A panel from 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank. Illustrated by Tyler Boss. Screencap via
Though the three-panel format of “Sunday Funnies,” including comic strips like Garfield and Dilbert, is famously associated with comedy, nailing funny bits in comic books is trickier. Thankfully for aspiring comic creators with a funny bone, this week’s Strip Panel Naked breakdown focuses on crafting the perfect comedic beat. “You can build a successful comedy beat,” says Strip Panel Naked creator Hass Otsmane-Elhaou, “through one particular technique: juxtaposing images. You show an image and set-up an expectation, and then dash it in the next frame, or even in the same panel. The reader expects a certain thing, and instead you give them a comedic image, and the joke lands much harder as you dash those expectations.”
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Otsmane-Elhaou says the traditional newspaper strip format of three panels, “which is set-up, beat, punchline,” is a simple way to craft comedy in a comic book space. And the three-panel format itself is a distillation of classic sunday comics from the 1930s and 1940s (like Little Orphan Annie) that would often sprawl well past three panels and take up the entire newspaper page. “It’s been proven to work really well,” he explains, “though I don't think it's inherently funny. But it is the go-to method.” In this episode of Strip Panel Naked, Otsmane-Elhaou focuses on the comedic pacing of 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank by Tyler Boss, Matthew Rosenberg and Thomas Mauer. The comic book, which features four unlikely kids who get in way over their heads and get involved in a crime caper, was described by Nerdist as “A mash-up of Wes Anderson-style whimsy and Reservoir Dogs that you never knew you needed.”
Interested in comedy, but uninterested in making a comic? Otsmane-Elhaou thinks the basis for this video applies to jokes as a whole. “Comedy often—though obviously not always—stems from something unexpected happening. When you establish something, such as the "Ice cream!" panel I talk about in the video, and then you dash it at the end, that's how you make someone laugh. Watch any sitcom, or mass comedian's stand-up and you'll see. They give you a setup, and before you can get chance to think about it, you get the punchline, and rarely is it the first thing your brain jumps to.”
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Watch how to properly pace and juxtapose your comics in the new webisode below:
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