A Compendium of Comic Strip Cameos

Cameos in film and television are common. In comic strips, they're not. One of the challenges is copyright, of course. When the Spirit did an extended appearance in Dick Tracy (site), the current owners of Will Eisner's intellectual property had to clear character treatment and depiction.

The other challenge is the blending of style. Sometimes the artist of the strip can't convincingly duplicate the style of cameo's artist. In the cases that appeared in June 2017 strips, that wasn't a problem. The first example comes from Blondie.

Dean Young''s clean style was a perfect match for Greg and Mort Walker's. Although Blondie is more detailed than Beetle Bailey, the styles were close enough to make Sarge's appearance appear natural.

Mark Tatulli has riffed on Peanuts many times in his strip Lio. His depiction of Charles Shultz's characters is close enough for the gag to work.

In September 2017, Jim Scancarelli sent Joel looking for his sidekick Rufus in an extended Gasoline Alley sequence.

This isn't the first time Gasoline Alley has featured Dick Tracy characters (see The Alley Comes to Tracy). Scancarelli draws Tracy and B.O. Plenty in the style of their creator, Chester Gould. If you're not familiar with the current iteration of Dick Tracy, it works. If you are (as I am), it seems a little off -- almost as if we're looking at an alternate universe, Dick Tracy!

Still, all three strips are good examples of comic strip artists showing they can draw in more than one style.

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.

Mooning the Comics

I'm always interested in how different cartoonists deliver the same concept. In this case, the gags turn on the reinterpretation of an image. Is that crescent shape depicting the moon, or is it outlining a mouth?

The first example comes from Jim Davis' Garfield Sunday sequence of 7/23/17.

The second is much older. It's from Mark Tatulli's Lio, 11/15/16.

Of the two, I think I prefer Tatulli's take. First, it's shorter. I feel that Davis is almost mansplaining the joke. Do we really need all that setup? How about this:

Plus, I like Tatulli's tone better. Lio gets the raspberry from the moon behind his back. The joke turns on the transformation from moon to mouth to moon again, with Lio at the receiving end of the moon's derision.

Odie not only gets the moon to smile back, but he turns and mugs to the reader. Look! We changed your point of reference! Just like we carefully explained we were going to do! Ta-da!

Two different treatments for two different audiences.

Lio's Border Patrol 2

The border panel is a fundamental design element of the comic strip -- so fundamental that it's all but invisible to most readers. Not to Mark Tatulli, creator of Lio. He often brings this hidden element to the fore in his innovative strip. Here are four recent examples, all featuring Eva Rose, the object of Lio's unrequited love.

 The sequence from 3/20/17 plays with convention in two ways. Usually, each panel represents a different moment in time. In this case, though, all three panels represent the same instant. The cannonball fired in panel one landed in panel three. The broken panels show the arc of the projectile. So instead of three traditional panels, we have a scene where the middle panel (room?) with two destroyed walls. But we still have a payoff for the gag in panel three.

 The second, from 3/7/17, retains the idea of each panel representing the same scene at a different moment in time. In this case, though, the bottom of the panel has changed function. Now it covers an (apparently) bottomless pit. Note that Tatulli's bottom border only extends halfway down the allotted space for the strip.

 The third example from 2/13/17 has a gag working on a number of levels. First, the entire strip is shown to be a flat surface that can be tied in a knot -- just as Eva Rose has tied Lio's heart in a knot. And though now tied, it also serves the role of a traditional three-panel sequence. In the first end is Lio, the middle (the knot), showing Eva Rose's action and Lio's emotion, and the third, Eva Rose walks away.

 Sometimes when Mark Tatulli has his comic spill over into another's he manages to fit both into his space (see: ). In this case, it's enough just to imply the action. Lio's mortar apparently exploded in the comic strip above it. I'm guessing the news flash defines "local" as the strips surrounding Lio.

 Four ingenious approaches to something most readers (and even comic artists) never seem to notice.

Lio's Border Patrol

Mark Tatulli, in his strip Lio, riffed on comic strip panels before. They're so much a part of the comic strip convention, most readers never notice the rectangular shapes that frame the pictures and order the events. In September and October of 2016, Tatulli offered up several different ways of considering the panel border, each one imaginative and unique.

Note that there is no center panel. Lio bends open the side of the second panel and flies across to the fourth. Why? Because without its borders, the middle panel is a vast empty void.

Tautlli's poked fun at Family Circus before (sometimes with a rather sharp stick). The Family Circus began as the Family Circle in 1960, which is why it's drawn in a circle rather than a rectangular panel. Family Circle magazine objected, and so the name was changed -- but not the panel shape. In this strip, Tatulli suggests it's not a circle, but a globe -- with another poke at the too-cute Family Circle characters.

