strips courtesy of Comics Kingdom
I can't remember the exact jumps it took me to get to Quincy. I know the starting point: Randy Milholland's guest appearance on Behind the Bastards for a couple episodes on Dennis the Menace. guests on that show tend to be a bit of a live studio audience, there to go "wow" and "yikes" and "[noise of discomfort]" at the right moments. not Milholland, who knows his comics history. boy, I would listen to a whole podcast of him just talking about newspaper strips! anyway, I don't think he mentions Quincy while talking about integrated casts in newspaper comics, but someone he did mention sent me off on a search and someone else mentioned Ted Shearer's Quincy, and well.
you can see, right, why this comic Got Me so fast? what a cartooning style! I'm not going to dwell on Shearer's history--you can read the Comics Journal article on him just as well as I can summarize it. I want to talk about how Shearer draws.
it's hard to do that without reference to other comic strip artists, in particular, standing as foils for Shearer's style. Ernie Bushmiller of Nancy fame is maybe the paragon of an ultra clean iconic style, where everything is almost like the platonic cartoon of what it is. (I've seen Schultz placed in this tradition as well.) not Ted Shearer's work. everything's got little flourishes and elaborations and bends and variations in outline. his comics jiggle. there are times when I'm not totally sure at a glance what his marks are meant to represent, which is a problem if you think the highest calling of comics is to relay information clearly, and a lot less of a problem if you're in love with the sheer artistry of mark making. look at that snowball fight comic, for example, and the wild mess of lines, or the way Quincy's shoes and socks are sketched, in the last panel of the letter to the president comic, with just a few confident pen blotches and a bunch of negative space. even when it's economical, it somehow feels so unsatisfied with the schematic, always searching for a way to make the objects feel a little off kilter, a little dynamic.
check out that first strip there, the one about where Quincy's granny frets over the neighboring building getting demolished, because it's crucial infrastructure for her clothesline. I just paged through a collection of Bloom County I have cause I was like, well Berkley Breathed has pretty dynamic panels too right? nope! Bloom County has a dynamic brushed style that feels similar to Shearer's style, but the panel compositions and the arrangement of characters and camera and environment are typically much more static. even Calvin and Hobbes, aside from the often completely crazy sunday strips, tends to have compositions that might employ a closeup or a distance shot, but tend to have relatively cohesive shots. this three panel strip starts with a panel where Quincy, instead of standing static, listening into the phone call, seems to pop in from the left, tie fluttering with movement. (also, scope the nice tilt on that lampshade, echoing the angle of Quincy's body!) panel two seems to pull out to an unmotivated ultra long shot, that not only gives us the apartment buildings but the fence partly blocking the view! Quincy's environment is so packed that there's no room for the kind of clear view of a building you might get in a Nancy strip. and then the point of that long shot is revealed in the final panel, a CRAZY dutch angle on the two leaning out the window towards the other building, as Granny reveals the other side of her washing line is going to get torn down. to accentuate this, the sheets on the line billow, again at an angle counter to the window, Granny, and Quincy.
Shearer seems never content to just have a series of characters in situations talking to each other. his viewpoint is always swinging around, his characters always turning to show new angles of themselves. the letter comic here is the most conventional strip of the lot and even this has only two relatively similar poses. all three standing poses are in wildly different positions and angles, front, then spinning to the side, then back, tilting left, tilting right.
he also has this tendency to have characters pop up almost as though they can see the camera. it's not enough that a straightman in Quincy should turn to the audience--they tend to pop towards the foreground. in that clothesline comic, Quincy doesn't look to Granny but to us, as though inviting us to join him in wondering about the phone call that has Granny so worried. in the composition of that circus comic, Shearer finds room for the characters, despite the size of the animals, at the borders of the comic, and is willing to embrace way more pronounced perspective than I'm used to seeing in daily gag strips to do it. look at that kid just sorta peeking over the bottom edge of the frame in that last panel! there's other comics of his where inexplicably another kid in Quincy's class, for example, will just pop their head up in the last panel, somehow accentuating the punchline with their non sequitur appearance. like real kids, Shearer's kids are unruly. like a real poor urban area, the very material of the landscape is unruly.
that TCJ article lays out what Shearer's motivation may have been, for such a vibrant and lived in strip:
"My first idea is to get people to like Quincy, to get them involved with the character, and then they can see for themselves the broken-down home, the torn sneakers, etc. Then perhaps readers will say, ‘Gee, maybe we can help.’ Or even the poor white can say, ‘Gee I went through this same thing myself.’"
that approach can only work because of the detail Shearer's panels overflow with. one more comparison: don't Shearer's landscapes sometimes feel a bit like George Herriman's wobbly, shape-filled landscapes in Krazy Kat? just, less weird cacti and more scrungly fire hydrants and snaggle-toothed fences. the move from panel to panel doesn't always make diegetic sense, much like the landscape moves around Krazy, but it's so lush that in total it creates a place that feels lived in, enough that it still connects with me 40 or 50 years later. that seems a testament to Shearer's strategy, and probably has some lessons for the Clarity of Communication school of comics theory.
it all adds up to a work that should be in the pantheon right alongside someone like Bill Watterson. I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about Shearer, though. the broadest history I have--Harvey's Art of the Comic Book--doesn't cite him; nor Wolk's Reading Comics. like a lot of histories, Gardner's Projections loses track of newspaper strips sometime between the rise of Stan Lee and the rise of Comix With An X. some of that's the way the history's been canonized, but some of the way the history's been canonized is surely due to institutional racism and the pinning of the modern Art History of Comics on white men like R Crumb.
what Quincy deserves is a way of following it now... but that's not an infrastructure I can imagine anyone is interested in building. sites like comics kingdom or gocomics have snubbed rss technology for presumably the same reason social media increasingly gates all content from non-users: gotta juice the numbers and make sure direct access is the only business in town. which is sorta bizarre when it comes to a strip like this because who is signing up for a comicskingdom account, sitting down, and reading through a decade of Quincy strips? if they're already just putting the lot online for free (which, hey, I'm grateful for that, especially from a historical access perspective!!), why not set up a way to cycle through that history in a feed, shipping out the strips in the format they were meant for: something you'd see daily? but, I'm the weirdo who thinks basically the whole internet should be embracing a more broadcast syndication model. at least the comics are readable online, which means that maybe bit by bit Ted Shearer's work can get the wider cultural attention something this virtuosic deserves.
