The "wall-paper" effect

As the title might imply, "Stuff & Nonsense" is given over completely to "humorous and whimsical subjects." Frost's drawings are more detailed than Töpffer's deliberate outlines, but his picture stories retain a lively, sketchy quality. Smolderen notes in his introduction that Frost eventually took advantage of a zinographic reproduction process that "allowed him to publish his pen drawings directly," making him "one of the earliest draughtsmen to re-encouter the conditions and potentialities of reproducing the original line work" in the manner of Töpffer (Frost, 11). If Frost followed Töpffer's example, he hewed instead to the earlier traditon of identical panel shapes and sizes (at least in part because, as Smolderen points out, Frost's stories were often reformatted for publication). Smolderen argues that Frost's particular use of a repetitive form may have signalled a new direction for comics. Smolderen highlights a full-page strip from an 1880 issue of Harper's New Monthly. The page is a six-panel grid in which the background remains identical throughout; the characters change position and gesture. Smolderen calls this juxtaposed repetition a "wall-paper" effect; he cites Winsor McCay's stated fondness for Frost's work to posit this effect as a direct predecessor to McCay's "Little Sammy Sneeze," and, by extension, a forebear of McCay's innovations in animation.

The strict panel repetition Smolderen describes does appear elsewhere in "Stuff and Nonsense," but the technique is atypical of the swiftly-moving material in the book. Although Frost doggedly maintains a fixed panel size, his individual panels convey a sense of motion that is distinctly comics, with characters often moving towards or away from what might be the center of a more conventially balanced composition (as in Cruikshank). The book leads off with "The Fatal Mistake: A Tale of a Cat" (17 - 23). The story is simple: a cat eats rat poison, reacts violently, tears through and out of the house (upsetting everything in its path), and jumps from a pier to its death. The cat is the protagonist of the story (or, more accurately, the agonist), but the center of interest in each panel is the violent action that precedes or follows the poisoned cat's rampage. The story suggests animated movement, but the panels themselves are no storyboard: they depict highly active moments and jump frequently between locations.