Space in a newspaper was a commodity, and thus by flipping the image upside down, he told more story for the same amount of space. Gustave Verbeek was a talented, intelligent man. I can’t even begin to think of how to do that. They are brilliant funny with an excellent use of wordplay, and they employ one of the first documented uses of an ambigram.Īn ambigram is a word or piece of art that can be read or understood from different directions. I was only able to find a few of them on the internet, but what I found I voraciously devoured. Gustave Verbeek created a total of 64 of these strips for The New York Herald, from October 11, 1903, to January 15, 1905. The two main characters were designed such that each would be perceived as the other character when inverted. His signature usually appeared at the top of the first/last panel, upside down. #26 on the 1001 Comics to Read Before You Die Comic Summaryįrom Wikipedia, “Gustave Verbeek is most noted for The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo, a weekly 6-panel comic strip in which the first half of the story was illustrated and captioned right-side-up, then the reader would turn the page up-side-down, and the inverted illustrations with additional captions describing the scenes told the second half of the story, for a total of 12 panels. Book Reviews Is it upside down or rightside up?
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