This sequence is very simple. The first panel sets up the gag, the second delivers. But take a moment to consider what the second panel means. In the first panel, the borders are treated like wire frames around a 3-D world. Here, the zipper implies the entire panel is a flat 2-D surface, with the border forming the edge of this fabric-like material.

Is this a panel border gag? I think it is. There's no panel border in the first frame. Lio is literally outside the comic strip, seeking admission. If there were a border around him, the sequence wouldn't make any sense.

In this final example, Lio's flame, Eva Rose, blows up the panel to separate them. The first and last panels have borders, but they're shredded around the explosion. The single panel has been broken in two. And, like in the first example, the middle panel has no frame -- it's that empty void again, only this time with a surface (where the crater is). Tatulli suggests the openness of the void by having the smoke rise above the tops of the outside panels.

One concept, five different takes -- and that's just with this batch. The inventiveness of Tatulli is remarkable and it keeps me reading Lio every day.

Lio's Meta Snooze

It's a comic strip convention that's been around for about a century -- but until it's pointed out to you, you never see it. And that was the point of a sequence Mark Tatulli used in his comic strip Lio, published August 24, 2016

Z's in word balloons denote sleep in comic strips. Tatulli turns that idea around. Instead of the Z being generated when the character falls asleep, it's a physical object that actually causes the character to fall asleep. And note how Tatulli saves the payoff until the last panel.

When Lio retrieves the balloon, he's holding it face down so the reader can't tell what it is until the reveal in the last panel. You can tell we're seeing the back of the balloon by the way the smaller balloons overlap.

That attention to detail we don't notice consciously, but without it, the gag doesn't work. This is real comic strip artistry.

Lio and the stale Peanuts

Cameos of one comic strip character in another's strip can happen for many reasons -- cross-promotion, joint story lines, special events, and mordant commentary.

The latter, I think, is the reason behind Charlie Brown's cameo in the June 20, 2016 installment of Lio. Mark Tatulli's riffed on Peanuts before, always (as I interpret it) to criticize this strip that is continually rerun in newspapers. It's past time to retire Peanuts and give that real estate to a contemporary comic strip. There are plenty of worthy strips that need to be seen.

In this case, Tatulli upends another now overly-familiar Peanuts trope -- the kite eating tree.

It's simple, and it makes the point. On the left side of the panel is the old -- Charlie Brown and the sign. On the right, the new -- Lio and the tree-eating kite. Placement is not accidental. We read from left to right, so moving from Charlie Brown to Lio is seen as a progression.

My takeaway from this panel is this: the kite-eating tree is gone. Can we please move on, now?

Lio and Mutts

The Sunday comic strips have more real estate than then dailies. And artists like Mark Tatulli of Lio take full advantage of it. Tatulli's played with the concept of comic strip borders before. This sequence from May 22, 2016 shows what Tatulli can do given space:

Tatulli does a great job capturing the style of Patrick McDonnell for the Mutts panels. Note that the clumsy robot not only crashed through the various panels on his journey tracking right, but he also seems to have kicked his foot and destroyed the Mutts title panel at the far left. The robot's drawn with his rear leg doing just such a kick, to subtly plant that idea in the reader's head (should they be reading this strip as carefully as I am).

Also, note the use of color. At each break in the panel borders, there's no color at all. It's an effective way to draw the eye to the breaks, helping us track the progress of the robot. And it may have another purpose, too. No matter what colors are in the comic strip panels, the gutters (the space between two panels) is always white. Is Tatulli suggesting that if the borders are broken, the white contained in the gutters leaks into the panels?

I like to think so.

Barney and Clyde and Lio

Meta humor in a newspaper comic strip is a rare thing. One example can brighten an entire comics page for me. So imagine my pleasure when two comic strips went meta on the same day -- August 21, 2016.

Both strips have a long history of playing with the concept of comics. I've cited Mark Tatulli's Lio in many posts. Tatulli's well established the fact that Lio knows he's living in a comic strip.

So it's not surprising that when thing go really badly, he'd op out.

Note how Tatulli treats the sequence. The biggest panel sets up the situation. The middle panel shows Lio's father looking for his missing son. The smaller panel size suggests what's to come. Tatulli's drawn the father's eyes to point us in the direction of the final panel (and payoff).

Lio does not want to go to school and does not want to be in the strip anymore. His panel is the smallest of the three, suggesting minimal participation. Even the gutter between his panel and the previous one is wider than that of the first two.

