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I think that what's brilliant about The Far Side is how it can imply an entire narrative with only a single panel. It's sequential art without the sequence. Like this one
There's the obvious implication of what's going to happen in the future (there's going to be a hunt), but it also stretches into the past: what circumstances in the anthropology of this group of cavemen must have happened to establish a tradition of dancing with Woolly Mammoths? Why does it, in spite of it's obvious absurdity, feel kind of right that there should be a dance before the cavemen and the mammoths engage in mortal combat? The reluctant fearful expression on the caveman at the bottom; is this his first hunt? Are those his elders trying to reassure him? Does the one mammoth actually seem to fancy him? What about the one looking fearfully back at his friends? How does he feel that the others aren't there to reassure him? One of the mammoths in the upper right looks just as fearful as the cavemen; why? etc.
And all of this is purely evoked. There's only simple line-drawing and two sentences of text, but you see it and it reminds you of other sorts of narratives you've seen or experienced, and your brain constructs a whole temporal sequence; and any possible answer you could get to above the questions would never be as satisfying as what your brain fills in.
I could write an entire essay about this.
armour and intimacy
illustrations in a "gladiatoria" manuscript, bavaria/austria, ca. 1450
source: Krakow, Bibl. Jagiellońska, Berol. mgq 16, fol. 46v, 16r, 47r, and 57v
Her: did you bring protection
Me whipping out 60 lbs of platemail: sure did babe
shit man this got me emotional
left: the Nebra sky disc, circa 1600 BCE, showing the Moon, Sun, and stars in gold on copper - the oldest depiction of the cosmos in the world
right: the Webb Space Telescope, July 2022, revealing thousands of baby galaxies forming in the early days of the universe - humankind’s deepest look into the sky



















