This exercise took me back to some very familiar territory, rediscovering and analysing classic comic books, I believe I have decent bit of experience reading all these comics. Moving on to the comparative analysis:

Each style is very distinguishable since each of them appeals to realism to a certain degree. The further away from realism the art style is, the more distant the reader is from the characters, in the sense that realism tends to affect immersion and relatability. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hard to connect to a character drawn in a minimalistic style like in Persepolis, it means Persepolis aims to create immersion in a more abstract and less tangible way, given the fact that it’s main focus is socio-cultural relatability. Kirby’s art style wants to increase relatability given that most superhero stories takes place on and in a limited scale and context; therefore the story requires an art style that can make the most out of it.

Most action/adventure stories, like Tintin, Marvel comics or even Little Nemo for that matter, usually make use of a collection of scenes to tell their story (in a more cinematic sense), as opposed to a book like Persepolis that has a free flowing narrative style. The former tend to focus more on getting the details of a single scene down, while the latter tends to focus on the movement of a much larger narrative through its panels. The former may thus require more panels and more detail to emphasise on its moments, while the latter will try to effectively and economically get a single scene across through one panel.

Peanuts, which has thus far gone neglected, also has an extremely simple art style essentially because the tone of the comic strip is light, and the stories are simple. Yet, the focus in Peanuts is more on the irony and sarcasm of the moment, and the narrative style is such that the scale is limited, so there has to be clear and continuous series of panels that executes the story effectively within that scale and context. And given that Peanuts is a newspaper publication, its layout is adapted to fit into the landscape format of a newspaper, unlike the others that come in issues and volumes in a portrait format.

Context, again, is a huge defining factor for each comic, not just in terms of when it takes place, but how large the period is. Persepolis takes place across the author’s entire life, while an issue of Fantastic Four usually doesn’t go beyond a single enemy interaction, or Tintin whose stories are limited to the duration of a single adventure, or Little Nemo, whose stories last as long as his dreams. And depending on the story and its context, a certain amount of attention is given to art that determines how much it defines the degree of immersion and realism for the reader.

Finally, where the story takes place also affects how much creative freedom you have with the story and the characters. Most locations for comics are either the planet Earth or planets that resemble it. While that may sound rather extreme, Fantastic Four stories also usually take place on Earth, however, a character like the Human Torch breaks a lot of physical norms by being able to fly and basically being a living sun. Tintin often ends up in fictional places that are shown to exist on Earth just so the author can steal from real instances while also giving him space to be creative. Little Nemo’s dreams often feature over-the-top characters and events due to the nature of dreams and since the dream-like reality is a mix of Nemo’s own experiences in the real world mixed with fantastical elements his mind conjures, again, a space with a lot of scope for creative storytelling. Peanuts on the other hand is already quite limited to a realistic context, its stories so simple, it doesn’t need to stray all that far from an ordinary, realistic scenario, despite being made in a very simple art style. However, such an art style gives the artist a lot more ease in exaggerating the situation, little effects can seamlessly be added in to make them part of the world Charlie Brown exists in.