Meshing the Dramatic and Comic

Maybe you write good jokes. Maybe you've got a great sense of plot and theater. The main point of the Cerebus Syndrome [G] is to do them both together.

That doesn't mean that you always have to be funny and serious at the same time. It is in fact probably not advantageous to be both all the time. But your humor and your drama must interact, they must work together. Because the two forms want such different things from the work, it is very easy for them to work at cross-purposes.

There is relatively little literary criticism about the cartoon form as it is found in webcomics, and practically none at all about the Cerebus Syndrome. The classical theatrical form of tragicomedy is probably the closest relative of the Syndrome. While tragicomedy is still fairly far from Cerebus Syndrome comics, nonetheless there is sufficient overlap that some tragicomedy criticism is applicable. Particularly appropriate is a description given by Verna A. Foster in "The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy" of what a tragicomedy should accomplish. It should "...offer a more comprehensive and complex understanding of human experience than either tragedy or comedy and evoke in its audience a more complicated response...to that experience" (1).

This expresses precisely what a Cerebus Syndrome comic should do. It should mesh the comic and tragic styles to form a work more complex than either. If it simply has tragic bits and comic bits, no further complexity will be gained. A Syndrome comic needs to gain by its hybrid nature; it needs to do things that it couldn't do without both parts.

The example comics for meshing of tones are Sluggy Freelance [G] and General Protection Fault [G]. To see the discussion of the example comics, go to:

Tone Meshing in Practice.

Or, to see other important elements of a Cerebus transition,

Character Development

Plot Motivation

No Backtracking

Enjoyment