The second example is from Barney and Clyde by Gene Weingarten, Dan Weingarten & David Clark. In this case, the team uses character cameos to make their point. Frank and Ernest by Bob Thaves (now drawn and written by his son, Tom Thaves) has always been an unpretentious and unabashedly corny gag-a-day strip.

Commonplace wordplay is the norm for Frank and Ernest -- but not Barney and Clyde. Making the gag about a misplaced script allowed the Barney and Clyde team to get by with awful pun -- and stretch the gag from three panels to eight (nicely filling up a Sunday spread).

Sometimes  cameos are used for one strip to comment on another. In this case, I don't think it was a criticism of Thaves' work -- rather, just way to fill up a page, with a wink to the reader.

Two gems in one Sunday! That's why I keep subscribing.

Lio's Diamond Mind

The characters in Lio know they live in a comic strip. Creator Mark Tatulli has shown them breaking through the panel borders many times, escaping into neighboring comic strips (or having those characters wonder into Lio). The sequence published 4/27/16 is a little different, though.

The power of this sequence comes from its ambiguity. The first panel's plain enough -- Lio paints a diamond on a wall.

But that second panel.

Tatulli regularly depicts the outdoors as he does in that second panel -- a grassy foreground strip across the bottom of the panel, and then a big white space for the sky.

So is Lio holding a string attached to a diamond painted on a wall, or between panels has that wall vanished the diamond become a kite? The simplicity of the illustration doesn't provide enough information for us to say. And that's the point.

Lio's Word Balloons

At the heart of the Lio strip that ran on 4/28/16 is a simple bit of word play. Mark Tatulli's gag uses two different meanings of the word " balloon" for the humorous payoff.

It works. But there's a little bit more to unpack here, because that's what makes this sequence even more enjoyable for serious comics fans.

First, understand that Lio is a strip in which no one talks. Or rather, a strip with no word balloons. so of course his word balloons are for sale -- they're useless in his strip.

Second, note that the customer contemplating Lio's wares is Nancy -- a character whose strip is dialogue-heavy. Nancy would definitely have a use for extra word balloons.

Third, note the variety of Lio's wares. And take a step back to realize that we intuitively know what these conventions mean. There are the traditional round balloons, with tails pointing in different directions. If two people are talking in the same panel, each balloon would have a tail going to a different speaker -- hence, you'd need both a right-pointing and a left-pointing word balloon.

See the spikey one? That indicates shouting, or a loud noise. The square one at the end is often used to depict emotionless or mechanical voice, like a robot, speakerphone, or computer navigation.

Comic readers know what these indicate, without ever consciously noticing the word balloon  at all. In this case, though, there are no words to distract us, and we're left to contemplate the shapes.

Well done!

Lio's Thin Black Line

There are many ways to play with the understood (and therefore unexamined) conventions of the comic strip genre. And it seems like Mark Tatulli is going to explore them all in his strip Lio.

In this 4/14/16 sequence, the gag depends on something the reader knows intuitively, but never thinks about:

Lio isn't a real person, and neither is his world. He's just a two-dimensional drawing. That's the punchline delivered by the final panel. We know it -- but we're seldom reminded of it.

Note what Tatulli does to get maximum effect out of his gag. In the first panel, Lio's stepping cautiously; the second, he's walking and happy; the third he's running and joyful. In emotion and motion, Lio's building momentum. So when in the fourth panel, he's not just motionless, he's been stopped cold and all that energy slams us into the panel.

And note that there is no fourth panel. Not really. Nothing exists in the infinite blankness of the page until the hand draws it. The end of the branch has been drawn, but the ground, and indeed the borders of the fourth panel haven't. So Lio's arrived in an area of the comic that's still under construction.

The gag is brilliant -- and it's the delivery that makes it so. And that's why I write these appreciations of the creator's artistry. Because like the conventions of the medium, they're often invisible.

Lio's Endless Loop

I know I keep returning to the newspaper comic strip Lio for these brief essays about comics. There's a good reason for that. Mark Tatulli, the creator, consistently plays with the urtext of the genre. And that brings it to light in a variety of innovative ways.

His sequence from April 4, 2016, is a good example.

The gag depends on the reader knowing the conventions of sequential art. That is, we read the panels from left to right, each subsequent panel representing a later moment in time. In this case, Lio falls down an endless hole, and so the cycle endlessly repeats.

What cycle? The sequence of panels 2 through 5 (as explained in the final panel). The sequence follows the traditional form of a daily comic strip.
Panel 1: set up the premise
Panel 2 (and later): tell the joke
Panel 3 (or final panel): deliver the punchline

In this case, the punchline requires the reader to loop the middle panels. It's a brilliantly delivered bit of meta humor. And another reason I look to Tatulli to help explain the mechanics and the appeal of sequential art.

