Meta humor in the frame

All comic strip creators have tropes they return to again and again. If you need to come up with a gag every day for years on end, having a concept you can keep reinterpreting is a must.

One such concept for Mark Tatulli is the panel border. Every comic strip has black borders on every panel. It's part of the visual language and virtually invisible to most readers. In Lio, Tatulli brings the panel border to the forefront, and each time in a fresh and different way.

In the case of these strips from 2017, the borders become physical objects. You can tell by the way they appear bent around the damaged areas!

How many ways can a border panel be used? I don't think Tatulli is done yet.

And if the border is indeed a physical object, then it can change its appearance.

That's the tack Stephen Pastis took in a Pearls Before Swine strip from June 2017.


Two great examples from two master cartoonists.