Source: Larsson 1997, 24-28

In applying Wölfflin's five parameters to Ola and Per, we may conclude something about the strip as a whole, or about single episodes, for example.

1. Episode 30, A Quaint Way of Catching Rats, is characterized by contour drawings and with only meager use of shadows. Hence, the episode is far more marked by linearity than by painterly depictions.

2. As for the second parameter, Rosendahl uses central perspective in his panels - his use of planes and gradient lines are part of that way of drawing, much as they did in the early Renaissance when people had rediscovered or discovered it. Lise Gotfredsen (1987) talks of various mental effects the use of various perspectives can have on viewers. However, such assessment may be somewhat speculative.

3. In judging whether the form of an episode is closed or open, one has to conclude on the basis of the separate panels in it. If the episode as a whole seems to tell all that is interesting in the scene, it tends toward a closed form, which is more like an overview than a close-up. We have something in between closed and open form here. Many modern strips may contain more of the Baroque "cut off" style of uncompleted figures and the like, with more focus on details, including faces.

4. As for the fourth parameter, there tends to be more than one object in an episode. A question is to what degree they combine to form a unity. I would say the episode tends toward a Baroque-looking style in this respect.

5. The episode is not obscure at all. It may in part be ascribed to the medium, the printing-press and its technical limitations at the time the strip was designed.

IN SUM. On the basis of the five parameters we have found that Rosendahl's output tends more toward Renaissance design than Baroque design, although there are many baroque elements: it tends towards violence and at times something quite grotesque. (Gotfredsen 1987, 105-7)

Knowledge of Panofsky's three stages or levels in the appropriation of paintings and other works of art - first observe, next interpret, and finally draw in background knowledge that includes the elements maker, genres, eras and world views, allows one to integrate perceptions and ideas about a single episode with the wider context to the end of arriving at deeper outlooks. It this case it is themes of Rosendahl's strip - what it is about above and below the surface of first appearance. Thus, by focusing on assorted elements in an episode it is possible to arrive at deeper understanding of the episode and Rosendahl's whole strip. That is the idea. Complementing Panofsky's method with Heinrich Wölfflin's postulates about styles is at times enlightening, because style is of form and is another side to the work as a whole, and it is the work as a whole that influences the reader. (Larsson 1997, 24-28)

Now for a few examples of Panofsky's method applied to the strip:

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Three Examples

1. Example 1: "Lars is inventive" (Episode 376)

Weekly strips usually consist of four horisontal panels, as in Lars is Inventive. - Ola, Per, and Lars are the persons that appear in the strip. They seem to be on a farm: they are so too, as shown by related strips. The landscape is quite flat, but not completely. Gradient lines mark sloven hills. Clouds are in the background of each panel. The ground is marked by convential images of grass in all four panels.

Pre-iconographic level: Description

1.

In the first panel the three men are discussing a pie that lies on a chopping block. They signal they are having difficulties with dividing the pie: Ola has spoiled his axe on it, so Lars wants to take the pie to a blacksmith's shop, assumedly a smithy on the farm.

2.

In the second panel Ola and Per talk among themselves about the pie and Lars, and wait for him to return.

3.

In the third panel Ola and Per stand outside the smithy where they converse with Lars through the open window. It was no use cutting it up, he tells.

4.

In the fourth panel Lars surprises Ola and Per by coming out with a "dandy milking stool" made out of the pie.

Iconographic Level: Analysis

The stances of the men seem to express they are puzzled. Their activities show they want to find a way to divide an abnormally hard pie, but in the end that project is given up, so that the uneatable pie becomes a milking stool. Lars seems satisfied with his work, while Ola and Per are surprised, as shown by the conventional strip sign?.

The drawings show quite large sections of a landscape with little in it but the bare farm elements, and a few details of a farm smithy.

The strip anecdote is about how impossible food is put to some other use, but it is slapstick.

The setting is farm life, where almost all things are utilized. Assumedly, part of the humor stems from this aspect of pioneer living.

Iconological Level: Depth analysis

The objects of this one strip include the axe of bare-headed Ola; the very long ovenpipe hat of Lars, the derby of Per, and also the chopping block. These objects stand out among what is represented. A farmland horizon is seen too, and there is a pie that is turned into a stool by human dexterity, by Lars. Such handiness comes as a little surprise to Ola and Per.

