Wednesday, October 13

Play With Dickie

This afternoon in Brussels, I walked to the Belgian Comic Strip Center, at 20 rue des Sables, where I was pleasantly surprised by the large number of glass covered easels with original sheets of comic book art. It was an impressive museum and book store, primarily specializing in European comics in book format.

One odd comic book that caught my attention was one of ‘Mrs. Walker’, an American Civil War nurse, in hardback, written in French. What’s the market for that?

I especially enjoyed seeing the artists’ error corrections done with white-out, or cut and pasted onto the page, as well as their lettering, which I need to study and practice.

They had one exhibit where visitors could arrange comic strip panels in their proper sequence, starting from an initial jumbled presentation. For a reason unknown to me, it’s called “Play With Dickie”. An initial jumbled sequence is shown in the picture at left. Perhaps, if you are clever, and can see the images well enough, you can figure out the correct sequence yourself. One clue, the white dog looks like a famous Belgian comic dog, "Snowy". Click on the photo to see it larger. Let me know what sequence you come up with, in the comments.

I designate initial panels as:
top: 1 2 3, middle 4, 5, 6, bottom 7, 8, 9.

2 comments:

jb said...

I thought this would be easier... and even after much head-scratching i'm not at all sure i've got it right. Did the exhibit provide an answer?

I'm thinking (guessing?) ...
3 -> 1 -> 4 -> 8 -> 5 -> 6 -> 9 -> 7 -> 2

Richard Fay said...

Hi, Jon,

The exhibit didn't provide an answer, so we can't know for sure what the intended sequence really is. Thanks for your guess. My best guess is:
3 4 8 6 5 9 7 1 2
(I think the reason #1 is next to last is to hide the dog after the refurb, prior to showing in the last panel, and 5 comes after 6, because the man's initial reaction is anger, then later he begins to think of what he can do for his saddened dog).