I was checking through the new inventory, searching for bloggable data and found, as usual, that there are plenty of outhouse cards, fishing cards, and dog cards. What this says about the priorities of our ancestors I am hesitant to declare. In any case, the dogs are busy with all the usual dog activities: deciding where to pee, guarding property, deciding where to pee, comforting their owners, deciding where to pee, chasing rabbits, deciding where to…and then I observed one class of dog activity I hadn’t particularly noticed before.
These are dogs which are simple bystanders. They are just standing around in the cartoon. An artist might have a term for this: maybe they give perspective, maybe they are just an interesting filler for space that would otherwise be unoccupied. The joke does not depend on them. They’re in the picture just to react to what’s going on.
Dog bystanders were something of a staple with Ray Walters, producing his vignettes of Middle America at the Curt Teich Company. Whatever is happening, the scene will generally be witnessed by a scruffy brown terrier type.
Who is not always just a passive witness.
Mind you, dogs are not the only species of bystander beast, even in the works of Walters. If a squirrel balanced the picture better, a squirrel would be his witness.
Bob Perley, meanwhile, was nearly as famous for the jackrabbit who was generally looking on (and sometimes adding reinforcement) to his gags of the wild, wild west.
This must have something to do with filling out the eye’s expectations. Here we have two bystander beats, presumably because we had empty space on each side of the outhouse.
Birds made excellent bystanders as well, as they might fly or wander into any old scene in the natural scheme of things.
As noted with Bob Petley’s impudent hare, the bystander beast is allowed to take part in the humor of the situation, as long as it isn’t the source of the MAIN gag. This fish, for example, doesn’t have much to do with the pun about lines. He’s simply drawing your attention to the fact (if you happened to miss it) that the primary purpose of this cartoon was as a pinup.
Ray Walters was able to add this kind of bystander as well. Here his bystander piles a little extra joke on top of the main one. After all, this mascot’s uniform fits perfectly.
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