Wayback Wednesday: Katzen Zzz’s + Barnaby Quits Mr. O’Malley
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The Origins of Zzzz
In the 1890s, a distinctly American art form emerged: the comic strip. But artists quickly ran into a particular difficulty. Some comic characters’ hijinks required a sleeping victim for full comedic potential.
But how could an artist convince the audience that a character was asleep and blissfully unaware instead of merely lying down? Visually—and, importantly for comics, dynamically—portraying a state in which most people are usually silent and still isn’t easy. So, in the end, the answer was to highlight the noisy part of it: snoring.
Marla Mackoul for Mental Floss reports on previous research that traces the first use of “zzzz” as a sound effect for snoring in comic strips to Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids for the August 2, 1903 Sunday.
Todd Klein takes a look at other early comics sound effects and onomatopoeia.
“I didn’t grow up on purpose”
Stories end.
But comics typically exist in a perpetual present. True, there are exceptions: characters grow older in Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, Lynn Johnston’s For Better or for Worse, Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean, and Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. However, comic-strip characters usually move through time without succumbing to its effects. Days pass. Seasons change. But the characters remain as they have always been.
That was true of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby until its final month. From April 20, 1942 to Jan. 2, 1952, Barnaby was always 5 years old. Yet on Jan. 3, 1952, Mr. Baxter tells his son that Mr. O’Malley “is going away” because “You’ll be six soon. You’re going to start school” and “big boys don’t have imaginary Fairy Godfathers, do they?” At that moment, the strip’s readers must have wondered: How will O’Malley prevail this time?
Crockett Johnson biographer Philip Nel discusses the end (the first 1952 end) of the Barnaby comic strip.
Note: A longer version of this essay appears in Barnaby Vol. 5
Barnaby is © the Estate of Ruth Krauss
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