If something deeper is to be read into the strip, the core element to me is the uneatable pie that is made into a milking stool, not by necessity, and not as a result of demands from a feared Værmor who made the pie. Lars plays a prank on her, his wife, someone that others fear because she frequently resorts to ruthless violence. The pie suggests an uneatable demand at first. It is converted by ingenuity into something that looks useful in a humorous and outré way.The milking stool might represent better conditions (provided there are milk cows).

Now most of the amusement evolves along such lines. In the background of such a scenario lies the fact that settling farmers had to be resourceful. But in its context, at least on the surface it serves to make fun of Værmor, the one who baked the inedible pie and offered it to Ola and Per.

Example 2: "Lars Can't Hoodwink Værmor So Easily" (Strip 219)

Pre-iconographic Level of Surface Descriptions

In episode 219 there are four strip panels. The characters that are shown in the first panel are Per's mother-in-law,Værmor, Lars, Per, and Ola. Værmor welcomes Per's brother Lars. Ola and Per are standing nearby, a yard or so away from Lars. The landscape is flat and grassy (by cartoon conventions, at least).

All the four of them meet near a porch or platform, most likely the farm porch of Per. All seem polite, all are smiling. Lars lifts his tall hat and bows courteously while holding a jug in his left hand. She greets by "hee, hee," and he by "heh heh."

Now she points to the jug that Lars carries, and asks as if suddenly changing her mood, if ill-tempered, "What do you have in that jug?" Lars seems taken aback, puts the jug behind his back and "sweats" (conventional cartoon sign of astonishment, great surprise etc), standing right in front of her, at about a meter's distance.

She has gotten hold of the jug, holds it in front of her face, looking into it. Lars has still a defensive posture while she bends a bit over the jug. He says it is just black molasses in it.

She does not believe him; the ill-tempered woman hits him in the head with the jug so that it breaks, saying, "You can't fool me!" Lars is knocked off his feet and his hat falls off him.

Iconographic Level of Analysis and Identifications

"Old folks meet again" sums up parts of the episode on this level. Features that stand out in it are the attraction between the old couple, her nosy suspicions, violence and ill-temper, his jug, and that she hits him, an academic doctor. As the strip often depicts otherwise as well, coarse, brutish violence is often her reaction or "solution" to problems. No wonder the survivor Lars in time exchanges her for a peanut roaster after many ignominies. Having heard that Congress has passed a "wife exchange" law, Lars seizes the opportunity (578). (Haugen 1988, xi)

The anecdote (episode 219) is about old acquaintances meeting again. In episode 164 the mother of Per's wife Polla comes to visit them, and remains. And Lars, who returned to the area from New York after graduating as a chiropractor there (171), met her in episode 179, when she throws out some slop water through the door and inadvertently hits him with it. In that episode he starts out nicely dressed, using a cane and wearing a silk hat, and thinking his brother has a pretty miserable home. gave him a wet reception inadvertently. Then, in 183 he and Værmor site on a bench together. A cow comes up to Værmor from behind and licks her face. She thinks it is Lars and hits him violently in the face. And in episode 188 they work together with Ola and Per to rescue a bull.

And now, in episode 219 they meet again. Lars has survived a miserable expedition with his brother Per and Ola (197 ff); Lars is the outstanding survivor, really (211 ff). He gets back to his brother by sending himself C.O.D. express (218), and when he gets out of the box, he meets Værmor again, presumably near the porch on Per's farm yard.

What is implied in the episode is that doctor Lars lies about what is in the jug, and that his jug contains alcohol. He says the jug contains molasses, but is never believed till one of the very last episodes (588), where he actually pours molasses from his jug on some pancakes and says he has never had anything else on the jug. Still, previous episodes allude to him as a drinker. The first suspicion is roused in episode 76. Later, in episode 137 he seems to drink in abject loneliness. The title goes far in saying he has gone boozing for Christmas. In episode 148 he carries a jug of mooonshine, but as it happens, it is not his own jug! Yet the strip's title says he is on a spree again - Then, in episode 149 Lars lies sleeping heavily with a jug by his side - and we suspect he is drunk from how deeply he sleeps while Ola takes his pants off Lars.

In episode 151 he is standing in a car while drinking - glug, glug - from a jug. Viscous black molasses hardly gives rise to such sounds. It is during this span of episodes (137-151) that Lars comes to be associated with a jug, after great deprivations. He does not carry one before.