Lio on the Trail

In his Lio strip of February 23, 2016, Mark Tatulli pays tribute to Jack Elrod, the second artist of Mark Trail. Creator Ed Dodd wrote and drew the strip from 1946 to 1978 before handing it over the Elrod. Elrod continued with Mark Trail until he retired in 2014.

Tatulli's tribute is uniquely Lio-esque, as it breaks the barriers between comic strips. It's a recurring theme with Tatulli and one that works quite well here.

Of course, Mark Trail now has a new artist -- James Allen -- who I think has done a great deal to revitalize the strip. Perhaps Mark Trail would have a different reaction to mice, now.

Lio Traps a Capp

I admit I don't care much for Reg Smythe's Andy Capp. When it was launched in 1957, alcoholism was still a source of humor. But the era of the lovable lush is long over, I think, and I find little endearing about an unemployed freeloader who drinks up his wife's paycheck. 

I don't know if Mark Tatulli feels the same way. Regardless, Andy Capp makes a cameo in his strip Lio on February 6, 2016.

Tatulli's played with the panel borders before, and characters from other strips have entered through them. This one is especially nice because Tatualli's rendition of Andy Capp is spot on. And note the way the panel's layout. There's no border around Andy Capp because, of course, he's outside Lio's strip. Having one of the panel lines serve as part of the trap is just genius.

Lio and the literal end

Long-time readers of this blog know how much I admire Mark Tatulli's take on comic strip conventions. In his strip Lio, he's continually exploring new implications of having characters who know they're in a comic strip.

The sequence from November 24, 2015 is a great example:

Everything you need to know is laid out in this one panel. And note how carefully it's laid out. The danger is stated in the newspaper headline in the lower left corner -- the first place the eyes see as they scan the panel. So context has been established. The word balloon for the Wite-Out is centered in the middle of the panel. It's removed from the headline to give the drama a beat, but not too far removed.

Tatulli could have positioned the balloon to come straight out of the bottle, but he didn't. By having it touch the top of the panel, he forces the reader's eyes to travel up so they don't immediately see who's speaking. Only the last word of the sentence is in line with the bottle. So only after we "hear" what's said do we discover who says it.

And note that the villians of the piece are cast in shadow. That shadow performs a couple of functions. First, it outlines the white bottle and eraser, making them pop. Second, it gives the alley some depth. And it makes this a proverbial dark alley where bad things happen -- like cartoon characters meeting their nemesis.

Lio -- Literally

The November 23, 2015, sequence of Lio shows one of the strengths of a comic strip. In such a visual medium, one has to represent everything as a drawing, as creator Mark Tatulli did. (click on image to enlarge)

The joke, of course, is that the figurative has become literal. The scissors and matches are both animate rather than inanimate objects. And note how that last panel is set up. 

Reading left to right we first see Lio with his two friends, and then the sign. If you reverse the order, the joke falls flat, as we know what to expect. As Tatulli set it up, though, we're briefly wondering what the significance of those two objects is, preparing us for the punchline contained in the rules. Coming up with the gag is one thing -- but knowing how to properly set it up is the real talent of a comic strip artist.

Lio remakes his marks

In my opinion, artist/creator Mark Tatulli does some of his best work on Lio when he plays with the conventions of the comic strip. Take this sequence from November 14, 2015. (click on image to enlarge)

The convention is that any marks that appear above a character don't really exist in the same space. They're text that only the reader sees to show the character's inner emotion.

Except in this strip.

The wrong punctuation is floating above Lio's head. He has to gather up the errant marks and hammer them into a new shape, like beating iron bars into horseshoes (not the sound effect).

Tatulli takes something that's understood to be immaterial and making it quite tangible. And once again draws the reader's attention to a blindly accepted convention. Brilliant.

Lio and the Family Circus 3

Lio creator Mark Tartulli is one of the newer generation of artists who seem to have a certain.. disdain for the venerable comic the Family Circus (see Lio and the Family Circus 1 and 2). And, as I've also noted, Tartulli likes to play with the fourth wall of the comic strip genre -- specifically, the outlines of the panel that generally go unnoticed by the reader (see: Lio and the Fourth Wall for other examples).

In his New Year's Eve strip for 2015, Tartulli brilliantly combined both. (click on image to enlarge)

It's what keeps me reading the funny pages.

Lio and Sendak

This particular sequence doesn't really need any analysis from me.

But Mark Tatulli created such a charming tribute to Maurice Sendak in his strip Lio, I thought it was worth sharing -- in case you missed it when it was published on August, 14, 2015. (click on image to enlarge)