Page - 26 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

26 | Christian Wessely www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 17–44 in Western tradition. to capture its full potential we need familiarity with the characters and an appropriate contextualisation. Decontextualised, the joke would be less comprehensible, with the paradox of the victory of the appar- ently hopelessly underpowered inferior over the powerful attacker lost. ABstrACtiNG eLeMeNt No visual art form, including drawings, can display all the details of an actual op- tical event. even Albrecht Dürer’s Young Hare (1502), acclaimed for its stunning naturalism, is no exception: despite all his loyalty to what he saw, Dürer had no choice but to abstract. As ernst Gombrich pointed out, artists never portray everything they see; they show us only the essence of what they represent.24 in comics such reduction is extensive, reaching a degree of abstraction that can take advantage, however, of the ambiguity it creates. With abstraction the need for similarity with the template decreases tremendously. A quantitative, but not necessarily qualitative, difference is created between the precisely executed drawing and the drawing flung down in a few strokes. A com- parison of fig. 6, with its depic- tion of a “Viking prototype” and fig. 7, with its depiction of the Norse god thor, Marvel’s comic hero, is illustrative. Although the execution of the thor cover is colourful, re- alistic, and far more detailed, the strongly abstracted de- piction of hagar is no less dy- namic than the image of the Norse god. the cartoonists have emphasised different as- pects, primarily as a product of the message they intend to de- liver. Umberto eco has pointed out that the painter produces a significantly less realistic repre- sentation than the graphic art- 24 Gombrich 2004, 55–78, esp. 73. Fig. 7: John Buscema, Cover of Comic- Magazine Thor, No. 272, 1978.