And then he meets the old woman (179, 183) that he later marries and next tries to trade away for a peanut roaster, falls from a plane into Lake Superior (197), makes a spooky return when he comes out of a whole in the ice, (211), gets captured and tied to a tree by Native Americans that dance in a circle around him whyle carrying hatchets. He throws his jug at them (212). Then he is ready to meet Værmor again, after sending himself C.O.D. express, because of lack of money.

In such a wider scenario it stands out that Per's mother-in-law and Lars are meeting each other once again, and that there is something between them, as suggested by their laughs. She and Doctor Lars do fall in love and get unhappily married (228, 249, 250, 273, etc.). A philosopher may say many a relationship shows what must pass in time, that what is decreed to become something of the past. (Rudolf Steiner 1985) If so, terrible things are bound to become something of the past for Lars as he survives blow after blow.

From what later takes place between them this little will do: He is in the middle of proposing to her when the two of them get attacked by wasps (228). Later he is distractedly dreaming of wedding bells (234). And then, somewhere between episode 234 and 246, probably, they get married, for in episode 246 Værmor says Lars drank himself right to death, just a moment before he surprisingly arrives from Canada as a "party crasher", and in episode 250 he speaks of the hag as his wife: "My wife will have nothing to do with me any more," he says. He then tries to read a poem to her to mellow her, but when the poem comes to "your nose is most like a rake", she hits him on the head with an axe. It is such a terrible blow that the axe breaks and he gets a headache that it "spills over" into the next episode - where she causes a little rockslide, and a stone that is larger than his head, hits his bandaged head fatally and unexpectedly from behind.

In episode 258 she is as crabby as ever when he sings her a ballad and plays his guitar beneath her window. From the lyrics we learn they got married and went to Canada. Rosendahl's strip does not actually show the wedding; episode 258 exposes that loose end.

Wherever I wander, south or north,

Your equal I'll never find on earth.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

my path through life is lonely and long.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

remember we married last year,

And fared out on Canada's plains, my dear.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I promised I'd always be faithful to you.

She rewards his efforts by dropping a flower-pot on his head from the first floor.

Lovoll documents that intermarriages in the Norwegian-American ethnic group were common. Rosendahl suggests the price to pay in such a case, against the Swedish proverb that says secret things are to be kept silent and not shown up. Lönnliga ting ska man lönnligen bära, in Swedish. One can also interpret the episode in the light that he who has got into trouble, is often scorned on top of it: Spott och skada följeas gärna åt. (Holm 1975, 222, 310)

The "secret content" of the jug was not her business before they were wed. Her nosy and suspicion-ridden behavior serves to take Lars aback, and seem somewhat suspect. Soon she calls him a liar and hits him severely, which is a criminal act, a great offence, and a humiliation of Lars.

Even though many episodes (219, 148, 149, 378-80, 588) lead readers into thinking that the jug of Lars contains alcohol, and shows his "penchant for liquor", as Haugen puts it. He also says, "He claims that he has never had anything in it but malassi 'molasses', but his inebriated actions belie the claim. In strip 148 he falls on one side of the fence and his jug on the other, and as the contents trickle out, he moans: "I hear your voice, but I can't help you". However, it was not his own jug he was carrying in it, but some moonshine they had come across in the woods, and that he was taking to the sheriff's office. Bengtson also says, "In one of the last strips of the series doubt is even cast on Lars' alcoholism." (Bengtson 1977, 15)

From the wider scenario we see in episode 210 such things "condensed", as it were, and that the characters in it have their emblems. "Lars' emblems are his long scraggly beard, a hat that grows longer with the years, and a jug of moonshine," says Bengtson. And the woman, "is usually carrying her emblems, implements of work such as a rolling pin, chore pail or pitchfork, which can double as weapons." (Bengtson 1977, 14, 15)

Iconological Level of Interpretation

The two main characters of strip 219 are an older woman and an older man, greeting one another in a farm yard. Their interactions start very courteously and end in gruff brutality. The old man with the tall hat and long beard becomes the victim of uncivic ways. The ill-tempered woman's politeness is skin deep only.

Both speak Norwegian, except for three broken English words. They are fule, fool, juggen, the jug, and malasi, molasses. Another word, madam, might possibly be French. It could be English as well. Compare a saying, "A fool could be a gentleman if he could speak French." The rest of the conversation is in Norwegian dialect and Dano-Norwegian.

