Joost Swarte

I subscribe to the New Yorker, mainly because they sometimes have good cartoons in there which can repay careful study. Joost Swarte's work is interesting. His style is classic ligne claire and very heavily influenced by Herge (well, who isn't?).

In the the strip excerpt below, we can see a joke working on several levels. As the protagonist talks to his (presumed) girlfriend, her body language from panel to panel displays increasing exasperation with his incessant talking, before turning out the light in the last panel. The guy is talking about his penchant for picking up knick knacks  and bringing them home for inspiration. Here, Swarte plays with the idea that in a comic book story it is minor variations in a panel that tell a story. The first time you read the strip, the room seems identical in each panel. But as you reread, you realise that the objects are different in each panel: on the bookcase, the table, above the cupboard. Of course this reinforces the idea that there is a proliferation of junk in the flat. As the artist himself comments in panel 5 "it's hard to concentrate when there's all this stuff around" - possibly leading to the inconsistencies between panels. This is a subtle and perfectly realised comics page, because the visual language is reinforcing the story in a very clever way. It's also a really good example of something which just wouldn't work in any other medium, even animation (where you would not have the luxury of going back to examine previous panels).