is because of how it’s bad storytelling. When you want a funny comic, you often have simplistic, similarly arranged panels to deliver the punchline. It’s funny because of either something being said or something changing! (Buckley could work on the funny though.)

See, Garfield is a good example of this:

Almost all of those panels have the same two figures in roughly the same spot. This helps accentuate how the last panel (the punchline panel, if you will) is different!

Ctrl+Alt+Del is a comic series that kept to this pattern:

Here, again, we have panels arranged simply, and the figures in the same  arrangement (height and placement, if you will) so that people pay attention to the text. The text is the funny part here, so there is no reason for the figures to change much.

But loss.jpg is a serious piece. I mean, I’ve never experienced this, but I’m willing to bet that if I or my spouse or my friend experienced a miscarriage or something, I’d be devastated! However, it kept to the silly, simplistic format.

“Well, okay.” you say. “How do you convey serious emotions in comics?”

And that depends on the emotion! The regular squares of the above comics enforce a sense of regularity. Meanwhile, with, like, an action comic, the panels will often be misshapen and crooked to give the idea that woah! something is happening.

Woah!! that guy almost go eaten by a dino thingy. It’s chaotic and confusing- meanwhile if you had put that into our “loss” format, the action would seem to have been much less important. In fact, you could almost say that it looked funny! See what I’m getting at?

“Okay. But whateverhisnameis from CAD isn’t fighting dinosaurs. Would he need those wacky panels?”

Well, sort of! You might want a misaligned panel for the panel when he opens the door, because I’m pretty sure he’s slamming it open, not gently pushing the door aside. But for the other panels, it would seem DragonBall Z levels of overdramatic to have WOAHH ACTION panels. You’d want something that isn’t too repetitive, thought. Something like this!

Here, the panels are pretty regular. But the placement of the figures is different according to each panel, creating that difference that we need to keep the actions from seeming funny. Sure, nobody is throwing punches, but there is something serious going on!! This isn’t perceived as funny because the figures are different per each panel.

Compare to loss.jpg and what do we have?

we have figures all positioned about knee height, with our protagonist always on the left, and always facing right. The last panel is almost always the punchline panel- that’s why people think that loss.jpg is people laughing at miscarriage. It’s not.

So what would make loss.jpg look like the serious story it’s trying to convey?

I scribbled this in 5 minutes in paint, but here’s my idea of what a better “loss” would look like:

He bursts through the doors and rushes to the receptionist, who directs him to the doctor. As he steps into the hospital room, he sees his wife crying and approaches to comfort her.

Is this perfect? Probably not! I’m honestly just learning comic theory right now. But does it convey the serious and honestly sad story of loss.jpg? Yes! You can’t tell a serious story in a silly manner. It’s like trying to tell a WWII survivor’s story with wingdings font. Using the wrong tools and techniques will get the wrong story across.

TL;DR loss.jpg’s punchline is that Tim Buckley needs to learn how to tell a story, not that miscarriage is in any way funny

loss.jpg inspires a quality little art lesson.

Of course the original comic isn’t only funny because of its awkward execution, but that it came out of nowhere as a sudden injection of cheap “drama” into a joke-a-day gaming comic written by a big old creep.