The two elderly persons later marry, so the man does not know what is all right for himself. A battering wife is bad, just as the Bible is into: "A wife of noble character is her husband's crown, but a disgraceful wife is like decay in his bones." As it is, statistics give evidence of a high degree of intragroup marriage for Norwegian Americans. Lovoll writes that almost two-thirds of the emigrants in the final mass exodus from Norway were between fifteen and twenty-five years old, mainly ordinary workers. But as Norway modernized and became more urban, engineers, artists, and other professionally trained people emigrated too. Lars is of the latter kind. In the 1920s emigration was curtailed by quota laws. Also, the war years produced a long break in migration. Thus the influx of fresh blood receded. (Lovoll 1998, 188, 11; Book of Proverbs 12:4)

They meet near a farm porch, reflecting in "a hazy way" that "Norwegians became the most rural of any immigrant group in the nineteenth century, as Lovoll writes. Lars strives to accommodate to life in the countryside in his way too, but his "long hat that grows longer with the years" comes in the way. The hat may serve as a symbol of the highest, theoretical education, at least theology. "From the start Lars is depicted as a well-schooled but unproductive individual, who 'has gone to school both in Oslo and Berlin, and not only that but he studied seven years for confirmation." "Doubt is thrown on his intellectual eminence by . . . that it took him seven years before the minister would admit him to confirmation, a process normally taking only one year," explains Haugen. If the height of the hat goes along with his seven years of religious training, the weight of the symbolism lies perhaps there. However, Lars often fails through inadequacy in practical handling, and his later wife fails in civic manners to such a degree that kidnappers offer her a thousand dollars to get rid of her (521-23). (Bengtson 1977, 14; Haugen 1984, 38; Lovoll 1998, 14)

Now to the degree the hat of Lars symbolizes his high and narrow education in theology, he is supposedly good at theoretical knowledge, although he seldom finds practical outlets for it. That is a problem for him. What was needed among Midwestern farmers at the time was perhaps years of hard work, rather. All four Norwegian Americans strive to settle as farmers, more or less. The ending of the strip find all of them heading for Norway on vacation, all but Lars, who misses the plane. If interpreted as the final verdict in the stream of happenings that led to the strip, and the closing of it, Lars, the old, educated in theology, a chiropractor and reducing specialist (462), becomes the survivor in the end. And as a matter of fact, the young American nation went for colleges and universities and other schools of education on an unprecedented scale. It was in part out of the great need to accommodate to the new land, in part out of the need to do well too. And the market for "redoosing specialists" has grown exceedingly great. Lars, who often vacillates (436) between settling and moving away - to New York for chiropractor schooling - to Los Angeles for pretty women - to Canada for escape, alcohol and his woman Lizzie - he is the one who remains, as his "high hat" of education could foster better control in time. He is not steady, he also went quite mad for a while (479-88), and he is fit for America, despite all appearances. That is quite a subsumed message. Yet there is room for alternative interpretations.

It is possible to read a strip episode in the light of the whole strip and interpret the characters as focal figures - within reasonable bounds. The general conditions and trends of the ethnic group of Rosendahl are reflected in his strip in artistic, grotesque and somewhat idiosyncratic ways.

Example 3: "Polla Tries Her Hand in the Barn" (102)

Pre-iconographic Level of Surface Descriptions

In episode 102 there are four strip panels from left to right. The characters through the episode are Per, Ola, Per's wife Polla, and a cow in her stall. The action takes place on a farm. The landscape is quite flat grassland; the ground is marked by conventional signs of grass or grass tufts. Gradient lines mark sloven hills. A few clouds are hovering over the horizon in the first two panels. The two final panels show the inside of a barn.

In the first panel the husband Per asks his plump city wife to milk the cow.

In the second panel Ola and Per leave the farm yard, and the wife carries a bucket to the barn. The scene is set.

In the third panel the wife is in the barn, wondering how to get milk out of the cow.

