Stuff and Nonsense  [06/07]
by Bill Kartalopoulos

Another piece of "Nonsense" on page 59 shows a painter comparing his fleet-footed image of a galloping horse to a Muybridge (or Muybridge-esque) photo-montage. "Said this artist 'Now don't you suppose / An intelligent man like me knows/ How a horse ought to go/ Yet you say I don't know / And believe what a photograph shows." The second image reproduces in ink the evidential photo-montage. This particular page points specifically to Smolderen's thesis placing Frost strongly within a tradition that connects illustration, picture-stories, photography, and eventually (when taken with the McCay connection mentioned earlier) animated film and cinema. "Frost applied Muybridge's and [Thomas] Eakins' research into the visual representation of motion directly to his comics, resulting in his exploration of the dynamic transformations between consecutive images that allow the reader to mentally reconstitute motion" (7). Although this image provides further evidence for Smolderen's point, this particular strip does soemthing else altogether that is specific to comics: Self-consciously or not, Frost has shifted artistic styles within the context of this one short strip (if we can call it that). He has moved from the original "objective" viewpoint of his scenario to his character's subjective viewpoint, depicting the Muybridge sequence not just as it would appear to his character, but much as it would appear to one of Frost's contemporary readers. This juxtaposed shifting of subjective viewpoints and artistic styles on a single page would eventually become an important tool for any number of modern cartoonists, and, in drawn narrative, prefigures a device fairly unique to comics.

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