At the rate those pickups swallow fuel and its high price, I hope Cherry got a raise this year. But Happy Day! We learned Rusty’s middle name. It sounds a bit overthought, but suggestive that a family ancestor is being honored. Otherwise, this week is just a piffle of a subplot, as it turns out. I just can’t figure out why Jules Rivera is so hesitant to inject some actual drama or danger into this strip. The context of the strip certainly invites it; yet, Rivera turns away from it, leaving the stories with all of the variety and suspense of rolling plains. Here, I’m thinking of the wide open plains that the early settlers faced when they drove their ox-drawn wagons across the prairie stated, heading to California or something closer.  It was the kind of openness that sometimes literally drove settlers mad, because of the seemingly unending monotony and endless stretches.

Art Dept. When I looked at the two panels, I almost thought I saw an example of what art historians call “Continuous Narration”, a compositional device in Medieval and ancient art, where a single scene would show the principle character(s) multiple times, involved in different chronologically ordered actions. The mountains in the two panels initially looked like they continued directly from panel 1 to panel 2, and the clay road might led from one panel to the next, but that it is not the case.

Here is a wonderfully composed example of what I mean: It’s an excerpt from the August 24 1930 Sunday comic of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. The overall composition is one beach, spread across multiple panels. Within each panel, Walt and Skeezix are shown engaging in different activities, representing different times of the day. Rivera’s panels look like they come close to a continuous narration, but don’t connect. I reckon Rivera was not trying to emulate this technique, after all. But it would be cool if she did!