Because of the medium’s brevity, image-based storytelling, and its traditionally non-explicit content, the newspaper comic strip appeals greatly to children, but it is not, by any means, strictly children’s media.
Illustration
Whether a cartoonist’s goal is to tell a joke, tell a story, make a statement, or some combination of the three, they rely primarily on images to do so. [Note: I will refer to a cartoonist’s goal as storytelling for the remainder of the post in the interest of clarity]
Some comics, such as
Dal Curtis’ Rex Morgan (below) primarily
tell their story using dialogue between characters, using illustration mainly as
a visualization of events rather than as a plot mechanism.
Rex Morgan is a
serial comic, telling one part of a story with each strip, rather than
containing an entire story in each strip. Serial comics tend to be more text
heavy and geared towards adults.
In contrast, some comics rely almost solely on images to tell their story. Mark Tatulli’s strip, Liō, uses no dialogue whatsoever. When text is used, it is in the form of signs or some other printed text and is typically ten words (total) at most.
Most comic strips lie somewhere in the middle of the two
extremes, using both dialogue and images to tell story. In this Baby Blues strip by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott, the dialogue alone is enough make the joke work, but the details like the trail of trinkets left by the children and the mother's heavy eyes as she picks up after her children enhances the comic.
Regardless of how illustration is used, pictures are appealing to young readers because it helps them understand what's going on. However, as demonstrated above, this does not make them less enjoyable to adults, it adds to the medium.
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