Monday, July 6, 2009

Luann: Tiffany's going to the pool with Quill. You guys wanna go?

Notice the way the first dialog bubble in today's Luann summarizes the plot development that occurred in Saturday's installment. To a large extent, this is just the way comic strips work. Rightly or wrongly (probably rightly), newspaper cartoonists don't necessarily expect their audience to read every single strip or keep completely up to date on all the storylines. So there's a lot of repetition in opening panels, even in the best of comics.

As helpful as it can be when reading the strips on a daily basis, it can be a pretty substantial hindrance to the narrative flow when reading them in a collection. It's an especially big problem when the plot rehashes are as clunky as the one in the Luann comic above.

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