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Filip Stojanovski
Contemporary Storytelling: Comics and Animation
The Modern Age
Back to the story of the comics as a medium, and
moving from the Middle Ages, there is a prevalence of pictorial elements
in the woodcuts that accompanied the printed word after its appearance
by the end of 15th century (McLuhan, 1963, p.160). But what
propelled comics to the spotlight was the intricate set of circumstances
that surfaced with the advent of what we consider to be the beginning of
modern journalism.
By the end of the 19th century, the
primary mass medium in the industrialized, urban America was the
newspaper. Giant media companies, such as those headed by the famous
Hearst or Pulitzer printed them, feeding the need of the public for
cheap entertainment.
 The new working and middle class, which lacked the
closeness of community relations that was an attribute of the rural
culture, was hungry for something to fill the gap. Newspaper
empires gave them events to talk about, and even participate in. The
reporting was based on stirring emotions, sensationalism and scandal.
The campaign related to the American-Spanish war over Cuba was a blatant
example of how the public opinion was molded in favor of the war by
using emotional reporting (Encyclopedia.com, Maine, battleship, 1999).
The owners battled for the readers by unscrupulous descriptions and even
the creation of sensations. The whole movement was called "yellow
journalism," maybe because the newspapers were printed on cheap
yellowish paper, or maybe because of the Yellow Kid.
The Yellow Kid, a comic strip by R. F. Outcault,
first appeared in 1894 and gained fame in 1895 as part of the New York
World, "the publication with largest circulation in America,"
(Olson, 1999). The Yellow Kid was very popular, attracting readers with
its caricatured drawing and adult humor. It depicted the life of a group
of kids in a New York alley, often in a crude and stereotyped way, but
was selling the papers.
Contents
| Foreword |
Glossary |
Works Cited
Comics: Bits of History |
Modern Age |
Great Adventurers |
Vocabulary
| Grammar: Closure
Animation: Origins |
An Early Animator |
Classical Animation |
Making an Animation
| Epilogue
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