The Funny Pages

Remember how the Sunday newspapers in America used to come with the Comics section? Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Doonesbury. I miss that feeling of peeling the Funny Pages away from the news and getting my hands covered in coloured ink. I remember using Silly Putty to copy images - if you pressed really hard, you could get the imprint of the frame on the goo, then stamp it on your notebook.

I’ve always loved comics - Don Martin and Spy vs Spy in MAD Magazine, Tintin and Asterix, even Lucky Luke and the Daltons.

And as I got older, the Furry Freaks, Mr. Natural and eventually Art Spiegelman’s RAW and the work of Charles Burns, Mark Beyer, Lynda Barry, Javier Mariscal and Richard Sala. Matt Groening pre-Simpsons of course. Fantagraphics books by Dan Clowes and Pete Bagge. I was lucky enough to work with almost all of these geniuses. I even made a DHL advert with the Far Side’s Gary Larson.

There’s something about the constraints of the frame, the sequence of frozen events, the amalgamation of images on the page, the whole being greater than the parts that I find immensely comforting.

So I’ve made a Context Maker comic. More precisely, I’ve let Chat GPT’s new image generator make a comic to celebrate this 26th post, twice as many editions as I set out to do when I started, by reviewing the last 25. But first, here’s a comic strip I prompted it to make out of one of my previous posts, Pentimento.

I was pleasantly surprised by how well the model understood the rhythm of the writing and reflected it in the visual flow. And its fidelity to my intent and authorial voice, which needs to be the goal of all creative work using AI.

See what you think.

Here’s the Season Finale look back on the previous 25 essays.

If you missed any of these posts, they’re all still available in the Substack ‘Context Maker’ archive. I’ll be back soon with more excessive verbiage. Thanks for reading.