Sunday, December 6, 2015

Daytripper: A Quick Quip About Caption Boxes

One aspect of comics that can easily be overlooked as being an unchanging standard of the medium is the humble caption box. The caption box as many of you are well aware is a method of usually either narration or internal thought. How often has a comic appeared that has tinkered with the conventions of this humble conveyor of information? Well the comic Daytripper does just that. The first caption boxes you see are in a ragged and torn style such as depicted here.




















Now this by itself isn't much cause for amazement but within the same page as the first introduction to these caption boxes a new style emerges.

This crisp and clean caption is much more standard. Why the use of these two different styles? Well the reason being is that the standard boxes are your usual narration, but the torn and ragged caption boxes are actually obituaries written by the main character. This is something that is slowly realized as it is revealed later that the main character is actually writing the yellow boxes and is a cause for the reader to turn back to these first boxes to make the distinction between the two. While this isn't exactly an earth-shattering revelation to make it is important to note that anything that can be considered standard fare in comics is open to be tinkered and messed with in order to give a comic some unique charm to it, just like here in day tripper.

While I'm sure I could fish around the internet and explore other comics or webcomics that push the boundaries of the humble caption box further, but I've been instructed to keep these blog posts short.

Until next time Everyone!


- Blake

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