In the fourth panel she has put her pail beneath the cow's udder and climbed the milking stool and started to crank the cow's tail like a T Ford of the times. Einar Haugen's comment: "Polla reveals that she is a city girl, probably born in America . . . she is ignorant of the techniques of farming: when asked to milk a cow, she tries to start it by cranking its tail as if it were a model T Ford." (Haugen 1984, 28) At this place one may find that city dwellers and others who set their hopes on technological outfit, cars and all, are much estranged - and also victims of a culture with its many unnatural constraints, as Sigmund Freud stated (1962). Another Austrian, the esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), might be taken to defend much rural ways too, in that he warns of Ahriman, a demon with a dragon-like serpent-form, of intellect, worldly knowledge, science, and technology - one who offers mastery of the physical realm, but also lures into excessive materialism and soullessness. Steiner advises to make good use of that demon by spiritual development and learn the built-in fallacies of most sciences, including their baseline assumptions, also called paradigms, and try to keep calm -

Ahriman . . . can actually serve to promote a higher, spiritual development - Rudolf Steiner 1993, 42-45.

Ahriman is the power that makes man dry, prosaic, philistine – that ossifies him and brings him to the superstition of materialism. - Rudolf Steiner, 1985.

[I]t is of the utmost interest to Ahriman that people should perfect themselves in all our illusory modern science . . . Ahriman has the greatest possible interest in instructing men in mathematics . . . he is interested in making men believe that these are absolute truths, not that they are only points of view, like photographs from [just] one side. . . . (Ib.)

We must get to know science . . . We do not safeguard ourselves against Ahriman by avoiding modern science, but by learning to know its character. . . . You cannot wish to get rid of the rainbow because you know it to be an illusion of light and color! . . . (Ib.)

A second means he employs is to stir up all the emotions that split men up into small groups - groups that mutually attack one another. . . (Ib.)

Ahriman also makes use of what develops from the old conditions of heredity . . . in order to set men against each other in conflicting groups.(Ib.)

Iconographic Level of Analysis and Identifications

A farmer, Per, has married a city girl, and asks her to milk their cow. It is obvious she has not done it before, and that things take time with inexperienced people.

The setting is farm life, and show that some things do not work out as expected. To me, the anecdote is about how inexperience leads to funny results at times, and also how inexperience and adaptations to machines maddens farm work. A mechanical cow that yields milk has not been made yet. But Per once did - he thought (386, 387).

Iconological Level of Interpretation

The city-bred wife goes with a bucket to the barn to milk and fails out of ineptitude. The episode seems to pokes fun of city women who are inexperienced with farm life. City folks "out of their waters" in the country may be made fun of; that is a recurrent theme in other places too, and vice versa for hicks in town. The woman fails, but shows rapport with the technological strides of the times by trying to crank the cow. The fun lies in just that.

The cranking foolishness may be taken to suggest family living or farm living endangered by adapting unwisely to machines. Admittedly, that theme emerges from the background and many other strips. Very deep themes may not be clearly discernible at first look, some may first be discerned after pondering many episodes while considering the context and the times they were produced in and reflect - or serve as antidotes or comments on, as the case may be. Buckley holds largely the same views on the strip as a comment on family adaptations and threats to the family. Polla's behavior was of the times, as evidenced by T. Hughes in American Genesis (1990). In the book we are told of such men as the inventor Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor and researcher, first employed by Thomas A. Edison, and later establishing his own laboratory. Among very many other things he found that the Earth could be used as a conductor and would be as responsive as a tuning fork to electrical vibrations of a certain frequency, and claimed he had invented a death ray capable of destroying 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 400 kilometres. This genius in the field of high-voltage electricity once offered the Westinghouse Company a patent on a technique for artificially raising chickens with a feed he named Factor Auctus (Creator of Growth). "You will be grateful to me," he wrote, "when you get the delicious eggs and meat obtained by this revolutionary process." So when Polla's inventor-husband Per starts to force-feed pigs (16, see appendix), it does reflect the times - times when inventors such as Edison took out more than one thousand patents, Elmer Sperry over 300 patents, Elihu Thomson took out 696 patents, and so on. (Buckley 1984, 22; Hughes 1990, 67-69, 86)

Adding to Perspectives: Freud and Jung

A Freudian might interpret the bucket as a symbol of the vagina: Many hollow things are interpreted that way in Freudianism. And milk - the flow of sustenance - is not got this time, due to inexperience. However, Freudian analysis suggests reductionism and thereby that oversimplifications are possible too. A Jungian might instead hold that the city wife had not been taught or given time to find out how to differentiate the cow's functions: "Fusion with the irrelevant precludes direction; only a differentiated function is capable of being directed," claims Carl G. Jung. He also finds that an "undifferentiated function is characterized by ambivalence," basically. Ambivalence could make some of us pity the wife, and make others laugh at her, or make us both pity her and laugh at her." (Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 6, par. 705)

Jung also says that "The flow of energy has a definite direction (goal) in that it follows the gradient of potential in a way that cannot be reversed." This woman's libido appears to be left behind as to the differentiations needed for successful functioning as a farmer's wife, at least in this incident." (Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 6, pars. 2f)

A Jungian would also say that Polla exhibits "too much libido" for cranking the cow, and he would search for a "hidden place where the libido dwells" instead of making regression a topic. As for getting milk by cranking the cow's tail, the attempt is foolish.

