Cartoon engage the audience, whether the lover or hater.. how is it working?

The article by Mike Rosen-Molina gave more explanation of how the cartoonist engage their audience by getting more responds in lover and haters, most of the letter that come in the newspaper is about articles or comic.it showing how much interest that reader have towards this topic .

One of the cartoonist Francesco Marciuliano said "Once I really start to hate a comic enough, a lot of the time I actually start to love it," about dealing with the public, cartoonist have their own way. They was actually discover that people that have the anger towards cartoons don’t have really something to argue. They are discover many of the medium of Internet that can shows how they real opinion of the audience. They tend to respond positively in twitter than email. Otherwise, cartoonist will go forum by forum and find out. They actually doesn’t really care about what audience say, because as long as their have own idea, reader will like it.

I agree that is not easy to engage audience into other people imagination, sometimes it might cause a controversial comment of different thought. Like what happen with George Joseph Herriman creature, He is a comicus that famous on 1932 because of his comic “Krazy Kat” that publish on New York Evening Journal. He portray a very unusual topic that happen in the American society. It’s about ethnic polarisation that going on in that era, Through the illustration of the cat character with others supporter character, He try to figure the race characteristic that exist in American society. where by He created a dialect of speech based on real such as Latin, American Indian, African-American, Spanish, In this comic, he put another spelling that he created to make the uniqueness.

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Krazy Kat, however, was the comics / strips that became Herriman's most popular. It was never goes smoothly, many readers complained because it’s make no sense and touched of some ethnic character. However it had an enthusiastic from other people, such as an artist and intellectuals people of that era. And because of big controversial, the strips become famous until now. The understanding of comics are depends on people knowledge. Means that the cultural background of the audience affects their interpretation of the comics. According to Schriver (1997,pg.374) “document designers must visualize familiar objects and symbols that make direct contact with the specific local culture, requiring detailed study of the culture prior to designing the visuals”. And because Herriman cover up the cultural characteristic on his creation, His creation can be understood and acceptable in American society.

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Another example is Garfield. Who don’t know about this character? He is a lazy Cat that has been stolen a lot of people attention through the story. It’s begin in 19 June 1978 from a strip newspaper by Jim Davis. This comic strip currently holds the Guinness World Record for being the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip. In their journey, There is not much controversy, because the story is based on daily activity of the main character and consist of light conversation . now because of a lot of antusiasm fans, Garfield has brought up to the cinema.

The successful of comics strip is not far from the development of the media. The success of Krazy Kat was pure by a newspaper circulation, but it’s different with garfield that famous in the media shift era, where by alot of people know about it as a character in the movie rather then comics strip. According to Kress and van Luween (2006,pg.23) “and we suggest that we are in the middle of the shift in valuation and uses from one mode to the other, from the “old” to “new” visual literacy in many important social context

References:

Schiver, KA, 1997, Chapter 6: Interplay of words and pictures, in Dynamics in document design: creating text for readers, Wiley Computer Pub, New York