Strip Icons
Dirks made substantial contributions to the graphic language of comic strips. Although not the first to use sequential panels or speech balloons, he was influential in their wider adoption. He also popularized such icons as speed lines, "seeing stars" for pain, and "sawing wood" for snoring.
As a pastime, Dirks produced serious paintings associated with the Ashcan School. Like many of his cartoonist colleagues, he was an avid golfer. Dirks incrementally passed his cartooning duties on to his son John Dirks, who took over The Captain and the Kids in 1958. The elder Dirks died in New York City in 1968.
Read more about this topic: Rudolph Dirks
Famous quotes containing the word strip:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)