Hence, a Jungian outlook would be that the strip indicates a city-bred woman who is inexperienced and therefore unable to differentiate well enough what to do and how to go ahead as the wife on a farm. Her libido is channeled differently from all that is needed to keep a farm running. We can now form two hypotheses: a libido-related Jungian one, and a machine-related one that pertains to farm living.

Rosendahl's Whole Work is Expressive

Rosendahl's strip is "expressive" in the sense that features are simplified and stereotyped to make the action and its points stand out, partly by simple schemes, schemata. Thus he is able to express much with few words. The use of simple and at times uncouth drawings and the use of schemata for building episodes assist that very much. What is drawn in his panels almost never contains lavish detail. The focus is on expressing points. "Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few," is a Pythagorean outlook.

That the strip expresses "feeling" may be taken to mean it is expressive of human feeling. When Rosendahl's strip was young, the "new expression" (Cubism etc.) that Picasso, Braque, and other brave artists had achieved in the Old World became a springboard for many different developments in international art and design. This goes to say that when saying that a certain strip or work is expressive, there is a need to clarify that concept and determine whether or to what degree it is so, and also what it expresses. Humor and having fun with hardships and setbacks is one fronted aim of the strip. Lynton 1989, 61; Warnke, 1995, I:165 ff)

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Anecdotal Handling of Difficulties

In the strip, anecdotal episodes and stories reveal conditions and attitudes of Norwegian Americans three generations ago to the extent the author of the strip mirrors these well. An anecdote usually is a short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident, Merriam-Webster says. The content of the anecdote, which is a popular and versatile literary genre, may be related to the local culture. We may discern with Heinz Grothe between gossip anecdotes, anecdotes of social differences, historical anecdotes, anecdotes of being fellows, and wandering anecdotes. And through anecdotal stories country people remember funny incidents and persons, village originals, remarkable occurrences, buildings and things, says Ann Helene Skjelbred. (Johnsen 1997, 39, 40, 41, 176)

People are entertained by and laugh at embarrassing social events and witty remarks and retorts "from a safe distance"; in present sitcoms it is used wholesale. The anecdote is understood as a story that tells something unusual about a person or persons, a happening, or a thing. It may quote a quick-witted remark or portray an unusual happening, writes Birgit H. Johnsen. Through the anecdotal form and its frames very many embarrassing incidents, social and other blunders, and faux pas may be very entertaining in time. Yet an anecdote will be a product of a recounter or author that people laugh at in such and most other cases of planned humor, much as the Finnish Olli Alho observes. (Johnsen 1997, 39, 48, 49, 55, 56ff)

Fanciful comic strips can suggest serious topics that are played on. Cartoons are a part of the daily lives of millions of people. Cartoons can be humorous or serious, realistic or fanciful, purely entertaining or bitingly satiric or a blend of some of these features. Today, the two main forms of cartoons are either in printed periodicals (newspapers, magazines, and comic books), or the animated. Common forms of print cartoons include comic strips. The comics pages of daily newspapers feature comic strips. A comic strip consists of two or more panels that tell a joke or present an episode in a continuing story.

An abundance of violence may work as good entertainment. Rosendahl's strip has an anecdotal framework that is rooted in both Norwegian and American rural life. The anecdotes are about familiar characters, and typically end in a jocular disaster - its resolution. "While there is an abundance of violence in the strip, no one dies and no one becomes seriously ill," Einar Haugen points out. Many folkloric anecdote types are well represented in Rosendahl's work, he says further, furnishes many examples, and sums it up: "Han Ola og han Per" afforded its readers entertainment . . . for its anecdotal form, ridiculing human folly." (Haugen 1988, ix, xii)

In such ways as those mentioned above and still more ways the anecdote may be a little piece of human experience transformed into art, just as Heinz Grothe observes. (In Johnsen 1997, 39)