Ryan North Kustov Effect Analysis

Ryan North’s experimental and bold tri weekly web comic, Dinosaur Comics despite the constraint of its rigid layout, explores narrative in comics with the strips remaining aspects in inventive ways. As the only real variable between the individual strips (Aside from a few one off jokes), the dialogue and captioning are North’s mechanism for delivering creative content. The strip beings to use narrative techniques outside of what would be expected of the medium such as 4th wall breaking and heavy juxtaposition. This restriction along with a regular release schedule forces North to subvert norms of the medium and continuously innovate to avoid stagnation and death of the comic. As the comic progresses North finds new ways of incorporating new vehicles for delivering the text in

To offset the limits placed on himself, North uses absurdist humor to explore the limits of the template and uses the non-humanness of the characters as an opportunity to explore potentially controversial material. The restrictions placed by the template force Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics to seek new avenues to create interesting weekly content.

One such innovation is an adaptation to comics of the “Kuleshov Effect”, a phenomenon in film in which placing the image of a person looking off screen, followed by a counter shot of another object; the audience's interpretation of the emotion of the actor varies dependant on what the actor seems to be looking at. The Dinosaur Comics adaptation of this effect comes about as a result of the fixed imagery in where the audience reads different emotions from the characters depending on the text and context surrounding them. This effect is most pronounced in the first two panels where Tyrannosaurus is introduced and a dramatic close-up occurs in the next panel , both panels are semi-ambiguous in the displayed emotion, this is the clearest parallel to the film version of the effect. In addition