Drawings and Texts in Comics

I am reading this book titled “What If?” by Randall Munroe. It’s a book on “serious, scientific answers” to “weird, hypothetical questions”. Munroe also writes a webcomic called xkcd that’s very popular among the kind of people who usually read the above mentioned book: geeks, science fans and engineers! (Personally, I believe anyone can learn from such informative yet entertaining books, but that’s a different topic…)

Talking of his webcomic made me think of how comics require you to be able to write as well as to draw. Or does it? Let’s look at some popular comics over the ages to check the validity of that hypothesis (I know, I know: I am in that “What If?” frame of mind when I use words like “validity” and “hypothesis”!)

Let’s evaluate in chronological order. The Asterix comics were done by a team: one guy wrote; the other drew. Awesome outcome, wasn’t it?

Then there is the Tintin series: the same guy did everything. The drawings are good, the stories even better:

And then came Calvin and Hobbes. The drawings are awesome, the writings even more so (oh, and they cover an unimaginable range of topics too):

Until then, quality of drawings was important and if the writer couldn’t draw, he’d team up with someone who could (a la Asterix). Then came the Dilbert series poking fun at the insanity of the workplace. Very average drawings, but the great humour has been enough to carry the strip:

And then there’s the xkcd series. The drawings are all stick figures, I kid you not! But the content is great:

Is the culmination in stick figures a sign that we are becoming less shallow? That we focus now on content rather than appearance?

Hmmmm…maybe, but if one can get the Calvin and Hobbes kind of excellence in both content and appearance, isn’t that a good kind of shallowness?