Twice the Chance for Errors

Niklas Eriksson started Carpe Diem in 2007, but it only began getting syndicated from King Features in 2015. Like many syndicated single panel comics, it has no regular characters or continuity, and just trades on gags. Here is the strip that ran this past Saturday...

Setting aside whatever you think of the joke itself, you might find yourself scratching your head a bit trying to parse the dialogue. The problem with it is that it's missing the word "from" as evidenced by the vertically oriented version of the strip...

It's pretty obvious that, in re-working the strip from one format to the other, the word balloon had to be re-sized and re-placed, and in changing the word-wrapping, the word "from" accidentally got deleted. These strips -- or at least the lettering -- were handled digitially, so dropping a word is extremely easy to do. An unfortunate accident, but not overly detrimental to the joke. It almost still works as is since it's not an uncommon trope to portray cavemen speaking in broken English anyway.

I'll point out, too, that I don't know what language Eriksson works in natively and, if it's not English, whether or not he does his own translation work. It's entirely possible the strip was written in Swedish and translated/re-lettered by an employee of King Features. In fact, it's possible Eriksson has never seen this English version of the strip.

But I'd like to point out the different issue in the vertical strip. The smoke rising from the volcano in the background is drawn in almost the exact same way and follows a similar parallel path to the word balloon. So it almost looks as if there's someone behind the volcano saying the exact same thing at the exact same time as the strip's actual speaker. The horizontal strip avoids this problem by A) not overlapping the word balloon with the volcano at all and B) depicting the word balloon in a different style, using a dashed line to convey more of a whisper.

Here again, I don't know precisely how Eriksson works. I know I've seen other artists who do similarly formatted strips -- notably Wiley Miller of Non-Sequitir -- draw their single panel comics in a kind of plus-sign format that allows for two sets of cropping. (See right.) This gives the artist a fairly high degree of control over what the multiple formats look like. But it's also possible that Eriksson draws his strip in a single format and, again, a King Features employee digitally re-crops it to fit an alternate format. That would explain why we're seeing two different styles of word balloons above. In fact, between that and the poor word balloon placement in the vertical format, I'd guess that Eriksson normally draws in the horizontal format and it's a graphic design intern or something handling the modifications.

(Look closely at the top of the volcano smoke in the the vertical strip. You can see a small glitch or "bump" in the line width where the original top of the horizontal panel crossed through, and someone had to extend it upwards to meet the word balloon.)

I don't point all this out to fault either Eriksson or King Features. I don't think Eriksson himself had anything to do with the "errors" to begin with, and trying to re-format a daily strip to a format it's not designed for... well, I get they're trying to work with different cultural/societal standards, and doing this on a daily basis is going to be a grind. And of all the possible things that could go sideways with this kind of situation, this is minimally problematic. But it does showcase how just the simple, regular production processes can impact a comic. Not every strip has to deal with precisely these issues, of course, but I point all this out to highlight that there are frequently unseen-to-the-casual viewer ways that a strip's humor or even basic legibility can be compromised at no fault of the creator!

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